archives of the CONLANG mailing list ------------------------------------ >From j.guy@trl.oz.au Sun Aug 1 01:46:13 1993 From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9307312346.AA05433@medici.trl.OZ.AU> Subject: Re: lojban ' To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Sun, 1 Aug 1993 09:46:02 +1000 (EST) In-Reply-To: <22876.199307300928@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> from "Colin Fine" at Jul 30, 93 12:26:12 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL20] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 956 Amazing how much traffic this little fly sh*t of ' generates! Lojban ' is the Byzantine iota subscript of homoiousia! Seriously now. I though about it the other day and, off-hand, I could not think of a language which had both diphthongs and phonemically distinct from them, vowel clusters amounting to so many syllables. French, for instance, has minimal pairs that superficially look like Lojban VV vs V'V, but the VV is actually V+semivowel and does not sound *at all* like a diphthong. For instance: ail [aj] (garlic) hai" [ai] (hated) It's a pity that "y" is taken up, because if it were not there would be a clean solution: spell ai, oi etc. as ay, oy, and get rid of the fly shit! Someone mentioned ' in Breton. But it has two completely unrelated functions: it is part of a letter in c'h (c'h is considered as single letter, just like ch and rr in Spanish), and elsewhere it expresses elision. Nothing like Lojban, or Navaho, of Hawaiian '. >From lojbab@grebyn.com Sun Aug 1 08:19:59 1993 Received: from BUPHY.BU.EDU by odin.diku.dk with SMTP id AA08279 (5.65+/IDA-1.3.5 for /usr/spool/listserv/catmail -L CONLANG -f); Sun, 1 Aug 93 08:19:59 +0200 Received: from leviticus.grebyn.com by buphy.bu.edu with SMTP id AA16838 (930416.SGI/IDA-1.4.4); Sun, 1 Aug 93 02:19:50 -0400 Received: by grebyn.com (4.1/SMI-4.1/ccg.7.2.91) id AA08146; Sun, 1 Aug 93 02:19:26 EDT Date: Sun, 1 Aug 93 02:19:26 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9308010619.AA08146@grebyn.com> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu Subject: significant Lojban news! (???) I am pleased to report what may be a major milestone in Lojban and conlang history. My daughter Angela has clearly learned some significant design features of Lojban without being explicitly taught them, thereby displaying some signs of "native language learning" of Lojban. A reminder that Angela is 7 years old, a native Russian speaker who is learning but far from fluent in English after 10 months in the US. The mark of something happening started to show up about a week ago (a week after LogFest), I believe after we had a Monday night session. Angela and her brother Avgust had been showing occassional new interest in Lojban words for things since a week before LogFest, perhaps because we were using it a little more around the house. But this had been limited to "what is Lojban for x" for many nouns - something they had been doing for many months with no sign of ever actually learning the words. Sometime after Logfest, perhaps about a week ago, though, Angela started doing something different. In what we thought was a little bit 'teasing us', she started jabbering away in nonsense syllables several times immediately after Nora and I spoke a little bit in Lojban (usually so the kids wouldn't know what we were saying). When asked she said that she was "speaking Lojban" though of course there was no resemblence between the jabbering and the language. After several occurences of this happening perhaps every 2 or 3 days (generally a couple of times close together when it happened), I suddenly recalled that sometime during the first month after arriving in the US, Angela had started spouting just the same kind of nonsense syllables in apparent mockery of us, but at THAT time it was "English" she was speaking, and it foreshadowed a rather sudden increase in her rate of picking up English. The kids have both continued to do similar "jabbering" in English, especially when attempting to sing songs that they "know" but don't know the words of. Perhaps others can recall when they were kids or about other kids, spouting nonsense syllables when "singing along" - my kids have been doing this with most songs for the last year, since there are few songs that they actually know and understand what the words mean well enough to realize when what they are singing is correct and when it is nonsense (but they sure do love to sing - at full volume, of course %^). For example, "Jingle Bells" in the car today (they don't yet realize that you don't sing Xmas carols in July) went something like "Jingle Bells, possly spells, forty nine oh eight" with even less recognizable syllables afterwards, none of which sound like real words. Realizing this similarity to their English learning, I started listening more closely to see whether there were any Lojban words or anything else recognizable in her jabbering. Nothing familiar. Until yesterday evening. After a little of this nonsense game, I was cutting Angela some watermelon - a 'round' slice of it when she jabberingly pointed and said ".... cukla" where the cukla was the last 'word' in a string of syllables. It was so clear that both my wife and I noticed. But I was the one who noticed that she said an APPROPRIATE word since "cukla" means "round/circle/disk" and is exactly the word for what she was pointing at (my wife recognized the word, even though she didn't know what Angela was pointing at). More surprising is that I can't recall ever telling her that "cukla" meant, or using it significantly in conversation in a context where it would be obvious. I quickly told Angela that "cukla" was indeed the right word for what she was pointing at and meant "circle". She repeated it a couple of times later in the evening and thus may be on the way to learning her first content word of the language, given the sudden positive feedback. On the other hand, using a word in what may have been pure coincidence is NOT what really caught our attention. With the positive reinforcement of Nora and my complimenting and encouraging her on her using a Lojban word correctly, Angela kept jabbering in "Lojban" while eating her watermelon, and then in getting ready for bed. But I noticed one thing about the jabbering last evening - there were a lot of syllables clustered together in a way that it sounded like real words rather than randome miscellaneous syllables. I couldn't figure out why, except that I noticed a lot of consonant clusters. Nora noticed why when I mentioned it, though. Angela was speaking many many syllables in such a way that they resolved into words by the Lojban morphology system such that almost all of them would be gismu "roots" with CORRECT PENULTIMATE STRESS. That the stress was really penultimate and not random with us just splitting the words according to the Lojban rules was made evident by the ends of her "phrases/sentences" and occassional single or double words, all of which ended with penultimate stress. None of these words actually "meant" anything , but it was very clear that Angela has learned that all multisyllabic words of Lojban are pronounced with penultimate stress, and that she is thus speaking nonsense that has somewhat of a Lojban sound and rhythm to it WITHOUT OUR HAVING TAUGHT THIS TO HER (I wouldn't have the vaguest idea HOW to teach it, and certainly wouldn't start a 7 year old learning the language by pointing it out). I then noticed that not only were these "words" penultimately stressed, but they were almost all of CVCCV form if spelled in Lojban, and used only phonemes found in Lojban. Nora noticed one further restriction on this - she thought most of the words had a nasal in the consonant cluster: CVnCV or CVCnV. This is interesting because "n" is indeed the most common consonant in Lojban and is almost always found in the medial cluster. Ospace that we have actually used and this may be a little less striking - maybe I should statistically analyze what percentage of possible Lojban words with l/n/r in medial position are actually meaningful). Few of Angela's words had consonant clusters at the beginnings of words, but the few that I heard all starreasonable rhythm, correct penultimate stress, and a reasonable allocation of consonants from within the Lojban phoneme set to match actual frequencies in words, none of this having been taught to her, and with the other noteworthy feature of absolutely none of the "words" other than "cukla" being real Lojban words (a rate of non-success that struck me given the small size of the gismu space, though I've since though about the percentage of gismu space that we have actually used and this may be a little less striking - maybe I should statistically analyze what percentage of possible Lojban words with l/n/r in medial position are actually meaningful). Few of Angela's words had consonant clusters at the beginnings of words, but the few that I heard all started with permissible initial clusters, usually something+'r', again the most common initial cluster in the language. This may be less significant because 'Cr' is also one of the most common initial clusters in English, and at least once she used an "str..." initially (something like "streila", I think it was) which would not be found at the beginning of a Lojban gismu (though it would be valid in a Lojbanized name or borrowing). Much more rare than consonant pairs at the beginning of words were the occasional CV and CVV words - all unstressed - that sorted themselves out of the speech stream - I distinctly picked out "kei" once, for example. They were never glued onto the following "gismu", so she isn't making nonsense "lujvo" compounds. Since gismu predominate in our rare free Lojban conversation around the house, I wouldn't expect to hear many words that sounded like lujvo if she was picking up patterns from our speech. I don't know how much of what we were noticing was because we were attuned to listening for "Lojban" in here gibberish, and how much is real patterns. But her speech sure seemed decidedly non-random in the stress and clustering, so she has clearly picked something up. I will be attempting to get a tape of some of her talking in the next couple of days to see if it can be more dispassionately analyzed for phoneme content and 'word' structure. It might turn out that all of this was a figment of our imaginations. But it was sure exciting and inspiring when we were hearing it. lojbab >From KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE Sun Aug 1 17:46:22 1993 Date: Sun, 1 Aug 1993 17:43 +0200 From: J%org Knappen Subject: Poliespo To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01H18MYMAZ5C8WWAPB@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> X-Envelope-To: conlang@diku.dk X-Vms-To: GATEWAY"conlang@diku.dk" In the beginning of this year, I snipped out this piece of second-hand information about poliespo. I wrote to the postal adress given below, but did not get any answer. (I also did not get it back with "addressee unknown, it seems that the address is somehow valid...) --J"org Knappen. The following is provided "as is" to the delight of the conlang forum. Original Sender: gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us (Gary S. Trujillo) Mailing List: Native Languages (nn.lang@gnosys.svle.ma.us) The following article was posted to gen.nativenet on April 1 via the IGC system, but was never distributed, due to a software problem. The poster was Wolfgang Steinhauer (igc.org!gn!oln!globnet.zer!sysop). POLIESPO, "polisynthetic Esperanto," the world's only invention that greatly speeds human thinking. In the last 3000 years the planet earth has given rise to only one member of the iroquoian family of languages: Poliespo. "Po" is the abbreviaton of Poliespo which is the life long work of N.I.Sequoyah, a speaker of the iroquoian language Cherokee. N.I.Sequoyah was born in Tahlequah, the capitol of the Cherokee Nation. As a child he noticed that he could say and think certain expressions much more rapidly in the Cherokee language than in english. He called these Cherokee expressions "Lightning bolts". He also noticed that there were certain expressions that could be pronounced and thought much faster in English than in Cherokee. When he was forced to study spanish in elementary school he found "lightning bolts" there as well. A question came to his mind: Why not collect the lightning bolts from various world languages, put them all together and baptize this a newly created world language? He inquired among his friends, did research in libraries and concluded that no one had ever done that. He decided to do that work himself. Feeling that he was too uneducated to complete such a grandiose task, he decided to study languages, grammar etc., and maybe one day he would be able to do it. He named his language "anagalisgi" which is Cherokee for lightning. He learned to fluently speak Esperanto. Poliespo is a mixture of Esperanto and Cherokee. It is a hybrid between Esperanto and iroquoian linguistics. It is not possible to be a fluent speaker of Po without being a fluent speaker of Esperanto. Po uses all the affixes and word roots of Esperanto plus 2 Cherokee roots (Osijo = hello and tohoc = is peace, harmony and good health with you?) and over 200 affixes from the Cherokee language. Poliespo has two parts: Idpo, the polisynthetic part, and Caespo, which is normal Esperanto. Among the rules of the language are: If someone doesn't understand a phrase it must be repeated not in idpo but in caespo. If one needs to express oneself outside of idpo, one uses caespo. In english and esperanto you have to use at least 3 words to express a subject, a verb and an object. In a polisynthetic language they are often enclosed in one single word. Linguists classify the world's languages into 4 groups: 1. inflected (latin, greek) 2. aglutinative (japanese, korean, esperanto) 3. isolating (vietnamese, chinese) 4. polisynthetic (cherokee, bask, innuit, aztec) A good linguist should know at least one of each of the 4 types. Po provides two birds in one catch since idpo is polisynthetic and caespo is aglutinative. If everyone became a po speaker, everyone would be an esperantist. Polisynthetic words are almost always more useful and economic. With po one has a choice. When idpo is more useful, use it! When caespo is more useful, use it! Po is the most rapidthinking language in the world. One may read and write in po faster than in native languages. By computer, one may perform miracles with po. Imagine for example a born englishspeaking journalist who types all of his articles into his computer in po, presses a button and the computer instantly translates the text into english. Why doesn`t he type it in english? Because he can type faster in po. Po greatly saves memory space, time, paper and money! When one gains a new language, one gains a new soul. Po is your golden chance to acquire an Iroquoian spirit. Order a copy of the "Fundamentals of Poliespo" Price: DM 20.00 or SFr 20.00 Global Network for Survival Oberau 63 E-Mail: NI.SEQUOYAH@GLOBNET.ZER D 7800 Freiburg Mailbox: +49 761 39761 Tel +49 761 39928 West Germany ================================================================================ >From doug@netcom.com Sun Aug 1 19:20:17 1993 Message-Id: <9308011721.AA03993@netcom2.netcom.com> From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt) Date: Sun, 1 Aug 1993 10:21:05 PDT In-Reply-To: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) "significant Lojban news! (???)" (Aug 1, 9:21am) X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: significant Lojban news! (???) This anecdotal report appears to support the hypothesis that the brain learns language via a statistical process similar to Hidden Markov Models rather than by a process that maps neatly to propositional logic. Doug >From j.guy@trl.oz.au Mon Aug 2 02:37:34 1993 From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9308020036.AA06083@medici.trl.OZ.AU> Subject: Re: Poliespo To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1993 10:36:50 +1000 (EST) In-Reply-To: <01H18MYMAZ5C8WWAPB@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> from "J%org Knappen" at Aug 1, 93 06:24:10 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL20] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 404 This sounds like a hoax. The Cherokee inventor bit, I mean. Prompted by I forgot which science-fiction novel in which you have a conlang of some 120 phonemes, (or more?), each a concept. Or by "Dutton's Speedwords"? And put under the sponsorship of a descendent or disciple of Sequoya (a.k.a. George Guess) who invented the Cherokee syllabary. Is it a hoax? Or is there/has there been an N.I. Sequoya? >From j.guy@trl.oz.au Mon Aug 2 03:41:06 1993 From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9308020140.AA06219@medici.trl.OZ.AU> Subject: Re: significant Lojban news! (???) To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1993 11:40:51 +1000 (EST) In-Reply-To: <9308011721.AA03993@netcom2.netcom.com> from "Doug Merritt" at Aug 1, 93 08:24:10 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL20] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 856 > > This anecdotal report appears to support the hypothesis that the brain > learns language via a statistical process similar to Hidden Markov Models > rather than by a process that maps neatly to propositional logic. Yes, yes, yes! That's the cart I've found myself pushing (pushed by experience) for over 10 years now. Contrary to whatever I hear from fellow linguists, I hold that language has to be unbelievably simple (even the most complex human language) to be learnable and usable. It's just that we don't have the proper model. We're like medieval astronomers with their circular geocentric orbits talking about "The Vastness of Epicycles" (bitter jab at Langendoen and Postal there). Once someone discovers the linguistic equivalent of heliocentric elliptical orbits "The Smallness of Natural Language" will become blindingly evident. >From lojbab@grebyn.com Mon Aug 2 03:49:31 1993 Date: Sun, 1 Aug 93 21:49:27 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9308020149.AA29545@grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: significant Lojban news! (???) Doug, could you please elaborate on the two processes, and why you so conclude? I can guess from the words what you might be referring to, but it is only a guess. I can note that is observations today, Angela's "Lojban" was less strongly patterned as it was two nights ago, though still clearly penultimately stressed, with mostly two syllable words, and consonant intitial, but the phonemes were often non-Lojban ('w' being one she used a lot. ) However, when I said a couple of sentences in Lojban, she started using my words as the start of a sequence of her own words, and I noticvced that the regularity of her creations seemed to increase as this game went on. lojbab >From j.guy@trl.oz.au Mon Aug 2 04:40:35 1993 From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9308020240.AA06292@medici.trl.OZ.AU> Subject: Just for fun To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1993 12:40:19 +1000 (EST) In-Reply-To: <9308020140.AA06219@medici.trl.OZ.AU> from "Jacques Guy" at Aug 2, 93 04:24:45 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL20] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1843 In the process of removing old junk from my disk area on the Unix box, I found a "language" I designed as an entry to a competition. The competition called for a totally inoffensive language, to be called "Inoffensish". Here is my brainchild: 1. No sentence shall be allowed that does not start with: "It is disputed..." 2. For stylistic variety, "disputed" may be replaced by: a moot point, under scrutiny, a matter that calls for further research, et al. 3. No member of a set shall be referred to without reference to other members of that set, in the approved form: "perhaps... or possibly some other...." Thus "Columbus" becomes, in Inoffensish: "perhaps Columbus or possibly some other navigator". 4. No set shall be referred to except through a member of itself, rule 3 applying. Thus "native Americans": "perhaps certain person born in America or possibly others born elsewhere". 5. Beliefs, theories, and opinions shall be mentioned only by reference to those who hold them, rule 3 applying. Thus "Christianity" may only be mentioned by reference to a particular christian, e.g. after the application of rule 3: "perhaps Father Maricon y Cojones or possibly some other member of a religious order". Now for a complete example: "It is a matter that calls for further research that perhaps in 1492 or possibly at some other date, perhaps Columbus or some other navigator discovered perhaps America or possibly some other continent, and brought perhaps Father Maricon y Cojones or perhaps some other member of a religious order to perhaps certain person born in that selfsame continent or possibly other persons born elsewhere." I am no longer sure what the original English was, but I figure that it must have been: "in 1492 Columbus discovered America and brought Christianity to its inhabitants". >From dasher@netcom.com Mon Aug 2 06:40:01 1993 Date: Sun, 1 Aug 93 21:40:45 -0700 From: dasher@netcom.com (D. Anton Sherwood) Message-Id: <9308020440.AA08061@netcom3.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: family interlanguages We're all aware of pan-Romance interlanguages, and I think there have been pan-Germanic projects (Tutonish); I've been wondering, what other regional or ethnic-group interlanguages have been designed or proposed? For example, is there a language that is to Old Church Slavonic what Latina sine Flexione is to Latin? Or a pan-Iroquoian, for tribes that have forgotten their ancestral language but want something appropriate to use at ceremonies? Some of today's standard national languages can be considered interlanguages of this type. Anton Sherwood dasher@netcom.com +1 415 267 0685 1800 Market St #207, San Francisco 94102 USA >From KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE Mon Aug 2 15:14:23 1993 Date: Mon, 02 Aug 1993 15:13:37 +0200 From: J%org Knappen Subject: Re: family interlanguages To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01H19VG60KO29YCIO2@MZDMZA.ZDV.UNI-MAINZ.DE> X-Envelope-To: conlang@diku.dk X-Vms-To: MZDMZA::IN%"conlang@diku.dk" Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Well, at least there were projects based on slavic languages earlier in this century (See Rick Harrison's list on this). Then there is Guosa, a Nigerian zonal project based on 15 Nigerian languages. These qualify truly as conlangs. There were also more or less successful attempts to unify several dialects to one language, as example may qualify Union Igbo, the language of the first (protestant) bible translation into Igbo. Because the vocabulary was picked out of different Igbo dialects, it is also nicknamed `Igbo esperanto'. It has still prestige as the language of the bible, but modern Igbo has developped from the central dialect of Igbo. Another example may be Nynorsk, created from the northern norwegian dialects. It was not excepted in the south, and the Sprachenstreit inside Norway is still going on. Also the ancient greek Koine has a conlang aspect, including the abolition of the dual which was alive in the attic dialect at ancient times. Hochdeutsch (high german) is not constructed this way, it is consistently derived from ``Ostmitteldeutsch'' (eastern middle german), especially from the dialect at the Meissen chancellory. >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Mon Aug 2 15:43:13 1993 Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1993 14:43:07 +0100 Message-Id: <568.199308021343@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Why not '? Richard Kennaway wonders: +++++> I've forgotten how this started. Can someone remind me why the use of "'" in Lojban makes things difficult for computers? >+++++++ Frank Schulz ( fschulz@pyramid.com ) said: >Using ' as an alphabetic character is incredibly stupid. My command >line interpreter uses ' as meaning quoted material follows. I believe that Richard is in the fortunate position of one to whom a command line interpreter is as relevant as a horse and cart. Colin >From urban@cobra.jpl.nasa.gov Mon Aug 2 16:01:46 1993 Message-Id: <9308021401.AA14030@odin.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Poliespo Date: Mon, 02 Aug 1993 07:01:37 PDT From: Michael P Urban Your message dated: Mon, 02 Aug 1993 03:25:37 PDT > > This sounds like a hoax. The Cherokee inventor bit, I mean. > Prompted by I forgot which science-fiction novel in which > you have a conlang of some 120 phonemes, (or more?), each > a concept. Or by "Dutton's Speedwords"? And put under > the sponsorship of a descendent or disciple of Sequoya > (a.k.a. George Guess) who invented the Cherokee syllabary. > Is it a hoax? Or is there/has there been an N.I. Sequoya? N.I.Sequoya is a pseudonym for Billy Waldon, whom long-time Esperantists will remember as an affable young man with much pride in his Cherokee heritage. And yes, the last I heard (a year or two ago) he was under sentence for murder somewhere around San Diego. >From DANX@smtpgate.dbsoftware.com Mon Aug 2 16:34:44 1993 Message-Id: <9308021404.AA14571@atldbs> From: DANX@smtpgate.dbsoftware.com (DANX) To: conlang@diku.dk (SMTP) Subject: re:family interlanguages Date: Mon, 02 Aug 93 09:41 D. Anton Sherwood writes: >We're all aware of pan-Romance interlanguages, and I think there have been >pan-Germanic projects (Tutonish); I've been wondering, what other regional >or ethnic-group interlanguages have been designed or proposed? I have been wondering the same thing about Semetic language families, Arabic and the like. Anyone know of anything there? >From dasher@netcom.com Mon Aug 2 17:16:09 1993 Date: Mon, 2 Aug 93 08:16:46 -0700 From: dasher@netcom.com (D. Anton Sherwood) Message-Id: <9308021516.AA09790@netcom3.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Welsh colors D. Anton Sherwood says: [...] : I see this not as a metaphor problem, but more like the problem of : translating colors between English and Welsh. Marnen asked: > Either my mailer was down, or this was something not discussed on here. > Does Welsh have a sub-stage-VII system? I don't know about that, but Welsh divides the green-blue-gray-brown area differently. I've forgotten the details. *\\* Anton Ubi scriptum? >From donh@netcom.com Mon Aug 2 17:32:15 1993 Message-Id: <9308021533.AA13115@netcom2.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Cc: donh@netcom.com, donh@netcom.com Subject: Re: Welsh colors Date: Mon, 02 Aug 93 08:33:00 -0700 From: Don Harlow > D. Anton Sherwood says: > I don't know about that, but Welsh divides the green-blue-gray-brown area > differently. I've forgotten the details. > One of the most important Welsh colors is _glas_ (mutates to _las_), which is the greenish-gray of a mountain tarn. English has no equivalent. ---------------------------------------------- Don Harlow donh@netcom.com Prezidanto, ELNA (510)222-0187 Esperanto League (Info only) (800)828-5944 Kavalir' fantom-tenebra alvokas min turniri dek mejlojn trans la monda fin': laux mi, ne longe iri. -- Freneza Tom ---------------------------------------------- >From V119N57H@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu Mon Aug 2 17:45:07 1993 Date: 02 Aug 1993 11:47:46 -0400 (EDT) From: Dragon Subject: Re: family interlanguages To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01H19OHZ23Z68ZDW3J@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu> Organization: University at Buffalo Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT As far as a pan-Iroquoian for tribes that have forgotten their language goes, only one of the living nations has lost its language - the Huron- Wyandot. Although some of the other languages are on the brink of extinction (Tuscarora, Cayuga), some are in need of help (Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida), both Mohawk and Cherokee are doing "fine". The Cherokee are sufficiently different culturally to not have the same ceremonies, so no need for "pan-Iroquoian". The others are very similar and many speakers have a "passive bilingualism" (quote from Floyd Lounsbury). As for the Huron themselves, they are attempting to revive their language based on extensive materials prepared by early missionaries and linguists. If something more like "pan-Indian" was meant rather than "pan-Iroquoian", then an interlanguage would be no more "familial" than one encompassing English, Chinese, Arabic, Ainu and Hottentot. Craig Kopris >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Mon Aug 2 18:53:19 1993 Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1993 17:53:16 +0100 Message-Id: <6907.199308021653@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: family interlanguages Craig Kopris says: +++++> If something more like "pan-Indian" was meant rather than "pan-Iroquoian", then an interlanguage would be no more "familial" than one encompassing English, Chinese, Arabic, Ainu and Hottentot. >+++++++ Well if Greenberg and Ruhlen are right, then Pan-Amerind (ie everything except Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut) is a meaningful term linguistically (I'm not saying anything about culturally). And if their more recent work is right, then Eskimo-Aleut is related to Amerind, but only in a larger family which includes includes English, Ainu and possibly Arabic, but excludes Na-Dene and Chinese (which go into Bengtson's 'Dene-Caucasian' I believe)! Colin >From jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu Mon Aug 2 19:27:09 1993 Date: Mon, 2 Aug 93 10:32:32 -0700 From: jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero) Posted-Date: Mon, 2 Aug 93 10:32:32 -0700 Message-Id: <9308021732.AA01379@glia.biostr.washington.edu> Received: by glia.biostr.washington.edu (911016.SGI/Eno-0.1) id AA01379; Mon, 2 Aug 93 10:32:32 -0700 To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: speedtalk j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy): | Prompted by I forgot which science-fiction novel in which | you have a conlang of some 120 phonemes, (or more?), each | a concept. Or by "Dutton's Speedwords"? One or both of these might be a reference to Robert A Heinlein's "Speedtalk", in his story _Gulf_, copyright 1948 or so (last story RAH ever wrote specifically for Analog, due to his wartime disagreements with Campbell) ... RAH's later novel Friday appears to be in large part a repudiation of the views/ideas he expressed in Gulf, btw. >From doug@netcom.com Mon Aug 2 19:32:46 1993 Message-Id: <9308021733.AA27381@netcom2.netcom.com> From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt) Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1993 10:33:33 PDT In-Reply-To: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) "Re: significant Lojban news! (???)" (Aug 2, 4:30am) X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: significant Lojban news! (???) lojbab@grebyn.com said: >Doug, could you please elaborate on the two processes, and why you so conclude? >I can guess from the words what you might be referring to, but it is only a >guess. Formalists who work on language, whether in AI or linguistics, tend to use various forms of traditional logic, such as propositional logic, apparently as part of the phenomenon that "when the only tool you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail." Indeed AI researchers in particular have tended to try to solve every kind of cognitive problem via symbolic logic, although there is a minority splinter group of "connectionists" who think that it's important to treat complex interconnections between processing units, e.g. via neural nets. In their defense, it's true that just about all math can be reduced to formal logic if you work hard enough. However, Whitehead and Russel struggled long and hard to do this in Principia Mathematica, and required something like 2000 pages to reach the point where "1+1=2" became a corollary. Reductionism at that level is useless, IMO. One needs the right notation and the right mathematical system, never mind that in theory one can express everything via formal logic. Life isn't long enough to perform the reduction. Your description of your adopted daughter's steps of progress in learning language coincide quite precisely with the behavior that one observes in training statistical models of language, except that she is learning which domain in which to produce patterns, whereas with computer models one must select that domain (typically) by hand. This difference is the one that we don't know how to model effectively yet, the one that J.Guy was saying we need in order to make a breakthrough. For instance, it's quite easy to create a statistical model that babbles in pseudo-Lojban. This is easiest with text. Take a corpus of Lojban, and analyze it to find the frequency of all two-letter combinations. Then produce text that matches those two-letter combinations, using random numbers that match the distribution of the data collected. The output will look a bit like Lojban. Do the same thing with all three-letter combinations. It will look even more like Lojban. Or do the same thing based on word-pair combinations. By definition it will now be emitting Lojban words, and a certain percentage will be grammatically correct. Increase to three-word combinations. The percentage will grow. But in all these cases, it will still be gibberish. There is a famous experiment in which a neural net was trained to synthesize English. In the early phases, it babbled pseudo-English gibberish; in later stages it correctly synthesized English words. The first example of statistical analysis of N-gram combinations is the realm of Markov Models. It turns out that this and related statistical methods have been proven to be equivalent in certain mathematical senses to training neural nets. So they are both simply instances of the general idea of training a statistical model. Your daughter is more powerful than our current models in two ways. She has the ability to figure out which pattern realms in which to operate, somehow combining together statistical information about two-phoneme, three-phoneme, stress patterns, etc, without being taught that those are the realms in which to operate, nor how to combine those different realms. Whereas with software we must very carefully select which realms to gather statistics in, and how to combine them. Presumably this is part of the brain's hardwired functional knowledge of language at work. Secondly she goes on to discover linkages between the statistical but meaningless Lojban-like patterns that she is learning and actual real world referents, so that she starts learning the semantics of words. Other sources have demonstrated that children learning a language learn not just which words are legal, but also how to create new words that fit the patterns of the language. This is on the fine line between gibberish and meaning, and we do not yet know how to model this fine line of generalization very well. And we certainly don't know how to model the process of learning the link between semantics and syntactics. Hope that gives some better idea of what Jacques and I are talking about. I didn't know Jacques was into this before. I've been looking for alternates to traditional AI for ages, but only recently started really *seriously* considering that simple statistical models might have a lot to do with it. (Partly this is due to the influence of my friend Andras Kornai, who is a linguist and is hot on statistical models of linguistics, among other things.) >I can note that is observations today, Angela's "Lojban" was less strongly >patterned as it was two nights ago, though still clearly penultimately stressed, >with mostly two syllable words, and consonant intitial, but the phonemes were >often non-Lojban ('w' being one she used a lot. >) >However, when I said a couple of sentences in Lojban, she started using my >words as the start of a sequence of her own words, and I noticvced that the >regularity of her creations seemed to increase as this game went on. Check out Jean Piaget's books. Some of them say a lot about language acquisition in children and have direct bearing on your observations. This is a classic stage in language learning in children. I just hadn't thought of it statistically before. Doug >From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Mon Aug 2 19:33:07 1993 From: (Mark E. Shoulson) Date: Mon, 2 Aug 93 13:32:00 -0400 Message-Id: <9308021732.AA17712@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: J%org Knappen's message of Sun, 1 Aug 93 18:22:43 +0200 <01H18MYMAZ5C8WWAPB@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> Subject: Poliespo Here is what I wrote about Poliespo to this very forum last November. Pardon the partisanship; I didn't like it very much. -------------- >From shoulson Wed Nov 11 11:44:58 EST 1992 To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Poliespo Well, I found the material Nick sent me about Poliespo. Started scanning over it again last night. It's worse than I remember it (though the linguistic work per se is a little better than I remember). I promised myself I'd get to show you the orthography (the romified orthography) for this. I'll try to explain what the characters look like. Hang on: a, a-hat, a-with-a-slash-through-it, slashed-a-hat, b, b-breve, c, c-hat, d, e, e-hat, f, g, g-hat, h, h-hat, i, i-breve, i-breve-followed-by-colon, i-breve-with-an-acute-accent, i-hat, i-hat-followed-by-colon, i-hat-accented, j, j-hat, k, k-breve, l, m, m-breve, n, n-breve, o, o-hat, p, p-overstruck-with-w, s, s-hat, t, t-hat, t-overstruck-with-v, u, u-hat, u-breve, v, z, z-hat, z-breve, q, q-with-acute-accent, q-hat, q-hat-with-acute-accent, w, w-with-acute-accent, w-hat, w-hat-with-acute-accent, x, x-with-acute-accent, y, 2, 2-with-accent. I wouldn't kid you about something like this. See below for notes on the acute accents. The i's-with-colons mean double length, used in something like two affixes (as in Cherokee, apparently). Elsewhere length is unimportant. Nineteen(!) vowels (this from a pamphlet that has the gall to say, a few paragraphs later (translated from Esperanto): IN ESPERANTO AND IN CHEROKEE, BUT NOT IN ENGLISH (THE LARGEST EUROPEAN LANGUAGE), THE NORMAL 5-VOWEL PATTERN WITH ONE OR TWO SMALL MODIFICATIONS IS USED. (Part of a list of similarities between E-o and Cherokee, indicating the wonderful rightness of Poliespo or something)). Vowels are: a,e,i,o,u as in Esperanto. a-hat, e-hat, o-hat, and u-hat (NOT i-hat), are the same but nasalized. slashed-a is \ae, as in American "ash", with a hat it's nasalized. i-breve is [I] as in "ship", i-hat is nasalized i-breve (not i!). q is the sound in "girl", etc. with a hat it's nasalized. w is the sound in "awful", "law" (pardon me for not using IPA, but I'm not going to trust *his* analysis, and I'm not going to trust mine, and I'd probably misrepresent anyway. So cope with the na"ive explanation by example), w-hat is nasalized. x is schwa, its nasal form is written 2 (so chosen because 2 resembles the author's hand-drawn symbol of the profile of a nose). Consonants as in E-o, unfamiliar ones: b-breve, k-breve, m-breve, n-breve are as their E-o equivalents, but (near as I can understand) pre-aspirated (or just aspirated?) with a *nasal* h. t-hat is voiceless th, t-overstruck-with-v is voiced th. p-overstruck-with-w is "pw" as one consonant (labialized p?). z-hat is "kts" as one consonant, z-breve is voiced analogue (gdz). y is "^hy" (esperanto ^h) pronounced as one consonant (palalized ^h?). Glottal stops, sometimes required, are not generally written. And I don't think the tones(!) are either, though the tonal system and its significance are hard to make out. Then again, I didn't try very hard. Wait, my mistake. The acute accents are used to indicate stransition from tone 2 to tone 3 (rising). Something is also said about a fourth tone, and maybe a first, but it's not always easy to tell when he's talking about Cherokee, Poliespo, or the myriad versions and incarnations of the intermediate and related languages he's developed. Also talks of the "Arabic Poliespo alphabet", so named because it uses more Arabic numerals, nothing to do with that language's orthography per se. Uses other symbols for hard-to-get Poliespo symbols: z-hat --> 3, t-hat --> 4, a-hat --> 5, t-overstruck-with-v --> 6, slashed-a --> 7, p-overstruck-with-w --> 8, slashed-a-hat --> 9, z-breve --> %, i-breve --> ), i-breve-accent --> (, i-hat --> ], i-hat-accent --> [, w-hat --> $, w-hat-accent --> &, x-hat --> !, 2-accent --> 1/2, q-accent --> =, q-hat --> +, q-hat-accent --> #. He makes a point to say that the symbols were chosen to resemble what they represent in some fashion. To him, maybe. Notes that getting the pronunciation shouldn't be too tough; it was developed from his accent, which he says is similar to fairly standard central/south/western US, so all you have to do is see some Hollywood movies or get English tapes from America, until the first Poliespo teaching cassette comes out. How convenient can you get? I should note that he doesn't get into phonology until well into the paper, so you're sort of lost in the orthography earlier. If you think the phonology is rough, you don't want to think about the morphology and grammar. The language of discourse, for the most part, is reasonably correct Esperanto, but it's cramped and hard to read, and you have to watch out for his frequent abbreviations, which he uses as Esperanto roots with no marking, and at least one neologism, "pi", which he uses as a gender-neutral, sentience-neutral third-person-singular pronoun. There seem to be conjugational affixes to indicate both subject and object (cf. Okrand's Klingon, which, after all, took the idea from Native American languages), and apparently a dual in second person. The affixes have different forms depending on whether they precede consonants or vowels (allomorphy! Run! Hide!). If I read the table aright (probability about 60%), there are 65 combinations of subj/obj taken into consideration, with two sets of beforeC/beforeV versions for each. Not sure how many are distinct. Probably most. Words wind up being pretty damn large. There seem to be agglitinative constructions for temporal and spatial tenses (rather fine-grained, I think, for some), some evidential markers (attested/not attested by speaker...), hmmm, do I see distinction between living and non-living subjects/objects in grammar? I think so, at least in some cases (I'm skimming tables with little understanding, so take with a grain of salt). I think there are "try-to-X" contructions, as well as more complex ones. Positive side to the paper: It includes a table of the Sequoyah Syllabary (which he peridically uses here and there when discussing Cherokee). If you trust what he has to say, that could be a useful addition to a lingvomaniac's collection. Um, lessee... What else can I say, without actually going much into this mess? I suspect I've already said more than enough. Hey, as the paper says, "POLIESPO IS YOUR GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY TO ACQUIRE AN IROQUOIAN SPIRIT". Lucky me. He's got plans for a few organizations as well, and Nick sent me some of their one-page flyers as well. And you know? If person A recruits person B, A automatically receives, credited to A's account, 20% of the membership dues of B, and 20% of the money paid to the organization by B during B's lifetime. But I magnanimously waive my rights to your dough under that policy if any of you decides to join up. Sounds like a pyramid scheme to me... Organizations I see: The "Monda Esperanto-Organiza^jo" (World Esperanto Organization)... "Monda Poliespo-Organiza^jo" (World Poliespo Organization)... "Monda Homaranisma Eklezio" (World Humanitarian Church)... and the "Unui^gintaj Nacioj de A^utonomiaj Popoloj" (United Nations of Autonomous Peoples). Each has its own little agenda, which I'll not get into here. OK, I've gone on long enough... ~mark >From jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk Mon Aug 2 19:56:38 1993 Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1993 19:56:21 +0200 Content-Identifier: Re: Why not '? From: " (Richard Kennaway)" Message-Id: <10426.9308021756@sys.uea.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Why not '? X-Sender: jrk@139.222.1.5 Colin Fine writes: >I believe that Richard is in the fortunate position of one to whom >a command line interpreter is as relevant as a horse and cart. This is true. But even when I use Unix, I just have to remember to put a "\" before every literal "'" on the command line (think of it as an allograph with the advantage of not looking like a letter), and that only applies to the shell, not when interacting with something like an editor or a dictionary lookup program. Are there widely-used systems where "'" is given a special meaning throughout all programs? -- ____ Richard Kennaway __\_ / School of Information Systems Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \ X/ University of East Anglia uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K. >From j.guy@trl.oz.au Tue Aug 3 03:57:49 1993 From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9308030157.AA02170@medici.trl.OZ.AU> Subject: Re: Poliespo again To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1993 11:57:34 +1000 (EST) In-Reply-To: <9308021732.AA17712@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> from "shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu" at Aug 2, 93 08:29:38 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL20] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1549 I've just read Mark Shoulson's review of Poliespo. If it is not the product of a demented mind, it must be a hoax. "THE NORMAL 5-VOWEL PATTERN WITH ONE OR TWO SMALL MODIFICATIONS IS USED". Well, that's true, in a sense, if and only if, you confuse vowels and vowel letters. The "one or two small modifications" must be 1) the use of accents, 2) the use of "slashing-through". Methinks I shall invent Poliespo++. Poliespo++ uses the nearly universal 5-vowel system with just one minor modifications: each vowel may take a superscript and/or subscript. The superscript/subscript is a consonant. Same thing for Poliespo++ consonants: they may take superscripts and/or subscripts. The superscript/subscript is a vowel. Since Poliespo++ has *only* 20 consonants, that gives us 2000 vowel phonemes and 500 consonant phonemes. All Poliespo++ morphemes are precisely CV monosyllables, which makes the language very easy to pronounce since it has no consonant clusters! That gives Poliespo++ a possible vocabulary of 1,000,000 morphemes -- eat your heart out, O, Compleat Oxford Dictionary! Note how Poliespo++ is self-segmenting, a feat Lojban does messily and Klingon marginally messily. Poliespo++ does it elegantly! Erratum: I stuffed up my count of vowels and consonants, but Poliespo++ is even better than I made it. In fact, it has 5*21*21 = 2205 vowels and 20*6*6= 720 consonants, hence 1,587,600 roots! Almost 60% better than you thought. After this interlude, back to writing this painful article on machine translation Frogguy-style.... >From doug@netcom.com Tue Aug 3 16:55:19 1993 Message-Id: <9308031456.AA10003@netcom5.netcom.com> From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1993 07:56:07 PDT In-Reply-To: Don Harlow "Re: Welsh colors" (Aug 2, 6:19pm) X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Welsh colors >One of the most important Welsh colors is _glas_ (mutates to _las_), which >is the greenish-gray of a mountain tarn. English has no equivalent. My name, "douglas", derives from this ("dubh glas")...yet I have no idea what shade of greenish-gray one would see in a mountain tarn. I had to look up "tarn", for that matter... Obviously I'm out of touch with my roots. Doug >From urban@cobra.jpl.nasa.gov Tue Aug 3 18:23:13 1993 Message-Id: <9308031623.AA24898@odin.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Welsh colors Date: Tue, 03 Aug 1993 09:23:10 PDT From: Michael P Urban > My name, "douglas", derives from this ("dubh glas")...yet I have no > idea what shade of greenish-gray one would see in a mountain tarn. > I had to look up "tarn", for that matter... Yes, the root is present in Goedelic languages as well as Welsh. I seem to recall that it was also translated as `blue' in a Scottish dictionary. Green/blue/grey sounds to me more like `the color of the ocean' than `a mountain tarn'. >From V119N57H@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu Tue Aug 3 19:57:45 1993 Date: Tue, 03 Aug 1993 14:00:10 -0400 (EDT) From: Dragon Subject: Re: family interlanguages To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01H1B7OXNH0G8ZDWIX@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu> Organization: University at Buffalo X-Vms-To: IN%"conlang@diku.dk" Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Colin says: >Well if Greenberg and Ruhlen are right I find it hard to imagine any bigger "ifs" ;^) Craig Kopris >From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Tue Aug 3 20:57:47 1993 From: (Mark E. Shoulson) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 93 14:56:16 -0400 Message-Id: <9308031856.AA21787@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: Jacques Guy's message of Tue, 3 Aug 93 04:19:59 +0200 <9308030157.AA02170@medici.trl.OZ.AU> Subject: Poliespo again >Date: Tue, 3 Aug 93 04:19:59 +0200 >From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) >I've just read Mark Shoulson's review of Poliespo. If it is >not the product of a demented mind, it must be a hoax. It seems to be worse than a hoax: it seems to be for real, much as I'd wish it not to be. Do you want me to make copies of all the stuff and mail them to you? Anyone else? ~mark >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Wed Aug 4 04:05:58 1993 Date: Wed, 4 Aug 93 04:05:57 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9308040205.AA10962@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Administrivia So I left my trusty workstation for some eleven days, and did I have mail when I came back? The failmail storm, 2 MB of it, has died down some; at a certain point during the Lojban apostrophe debacle my mailbox was being inundated with at least seven copies of everything, but now I am down to two consistently bouncy mail targets. It seems that Marnen Laibow-Koser's mailbox has given out under the strain, so I am setting him POSTPONE; I cannot in the nature of things send him a message about it, so anybody who hears from him is welcome to inform him of the fact. Also, I excised a gentleman known to me only as ckline@umiami.ir.miami.edu, who upped and left leaving only an invalid address, and fixed David Wolff's posting problem (Computer Vision changed their mail routing yet again). Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) >From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Wed Aug 4 04:33:37 1993 Message-Id: From: snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM (John Cowan) Subject: Re: Poliespo again To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Tue, 3 Aug 93 11:50:57 EDT In-Reply-To: <9308030157.AA02170@medici.trl.OZ.AU>; from "Jacques Guy" at Aug 3, 93 4:22 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Jacques Guy writes: > Note how Poliespo++ is self-segmenting, a feat Lojban does messily > and Klingon marginally messily. Poliespo++ does it elegantly! Yes, but! Did you miss my magnum opus on two-level self-segmentation? (Morpheme level and word level.) I'm still waiting for details on a better way to do >that<. As far as I know, only Bee (and Cee) achieve it outside the Loglan/Lojban paradigm. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Wed Aug 4 09:20:38 1993 Date: Wed, 4 Aug 93 09:20:38 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9308040720.AA11766@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Complexity tradeoffs on sci.lang For those who have given up on sci.lang, I'll just point out the current thread called ``The best language.'' It has some very interesting points about lexical/derivational/inflectional complexity tradeoffs and their relation to the complexity of language production and understanding. Stuff that all conlang inventors should be aware of (even if they decide to ignore it). They haven't even started flaming Hubey yet. Also: would it be relevant for me to archive such discussions with the listserv? This one in particular? Do we have subscribers that cannot get sci.lang? Feedback by direct email, please. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Wed Aug 4 10:56:36 1993 Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1993 09:56:29 +0100 Message-Id: <27548.199308040856@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: family interlanguages >Colin says: >>Well if Greenberg and Ruhlen are right >I find it hard to imagine any bigger "ifs" ;^) >Craig Kopris Meow! >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Fri Aug 6 19:07:07 1993 Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1993 18:07:03 +0100 Message-Id: <2058.199308061707@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Abstract of paper for EJC A few weeks ago now, Robin Gaskell posted the following abstract. I haven't had a chance to reply until now. Some of what follows is mildly inflammable - it is on the basis of my reactions to the abstract; I know that the paper itself may give a different view. ++++++++++> Title: Independent Scholarship into the International Auxiliary Language Hypothesis Abstract: The barrier to global communication caused by national languages is not being addressed by mainstream communication researchers. Academic and commercial interests, worldwide, are conducting ad hoc translation projects based on a range of hypotheses; research into Human Language Reform is limited, and is being conducted by Independent Scholars without funding. This paper describes the work of one Independent Scholar investigating the International Auxiliary Language hypothesis using the superior Planned Language, Glosa, as his model. Lack of funding forces reliance on volunteers and on innovative, low-cost methods. An explanation for the lack of institutional research into reform of the medium of verbal communication is attempted. The significance of Human Language Reform for global communication is outlined. >++++++++++ I'm afraid, Robin, that this got right up my nose. It is based on a whole string of unstated assumptions which are both unconventional and questionable. "The barrier to global communication caused by national languages is not being addressed by ..." Nor is the barrier caused by mountain ranges. Why should it be addressed? Is there any hope of success? Is there any reason to think that there is a fertile approach? " research into Human Language Reform is limited, and is being conducted by Independent Scholars without funding. " So is research into ESP, not to mention proving the Earth is flat. Again, there's an unstated assumption, together with a strong hint of submerged anger. " This paper describes the work of one Independent Scholar investigating the International Auxiliary Language hypothesis using the superior Planned Language, Glosa, as his model." What on Goglafrincham is the International Auxiliary Language hypothesis? And as Doug said, that 'superior' is a red rag. As I say, it is probable that the paper itself is much more reasoned. And the work described is I am sure of interest and value: my comparisons with moonshine above are not meant to cast aspersions on what you actually do, merely how you present it. (BTW, although I am a keen Lojbanist, I have always regarded the prospect of an International Auxiliary as a pipe dream. This is a partisan position, just as yours is - but it is in need of less support in argument). But the abstract reads to me like an arrogant and chilish pout. Colin fine >From dasher@netcom.com Mon Aug 9 08:01:52 1993 Date: Sun, 8 Aug 93 23:02:37 -0700 From: dasher@netcom.com (D. Anton Sherwood) Message-Id: <9308090602.AA25825@netcom2.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: universals Before I ask the net at large via sci.lang: does one of you happen to know if Greenberg's seminal list of proposed universals is available by ftp? By the way-- > As far as a pan-Iroquoian for tribes that have forgotten their language > goes, only one of the living nations has lost its language - the Huron- > Wyandot. . . . > If something more like "pan-Indian" was meant rather than "pan-Iroquoian", > then an interlanguage would be no more "familial" than one encompassing > English, Chinese, Arabic, Ainu and Hottentot. Iroquoian was just the first New World language family that came to mind; I didn't mean anything by the choice. *\\* Anton Ubi scriptum? >From jennings@halcyon.com Fri Aug 13 09:22:18 1993 Message-Id: <199308130722.AA08389@halcyon.com> Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1993 00:25:36 -0800 To: conlang@diku.dk From: jennings@halcyon.com (James Jennings) Subject: "Idiom Quotient" James Kilpatrick's column in last Sunday's paper said something that I find intriguing. The 4th paragraph reads: ---- These are idioms, formally defined as expressions that are peculiar to themselves grammatically and cannot be understood from the individual meanings of the elements. Every language is rich in idioms, but professional linguists believe that English is the richest of them all. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ---- Are there any professional linguists out there who can fill me in on that last bit? Who has measured "idiom richness" and how did they do it? How do they define it? A modest conjecture: Could "idiom richness" be closer to the heart of what language is all about than, say, vocabulary and grammar? ;-) James >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Fri Aug 13 10:53:07 1993 Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1993 09:53:02 +0100 Message-Id: <101.199308130853@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> Received: from Colin Fine's Macintosh (colin_fine.comp.brad.ac.uk) by atlantis.brad.ac.uk; Fri, 13 Aug 1993 09:53:02 +0100 From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: "Idiom Quotient" James Jennings quotes and questions: +++++> Every language is rich in idioms, but professional linguists believe that English is the richest of them all. >+++++ I too would be fascinated to hear any justification of this, because I simply don't believe it. I'm not saying that English is idiom-poor: just that I don't believe it is richer than others (and I am dubious that there is any meaningful measure of it). Colin ======================================================================== There are no extraordinary people. | Colin Fine Whoever tells you otherwise is | Dept of Computing lying to you. | University of Bradford There are only ever ordinary people,| Bradford, W. Yorks, England Who do what they do - | BD7 1DP The extraordinary thing is the | Tel: 0274 733680 (h), 383915 (w) extraordinary things that they do!| c.j.fine@bradford.ac.uk | (cfine@cix.compulink.co.uk; .e'o ko sarji la lojban. | cjfine@gn.apc.org) EXLIB = EXpansion of LIBrary systems for the visually disadvantaged ======================================================================== >From jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu Fri Aug 13 19:52:25 1993 Date: Fri, 13 Aug 93 10:57:57 -0700 From: jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero) Posted-Date: Fri, 13 Aug 93 10:57:57 -0700 Message-Id: <9308131757.AA29734@glia.biostr.washington.edu> Received: by glia.biostr.washington.edu (911016.SGI/Eno-0.1) id AA29734; Fri, 13 Aug 93 10:57:57 -0700 To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: "Idiom Quotient" Colin: | James Jennings quotes and questions: | | Every language is rich in idioms, but | | professional linguists believe that English is the richest of them all. | I too would be fascinated to hear any justification of this, because | I simply don't believe it. | I'm not saying that English is idiom-poor: just that I don't believe | it is richer than others (and I am dubious that there is any | meaningful measure of it). Um? Colin, are you willing to believe that English has a larger than average vocabulary? Speaker population? If there is really evidence that the idiom vocabulary remains constant between languages while the vocabulary proper varies in size by a couple orders of magnitude, I would find _that_ fascinating. >From KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE Sat Aug 14 22:34:21 1993 Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1993 22:31 +0200 From: J%org Knappen Subject: Early conlang fragment in Jules Verne To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01H1R2SHOP8W8WW2EG@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> X-Envelope-To: conlang@diku.dk X-Vms-To: GATEWAY"conlang@diku.dk" (Forwarded from esperanto@rand.org -- Note the line with the *) (English summary at the end) En mia kopio de "Dudek Miloj da Trimejloj sub la Maroj" cxi tiu sekvas la supera: "That would be of no use," answered Ned Land. "Do you not see that those fellows have a language of their own--a language invented to make honest men who want their dinners despair? ..." Ron MILLER tradukis kaj ilustris mian eldonon. La lingvo de la Nauxtilo-anoj estas artefarita. Bedauxrinde, la sola ekzemplo de "Nautilo-lingvo" estas trovita en Cxapitro 15: "Nautron respoc lorni virch." * Rimarku! "Dudek Miloj da Trimejloj" estis unua-foje eldonita en 1871, kelkaj jaroj antaux SCHLEYER eldonis "Volapu"k: Die Weltsprache", kaj ankaux antaux la nasko de Esperanto. La ideo de universala kaj artefarita lingvo estis malnova antaux la eldono de la unuaj praktikaj lingvoj. >Jules Verne apparently started to write a novel in which Esperanto >appeared explicitly. A posthumous French edition of the uncompleted >novel appeared very recently. Mi legis iometon pri la supero en piednoto en mia libro. Rob Dean *Cxu iu scias plu pri fruaj lingvoprojektoj? Mi scivolas, cxu cxi tiu fragmento estas derivita de tia lingvo... (forwarded by J"org Knappen) (Summary) (In Jule Verne's 20 000 miles under the sea (?), the crew of the Nautilus speaks a constructed language. The only fragment of it is the line "Nautron respoc lorni virch." * in chapter 15. Note that the roman appeared in 1871 several years before Schleyer published Volap"uk. Does someone know about early conlangs? Is the phrase above taken from such a project?) >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Mon Aug 16 10:30:01 1993 Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1993 09:29:57 +0100 Message-Id: <25417.199308160829@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: "Idiom Quotient" Jeff Prothero queries: ++++++++++> Um? Colin, are you willing to believe that English has a larger than average vocabulary? Speaker population? If there is really evidence that the idiom vocabulary remains constant between languages while the vocabulary proper varies in size by a couple orders of magnitude, I would find _that_ fascinating. >++++++++++++ Larger than average vocabulary - certainly. Larger than average productive vocabulary for a given speaker (or even community) - probably, but certainly depends on which speaker and community you're talking abo Large speaker population - certainly Again it all depends what you mean. If you mean 'total count of idioms used somewhere by speakers of some variety of English', then I'd have to accept the claim, but it's a much less interesting claim than it first appeared. I would take it to imply something like 'the average English speaker has available an unusually large stock of idioms' - this may be true, but I'm dubious. Indeed one could imagine an argument that went 'the smaller lexis a language has, the more idioms it must have to cover the semantic field of others.' Colin >From pool@u.washington.edu Thu Aug 19 05:56:25 1993 Date: Wed, 18 Aug 93 20:56:17 -0700 From: Jonathan Pool Message-Id: <9308190356.AA15557@carson.u.washington.edu> X-Sender: pool@carson.u.washington.edu To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Unsubscription Cc: pool@u.washington.edu The last few months' contributions have been sufficiently dissimilar to my research interests to motivate this request to remove me from the list of those receiving postings to conlang. Thank you for complying with this request. >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Thu Aug 19 14:16:09 1993 Date: Thu, 19 Aug 93 14:16:08 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9308191216.AA26197@tyr.diku.dk> To: Jonathan Pool Cc: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: Jonathan Pool's message of Thu, 19 Aug 93 06:19:58 +0200 <9308190356.AA15557@carson.u.washington.edu> Subject: Unsubscription No problem ... but how about making a minimal effort to remember what sort of list you are on and using the appropriate channel to unsubscribe, instead of blindly propagating an administrative request to one hundred subscribers? Besides, have you tried to bring up your research interests on the list lately? That would seem to be a good way of getting other people to contribute on those subjects. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) >From EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Sat Aug 21 03:39:06 1993 To: conlang@diku.dk, ez-as-pi@cup.portal.com From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Subject: Ease of learning a conlang Lines: 46 Date: Fri, 20 Aug 93 18:42:59 PDT Message-Id: <9308201842.2.5961@cup.portal.com> X-Origin: The Portal System (TM) Having been away from this list for about 2 1/2 months during which I (a) moved, (b) couldn't find my modem, and (c) couldn't get my computer to work for a while, I am trying to respond to threads which, admittedly, may be stale to most of you. But it does warrant a comment from me in some cases, and if this bothers you, I apologize. There are differences between ease of learning to SPEAK a language and ease of learning to UNDERSTAND it. A language with many different ways of saying the same thing can be easy to speak, because you only need to remember one of these ways. In Lojban, the se/te/ve/xe parti- cles are one way of moving a word into subject position (equivalent to passive voice in English), but there are other ways (I believe fa/fe/etc. but I'm not sure I recall correctly) with somewhat different syntactical rules. If you remember one, that's enough. But this flexibility that makes speaking the language easier makes understanding a bigger task, because you must be prepared to interpret each of these ways of saying the same thing. Similar- ly, in Interlingua, there are choices where one can form a regular derivative or a natural one (i. e., use the form as it is found in the natural Romance languages) and this flexibility makes for ease of use but difficulty in interpretation. Of course, in some cases, the two kinds of ease of learning go hand in hand. I think that everyone agrees that a phonetic orthography (like Finnish or Spanish) is easier than an irregular one (like Irish or English). At least nobody I know of has created a conlang with English-like orthographic irregu- larities! Bruce >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Wed Aug 25 12:04:01 1993 Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1993 11:03:56 +0100 Message-Id: <8550.199308251003@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk, LOJBAN@CUVMB.EARN Subject: Is PLS awake? Has anybody managed to get anything off PLS recently? I keep sending it messages asking for index, and not getting any answers at all. I'm sending to langserv@columbia.edu Any ideas? Colin >From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Wed Aug 25 16:24:09 1993 From: (Mark E. Shoulson) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 93 10:21:41 -0400 Message-Id: <9308251421.AA00188@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: conlang@diku.dk, LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET In-Reply-To: Colin Fine's message of Wed, 25 Aug 1993 11:03:56 +0100 Subject: Is PLS awake? It seems that cunixf, the machine on which langserv was running, got itself retired whilst we weren't looking. Jerry is arranging/has arranged for it to get reinstated elsewhere with the same address, I haven't heard if he's succeeded. I'll try it myself and see what's happening. We apologize for the inconvenience, it should be back soon. ~mark >From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Wed Aug 25 23:53:50 1993 Message-Id: From: snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM (John Cowan) Subject: A sample of Eurish, with commentary To: conlang@diku.dk (conlang) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1993 17:36:28 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL22] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 3935 Of course, there really is no conlang called "Eurish". That's just the name that James Blish gave to the weird mixture of garbled English and other languages that appears in James Joyce's last novel, >Finnegans Wake< (hereafter FW; all quotations refer to page.line numbers, which are the same in all editions). Here's the excerpt, drawn from FW 4.11-21, a relatively easy and well- understood passage. Yes, it's all one sentence. See what you make of it, then read the commentary below. The insights, such as they are, in the commentary aren't original with me; they probably owe most to Campbell & Robinson's groundbreaking (but often wrong) 1947 commentary, >A Skeleton Key To FW<. 11> Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen's maurer, 12> lived in the broadest way immarginable in his rushlit toofarback 13> for messuages before joshuan judges had given us numbers or Hel- 14> veticus committed deuteronomy (one yeastyday he sternely struxk 15> his tete in a tub for to watsch the future of his fates but ere 16> he swiftly stook it out again, by the might of moses, the very water 17> was eviparated and all the guenneses had met their exodus so that 18> ought to show you what a pentschanjeuchy chap he was!) and during 19> mighty odd years this man of hod, cement, and edifices in Toper's 20> Thorp piled buildung supra buildung pon the banks for the livers 21> by the Soangso. Commentary: Bygmester (.11): English "big master" + Dano-Norwegian "master builder" (after Ibsen's play). the Stuttering Hand (.11): presumably Finnegan's coat of arms. messuages (.13): Medieval Latin, adopted into English for the house and immediately adjacent lands of a feudal lord. So "toofarback for messuages" means before feudalism. joshuan judges ... numbers ... Helveticus ... deuteronomy ... guennesses ... exodus (.13-.17): the first six books of the Bible. tete ... watsch (.15): French "head", pseudo-German. French and German are often contrasted in FW. moses (.16): the purported author of the first five books. Helveticus committed deuteronomy (.13-.14): probably refers to Joyce's claim that T. S. Eliot, while living in Switzerland ("Helvetica"), had plagiarized "The Waste Land" from Joyce's "Ulysses". "Deuteronomy" is etymologically "the second naming" (of the Law). yeastyday (.15): mostly "yesterday", but also implies that the "tub" contains beer. sternely ... swiftly (.14-.16): refers to Irish writers Sterne and Swift, the latter of whom wrote >The Tale of a Tub<. eviparated ... guenneses had met their exodus (.17): the beer (Guinness) was gone, because the water had evaporated. pentschanjeuchy (.18): Pentateuch-y, Punch-and-Judy. hod, cement, and edifices (.19) shows the acronym HCE which represents the main hero of the book; often equated with Finnegan (.11). bildung supra bildung (.20): a triple pun: English "building", English "dung", German "Bildung" = education. Toper's Thorp (.19-.20): English: drinker's village. Soangso (.21) = English "so-and-so", Chinese "Huang Ho" = the Yellow River. What on earth was Joyce doing? My favorite theory is that he designed the skeleton of the book, and then concocted it from bits and pieces of other books. He transcribed a vast number of words and phrases from his extremely miscellaneous reading into various notebooks (most of which survive), then crossed the phrases off as he used them. Not all the phrases were English, by any means, although English is the predominant language of FW (followed by Irish and Norwegian, probably). The reason for the distortions was to condense multiple phrases into one and keep the total length down (600-odd pages is more than enough, most people would think!). FW is a fascinating book, and in addition (especially if you can adjust to reading it aloud) very funny. Good hunting. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban.