archives of the CONLANG mailing list ------------------------------------ >From ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Sun May 1 15:08:40 1994 From: ucleaar Message-Id: <117050.9405011308@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Lojban terminators Date: Sun, 01 May 94 14:08:40 +0100 Lojbab gave examples where commas/intonations gives strong clues to what the grammatical structure of an utterance is, and continued: > In both of these cases, spoken language as well as written language indicates > the grammatical structure differences. Whether you call the difference > pohrasing, intonation, or whatever, a grammar of Ennglish is not complete > with that information. Lojban's terminators correspond to the whatever-you- > want-to-call-it that reflects the difference between the above pairs. In English commas/intonation reflect the difference between vocatives, restrictive v. nonrestrictive relative clauses, and so on. But you can write a generative grammar of English that ignores punctation and intonation & has no problems generating the desired syntactic structures (the only problem is that it fails to generate punctuation & intonation). But you can't write an adequate grammar of Lojban that ignores terminators: they are an integral part of syntactic structure, not a reflector of it. In this respect, terminators are like English 'that': you can think of 'that' as a mere punctuation-like marker of the beginning of a clause, but it is well known that its presence or absence is syntactically significant: Who do you reckon went? *Who do you reckon that went? The presence of absence of Lojban terminators could also make differences in grammaticality. ------ And ______________________________________________________________________ >From lojbab@access.digex.net Sun May 1 20:11:28 1994 Date: Mon, 2 May 1994 00:11:28 -0400 From: Logical Language Group Message-Id: <199405020411.AA25584@access1.digex.net> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Lojban terminators Cc: lojbab@access.digex.net UC> In English commas/intonation reflect the difference between vocatives, UC> restrictive v. nonrestrictive relative clauses, and so on. But you can UC> write a generative grammar of English that ignores punctation and UC> intonation & has no problems generating the desired syntactic structures UC> (the only problem is that it fails to generate punctuation & intonation). UC> But you can't write an adequate grammar of Lojban that ignores UC> terminators: they are an integral part of syntactic structure, not a UC> reflector of it. I think I see the confusion/disagreement/whatever. You seem to be saying that there is an algorithm that will*form* the given sentences interpreted either as vocatives or non-vocatives, restrictive or non-restrictive sentences. In other words the same sentence, minus intonation, has two grammatically distinctive parses, and either is 'generable'. Of course this is possibly meaningless, and at best an incomplete set of rules, since you say it does not generate the intonation/punctuation. We also have no idea whether any particular set of generative rules have any real relation to the way our brains process language - these rules are just a model of the black box. But even more important, that sense of a 'generative' grammar doesn't tell anything about how someone LISTENING to the sentence breaks it down and understands it. The intonation is vital to understanding the English, from the point of view of a listener. The Lojban rules are designed to not only be generative, but complete in the other direction of parsing/breaking down AND to hgave the same structure in either direction. BTW, I find your example cute: UC> Who do you reckon went? UC> *Who do you reckon that went? because a near synonym of 'reckon' gives to me the exact opposite judgement: *Who do you know went? Who do you know that went? lojbab ______________________________________________________________________ >From ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Mon May 2 22:08:53 1994 From: ucleaar Message-Id: <243259.9405022008@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Lojban terminators Date: Mon, 02 May 94 21:08:53 +0100 > In other words the same sentence, minus intonation, has two > grammatically distinctive parses, and either is 'generable'. Right. And it's easy to conceive of English working okay, albeit more ambiguously, without intonation or punctuation. > Of course this is possibly meaningless, and at best an incomplete set of > rules, since you say it does not generate the intonation/punctuation. We also > have no idea whether any particular set of generative rules have any real > relation to the way our brains process language - these rules are just a > model of the black box. True, but some models are more principled and less arbitrary than others, & one may hypothesize that this will better model the black box. > But even more important, that sense of a 'generative' grammar doesn't tell > anything about how someone LISTENING to the sentence breaks it down and > understands it. The intonation is vital to understanding the English, from > the point of view of a listener. The intonation facilitates; it isn't vital. A generative grammar doesn't necessarily tell you anything about production or comprehension unless it's formulated in procedural terms (i.e. unless it models processes rather than static knowledge). I meant 'generative' in the technical sense of being sufficiently explicit to describe all and only the well formed strings of the language. I agree that one would like the processes of production and comprehension/parsing to operate on the same structures. > BTW, I find your example cute: > UC> Who do you reckon went? > UC> *Who do you reckon that went? > > because a near synonym of 'reckon' gives to me the exact opposite judgement: > > *Who do you know went? > Who do you know that went? I don't believe that 'Who do you know went?' is * for you. It's a question from 'You do know X went'. In 'Who do you know that went', 'that went' is an extraposed relative clause modifiying 'who': 'Who that went do you know?', 'I know someone that went'. In 'Who do you reckon (*that) went' 'who' is extracted out of a clausal complement of 'reckon': 'You reckon (that) X went'. Apparently in the Ozarks, 'Who do you reckon that went' is okay, This is the only thing I know about the Ozarks, except that they're somewhere in the USA. ----- And ______________________________________________________________________ >From lojbab@access.digex.net Mon May 2 23:30:54 1994 Date: Tue, 3 May 1994 03:30:54 -0400 From: Logical Language Group Message-Id: <199405030730.AA28535@access3.digex.net> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Lojban terminators Cc: lojbab@access.digex.net LL> > because a near synonym of 'reckon' gives to me the exact opposite judgeme LL> > LL> > *Who do you know went? LL> > Who do you know that went? LL> LL> I don't believe that 'Who do you know went?' is * for you. It's a LL> question from 'You do know X went'. LL> LL> In 'Who do you know that went', 'that went' is an extraposed relative LL> clause modifiying 'who': 'Who that went do you know?', 'I know someone LL> that went'. In 'Who do you reckon (*that) went' 'who' is extracted out LL> of a clausal complement of 'reckon': 'You reckon (that) X went'. I can't get 'Who do you know wnt?" to work, even based on your sample - which itself only works for me with emphatic stress on 'do'. In the question, I need either a 'who' or a 'that' before 'went', even with emphatic stress, unless I am missing something. In any event, you comment confirmed my hypothesis regarding 'generative'. I do not believe that there is necessaarily any such thing as 'language knowledge' distinct from the processes used to generate or interpret it. How can you have static knowledge about a dynamic thing like language - even my personal idiolect changes (for example, you *lmight* convince me that "Who do you know went?" SHOULD be acceptible to me, in which case my set of well-formed strings will be different than it was a couple of days ago. One nice thing abotu working with a conlang is that at least at this stage, we get to dictate what is a well-formed string, and thus avoid the argument that seems to divide the field of linguistics as to whether such a thing really means anything independent of the theory used. lojbab Bob LeChevalier ______________________________________________________________________ >From ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Tue May 3 21:00:51 1994 From: ucleaar Message-Id: <191868.9405031900@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Re: Lojban terminators (Logical Language Group ) Date: Tue, 03 May 94 20:00:51 +0100 > From: Logical Language Group > I can't get 'Who do you know wnt?" to work, even based on your sample - which > itself only works for me with emphatic stress on 'do'. In the question, I need > either a 'who' or a 'that' before 'went', even with emphatic stress, unless I > am missing something. I'm gobsmacked. What about 'Who do you think likes bananas?'? Will changing the example help? > In any event, you comment confirmed my hypothesis regarding 'generative'. > I do not believe that there is necessaarily any such thing as 'language > knowledge' distinct from the processes used to generate or interpret it. > How can you have static knowledge about a dynamic thing like language - even > my personal idiolect changes (for example, you *lmight* convince me that > "Who do you know went?" SHOULD be acceptible to me, in which case my set > of well-formed strings will be different than it was a couple of days ago. Generative grammars aren't necessarily declarative (non-procedural), though in practise most are. Nowadays a fair number of people are trying to develop generative grammars that are procedural (i.e. grammatical structure is the procedures used to produce/comprehend it). The declarative view is entirely compatible with a change in knowledge; your knowledge of trees is declarative, but I can easily teach you new things about trees. Similarly you can learn new things about English grammar. > One nice thing abotu working with a conlang is that at least at this stage, > we get to dictate what is a well-formed string, and thus avoid the argument > that seems to divide the field of linguistics as to whether such a thing > really means anything independent of the theory used. A nice thing about *Lojban* is that a generative grammar has been developed for it, & as far as I know this is the only language of which that can be said. I am filled with admiration for the people who created this grammar. It is true that deciding whether a string is 'well-formed' is theory-dependent, but I don't see this as a weakness of the generative approach to linguistics. The argument for the generative approach is that the only explanation for the utterances we are capable of producing is that we do indeed know/possess a set of rules that 'generate' sentences. And it is these rules that necessarily determine whether a string is well-formed. The rules either do or don't generate a sentence. ---- And ______________________________________________________________________ >From lojbab@access.digex.net Tue May 3 21:30:25 1994 Date: Wed, 4 May 1994 01:30:25 -0400 From: Logical Language Group Message-Id: <199405040530.AA15398@access3.digex.net> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Cc: lojbab@access.digex.net And:LL> > From: Logical Language Group LL> > I can't get 'Who do you know wnt?" to work, even based on your sample - w LL> > itself only works for me with emphatic stress on 'do'. In the question, I LL> > either a 'who' or a 'that' before 'went', even with emphatic stress, unle LL> > am missing something. LL> LL> I'm gobsmacked. What about 'Who do you think likes bananas?'? Will LL> changing the example help? No problem with that one - but it also fails for me with 'know' instead of 'think'. This may be a peculiarity of the verb which of course is ambiguous between 'know that', and 'know about', that may make it somewhat more restrictive in grammar for me. But I think there is a phenomenon in English which may or may not be described as 'telegraphing' (abbreviating by leaving out some words), that is very specific on which words it can be done with. Who do you think likes bananas? *Who do you know likes bananas? I decide who likes bananas. *Who do you decide likes bananas? [at least it is awful strained to me, but] Who did you decide liked bananas? [works fine for me, but still] *Who did you know liked bananas? Who do you think has a car? Who do you know has a car? [no problems there] Who do you think has cars? *Who do you know has cars? [again sounds too strained to me] But interestingly enough, if the plural is a false one, the sentence suddenly works for me, I just realized. Imagine a set of playing cards of unusual faces: One of them has a bunch of bananas pictured on them which is aesthetically pleasant. The card has the name 'Bananas' (If you want traditional playing cards, you can just use one of the standard suit names here). Likewise another suit has pictures of cars on it, and is labelled "Cars". Then no problem with Who do you think likes Bananas/Cars? Who do you think has Bananas/Cars? Who do you know has Bananas/Cars? [but still not] *Who do you know likes Bananas/Cars? [though I am less sure that this would be unacceptable in a card-playing context - it is certainly beating at the margins of acceptability.] Enough useless grammatical judgements - I don;t trust them anyway unless I actually do hear them in a natural context and get to react to them without my grammarian hat on. LL> It is true that deciding whether a string is 'well-formed' is LL> theory-dependent, but I don't see this as a weakness of the generative LL> approach to linguistics. The argument for the generative approach is LL> that the only explanation for the utterances we are capable of LL> producing is that we do indeed know/possess a set of rules that LL> 'generate' sentences. And it is these rules that necessarily LL> determine whether a string is well-formed. The rules either do LL> or don't generate a sentence. But this isn't much of an explanation in my book, since the rules are an artifact of the particular theory, and there is no evidence that any particular theory is complete and correct. Only if someone says that a given rule set is or is isomorphic to a COMPLETE set of rules embedded in our brains could I even start to accept that it might be an 'explanation', and then God forbid that there be discovered a rule changing or I no longer will trust that theory or theorist. Otherwise, the proper word to me is 'model' or even better 'incomplete model'. Theories need to explain something, and generative theories explain nothing that is a real phenomenon. lojbab ---- lojbab Note new address: lojbab@access.digex.net Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Ask me about the artificial language Loglan/Lojban. ______________________________________________________________________ >From ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Thu May 5 21:38:07 1994 From: ucleaar Message-Id: <180796.9405051938@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: theories of grammar Date: Thu, 05 May 94 20:38:07 +0100 > From: Logical Language Group > > Enough useless grammatical judgements - I don;t trust them anyway unless > I actually do hear them in a natural context and get to react to them without > my grammarian hat on. As you probably realize, one really makes acceptability judgements rather than grammaticality judgements. If a sentence is acceptable then we presume it's grammatical, but if it's unacceptable this cd be because it is ungrammatical, or has a weird meaning, or is tough to process, & in the case of your judgements I think the 'tough to process' (because of interfering readings' is probably the right one. > LL> It is true that deciding whether a string is 'well-formed' is > LL> theory-dependent, but I don't see this as a weakness of the generative > LL> approach to linguistics. The argument for the generative approach is > LL> that the only explanation for the utterances we are capable of > LL> producing is that we do indeed know/possess a set of rules that > LL> 'generate' sentences. And it is these rules that necessarily > LL> determine whether a string is well-formed. The rules either do > LL> or don't generate a sentence. > > But this isn't much of an explanation in my book, since the rules are an > artifact of the particular theory, and there is no evidence that any particular > theory is complete and correct. Only if someone says that a given rule set is > or is isomorphic to a COMPLETE set of rules embedded in our brains could I > even start to accept that it might be an 'explanation', and then God forbid > that there be discovered a rule changing or I no longer will trust that > theory or theorist. > > Otherwise, the proper word to me is 'model' or even better 'incomplete model'. > Theories need to explain something, and generative theories explain nothing > that is a real phenomenon. I think it's a bit demanding to ask for it to be complete. surely every theory is incomplete, except for some ultimate theory of absolutely everything. I don't really mind using 'model' instead of 'theory', but I wd dispute the notion that it explains nothing. The grammar explains why we don't say certain things (i.e. because the grammar doesn't generate them). Okay, we then have to explain how it is we acquire this grammar, so it's not self-explanatory, but nevertheless it constitutes a partial explanation. Perhaps I misread you, but you seem to be suggesting that for the theory to be explanatory is has to be true. I don't see why this should be so: Creationism is explanatory, but apparently not true. I think that this discussion is well and truly off-topic by now, so I propose that it proceed by private e-mail (and thank readers for their forebearance). ---- And ______________________________________________________________________ >From viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi Tue May 31 23:02:40 1994 From: viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi (Ville Heikkila) Message-Id: <9405311702.AA24849@freeport.uwasa.fi> Subject: My experiences in fictional language creation To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Tue, 31 May 1994 20:02:40 +0300 (EET DST) I've been creating languages of my own for several years now, and most of them were used in fictional worlds. My first attempts were quite simple. I used a technique that I would nowadays call very raw: I had some source text somewhere (in Finnish). Then I made a kind of "translation" into the language I was creating. And I did all this completely without any grammatic/vocabular notes, completely from my imagination. During this process, however, the vocabulary and grammar were constructed kind of "automatically" or "naturally" in the brain. But there usually was a vast amount of borrowings and interference from other languages, even if I didn't want them. The invention of one of my most succesful languages, Jurs (about '89-'91) begun with this technique. Some time later, the grammar stabilized in my subconsciousness, and the vocabulary was written down. What is notable in this language is that it is the only language that I really 'know', so I can make up sentences without real efforts (my vocabulary, though, is something I've mostly forgotten). I've explored my intuition for this language many times, and I've even managed to write grammar for it (a month or so ago). I've found out many interesting things. I'll post the English version of my grammar file to conlang, if there's interest for it. Later, as I got more information about languages and different aspects for life and world, the language and world of Jurs became a bit naive for me and I tried to start a new style of language construction. The creation process started from single ideas that I had (for example) sucked into my brain from some book. Most of the languages I constructed this way were not very succesful, and I never reached the fluency I reached in Jurs. I hope I have corrected the clitches of this kind of technique in the new languages that are currently under work. After all this experience, I could now list the factors I require from an ideal fictional language: Weirdness. Especially on alien languages. I personally don't consider a fictional language very unique if it directly mimics some already existing language. A fictional language, as an opposite of an auxilary language, must have some exotic new ideas, though if its vocabulary was borrowed or so. (What this is all about, is art, isn't it?) Simpliness: The language must not be so exotic and weird that it's impossible to master. Strange, illogical and strict rules force the user of a language to have the notes ahead all the time, which really doesn't help in the development of the language. If the language is "too" simple or logical, it may reduce the important factors of weirdness and life. Life: A major problem that occurs in a big number of constructed languages is a kind of "mechanic ugliness". Natural languages live in the mouths of their users to perfectly fit their purpose, whatever it is: e.g. the basic words tend to become easier to pronounce etc. One may create a strict rule that says that the plural of a noun, in terms of simpliness, is always created using -go suffix. So the plurals of the words ending in -k would be so hard to pronounce that a living language could use this kind of plural only if it were a disappearing or rarely used form. One must not be too sure if the rules of his/her language work or not, and he/she always has to prepare to modify or eliminate them with a rude hand. In an ideal fictional language, the factors I listed must live together, without conflicts. Viznut.H. _ -- Ville Heikkila Miskala, Vaajasalmi 77700 Rautalampi Finland ______________________________________________________________________ >From viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi Tue May 31 23:03:22 1994 From: viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi (Ville Heikkila) Message-Id: <9405311703.AA24940@freeport.uwasa.fi> Subject: Fictional languages To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Tue, 31 May 1994 20:03:22 +0300 (EET DST) > From conlang@diku.dk Sun May 29 23:24:17 1994 Lars Mathiesen writes: > There has been some discussion of fictional languages/languages for > fiction, but is does seem that the people who want to discuss `useful' > languages (i.e., languages designed to be useful) are the ones who > have found the most energy to post lately. > Perhaps languages for fiction tend to be more private projects? Personally, I have always wanted to contact other language creators but there has been some kind of barrier: perhaps the problem with the lack of input is that the culture of creating fictional languages is really quite private for now (no good ways for information/experience interchange with other odd ones... ;) Those international auxilary languages, however, have been known publicly for decades (at least). The idea of creating fictional languages for "useless" purposes must be very new compared to the idea of IALs. > In fact, I originally joined this list to read about neat invented > languages. (Personally, I don't believe in the quest for a perfect > international auxiliary language (IAL). If the opportunity should > arise to get one adopted, I'll say leave well enough alone and go for > Esperanto. However, a lot of interesting ideas and even data come up > in the course of these discussions, so I'm glad that they are here.) I've also noticed this. As I subscribed this list, I noticed that some discussions (about pidgins and creoles, for example) could give me new and perhaps important ideas for developing languages of my own. What I've always seeked in my inventing process, is kind of simpliness to learn and memorize the language, and pidgins really seem to have this feature, so their structures interest me. J"org Knappen writes: > Personally, I'm interested in both topics, constructed languages for > international communication and constructed languages for fictional worlds. > > However, the input on the second topic is rather low here. Do you have > something to contribute? I've been discussing the topic with a couple of persons via email. We've swapped text files about grammars etc. And yes, I do have something to contribute. But that's worth another posting... Viznut.H. _ -- Ville Heikkila Miskala, Vaajasalmi 77700 Rautalampi Finland ______________________________________________________________________ >From ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Wed Jun 1 02:38:25 1994 From: ucleaar Message-Id: <140637.9406010038@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: CONLANG digest 51 Date: Wed, 01 Jun 94 01:38:25 +0100 [A reply to several messages, here. Is this a bad thing to do?] From: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk (Richard Kennaway) > It was And Rosta who mentioned that Alan Butcher had been working on Dwys. > And posted a translation of "The North Wind and the Sun". I believe Alan > Butcher was working on a booklet describing Dwys, but I haven't heard > anything for a while. Alan gets credit for posting the translation. As far as I know he's still on the conlang list, but he's probably busy with exams at the mo. Try posting queries to alan.butcher@ucl.ac.uk. From: viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi (Ville Heikkila) > Subject: Fictional languages > Personally, I have always wanted to contact other language creators but > there has been some kind of barrier: perhaps the problem with the lack > of input is that the culture of creating fictional languages is really > quite private for now (no good ways for information/experience > interchange with other odd ones... ;) It is my impression that hidden away, dotted about the globe, many people labour with quixotic dedication upon what Tolkien called A Secret Vice. Come the internet, we discover that each of us was not after all the only such person; in fact there are lots of us, but proportionately few with respect to the population of the whole world, and randomly distributed within it. When Conlang was first set up I was agog with excitement. > Those international auxilary languages, however, have been known > publicly for decades (at least). The idea of creating fictional > languages for "useless" purposes must be very new compared to the idea > of IALs. As far as I know the first fully-fledged lg invented for art's sake was by Tolkien. Marina Yaguello's _Foux de langage_ cites some earlier examples (e.g. Edward Bulwer Lytton last century) but these appear not to be fully-fledged. IALs go back to when - 17th century? Mind you, in all probability people have been inventing lgs for their own sake for centuries, but just carrying them to the grave with them. > I've been discussing the topic with a couple of persons via email. We've > swapped text files about grammars etc. How about posting these to the list? Colin: > Subject: Fictional languages > I agree, but there are two problems. One is that real earth languages > are so amazingly varied that you'll have to be really way-out to > out-weird some of them. On the other hand if you went even half-way > to some of the real languages, you'd leave most of your readership behind. Chomsky asserts that all languages are basically the same, with the differences between them being rather trivial. You probably find this rather provocative, but - as inventors of languages in particular should be aware - it is interesting to consider the ways languages could work but don't. For instance, Chomsky points out that humans have an ability to count, but that the language faculty does not have access to this ability: that is, no grammatical rule could apply to the third word of the sentence, for instance; anaphora could not work by numbering each word and then referring back to the number of the antecedent. One of my interests in invented lgs is to see whether very unnatural lgs have been invented and how people cope with them. > I think I agree with your general point, but you have chosen an > unfortunate example. From the viewpoint of a Finn, with next to no > consonant clusters in your language, no doubt plurals is '-kgo' seems > strange and wierd. But if you look at (say) many Amerind languages > you'll find plenty of consonant clusters that seem quite unachievable > even to us poor English speakers. > You can argue forever about what constitutes euphony, but the > fact is that one language's normal sound patterns may be ugly or > even unthinkable in another language. Nevertheless, there are cross-linguistic preferences for some phonological structures over others, and there is accordingly a scale of naturalness. -td- for instance will be rarer and less natural than -nd-. A major goal of phonological theory is to account for this. I think this is what Ville/Viznut was intuiting & trying to explain. ----- And ______________________________________________________________________ >From hmiller@origin.ea.com Wed Jun 1 00:49:57 1994 To: conlang@diku.dk From: hmiller@origin.ea.com (Herman Miller) Subject: Re: A new list needed for language creation? Date: Wed, 1 Jun 1994 00:49:57 GMT Message-Id: >> So, may language creators discuss about our experiences here, or do >> we have to create a new list for this purpose? >Please do tell us about it. Speak up, lurkers all. I was attracted to this mailing list by one of the replies to Viznut's (Ville Heikkila's) original message on sci.lang. After reading for a while, the list seemed to be generally about Esperanto, Glosa, & similar languages. (Interesting stuff in itself, but not the sort of people who would likely be interested in a fictional language. Or so I thought.) BTW, where can I get some information on Glosa? It sounds interesting. In any case, I have been creating languages since -- oh, sometime around the late 70's, I would guess. Not too long after "Star Wars" came out. I think it was the combination of the alien languages in "Star Wars", and the influence of reading Tolkien at the time, that gave me the impulse to organize some of my random made-up words into a real language. I have very few records from that time, but sometime around 1980, I had two languages that were fairly well developed: Olaetyan and Neesklaaz. In the meantime, a lot has happened: Olaetyan has grown to a vocabulary of somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 words. Neesklaaz has mostly dropped out of use. I started many languages during this period, but few got beyond the initial stages. Still, I can count Olaetyan, Neesklaaz, Deve'rrin, Sythin, Rynnan, and Cispa Zaik, as well as a few borderline cases like Shirra and Kazat ?akkorou. None of the others are as fully developed as Olaetyan. I also developed the Gargoyle language for "Ultima 6: The Black Gate", based mostly on abbreviated Latin roots, along with some of the words used in previous Ultimas. I did all of the translation of the signs and books in the world into Gargish. Most of my successful languages are associated with my fictional world. Originally this was the world of my AD&D role-playing campaign, but it has changed almost beyond recognition since those days. Perhaps one day I will have the time to write stories for publication. Having a full time job leaves little time for writing and creating new languages, but somehow I still manage. If anyone is interested, I have more details and grammatical notes available, mostly for Olaetyan (o-LYE-tyahn) and Cispa (CHIS-pa) Zaik. Is there an anonymous FTP site for uploading this sort of thing? A Nenskian Creation Myth A lina'n, ypha' oxe'nik; asela'n s-ekplentu nensko. Ot y xyya-ne' xakhe'nik: kh-u y ohas', kh-u y tensko. Xes xa proxyrg nextaredhli xyika ninska le' unilatya Xy ne'z xyli e nararedhli sepe'an ilats y il' redhlatya. In the beginning, nothing existed. Then Nensko described itself. It is a thing made by life, not of ordinary matter, but an immense being of energy, a living force that is everywhere. The life-power of animals and plants is the theme of the music of the cosmos. Edhlyt Narlend Rillintel (Herman Miller) ______________________________________________________________________ >From hmiller@origin.ea.com Wed Jun 1 00:58:11 1994 To: conlang@diku.dk From: hmiller@origin.ea.com (Herman Miller) Subject: errata Date: Wed, 1 Jun 1994 00:58:11 GMT Message-Id: Oops, for "Ultima 6: The Black Gate" in my previous post, read "Ultima 6: The False Prophet". After a while I tend to forget these things... hmm ______________________________________________________________________ >From j.guy@trl.oz.au Wed Jun 1 22:22:17 1994 From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9406010222.AA27522@medici.trl.OZ.AU> Subject: Re: CONLANG digest 51 To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Wed, 1 Jun 1994 12:22:17 +1000 (EST) > Chomsky asserts that all languages are basically the same, with > the differences between them being rather trivial. You probably > find this rather provocative, but - as inventors of languages > in particular should be aware - it is interesting to consider > the ways languages could work but don't. For instance, Chomsky > points out that humans have an ability to count, but that the > language faculty does not have access to this ability: that is, > no grammatical rule could apply to the third word of the sentence, > for instance; Nasioi (spoken in Papua-New Guinea) provides a counter-example. It has a rule according to which a syllable of the verbal prefixes is doubled depending on whether the verb has an even or odd number of syllables. I see the reason why there is fully fledged indexing of the words of a sentence in the very recent, and local, development of counting systems. Many languages do not have anything like numbers. Chomsky's argument is based on the notion of the innateness of fundamental language abilities, which denies language evolution (by which I do not mean language change), but e-volvere: to go from the simple to the complex. We even witness the beginning of what Chomsky deems impossible in many Ameridian languages which have a "fourth" person, i.e. second-mentioned third person. ______________________________________________________________________ >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Wed Jun 1 12:20:50 1994 Date: Wed, 1 Jun 1994 11:20:50 +0100 Message-Id: <2938.199406011020@discovery.brad.ac.uk> From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Chomsky, Phonology, counting And says: +++> Chomsky asserts that all languages are basically the same, with the differences between them being rather trivial. >++++ This is like the mathematician's meaning of 'trivial' - something like 'can be constructed mechanically'. Chomsky may well be right - but the fact that you got English, Samoan or Onondaga structure simply by plugging a few different parameters into a common set of rules would not make the perceived strangeness of each of these languages to speakers of the others any less. And continues: ++++> You probably find this rather provocative, but - as inventors of languages in particular should be aware - it is interesting to consider the ways languages could work but don't. For instance, Chomsky points out that humans have an ability to count, but that the language faculty does not have access to this ability: that is, no grammatical rule could apply to the third word of the sentence, for instance; anaphora could not work by numbering each word and then referring back to the number of the antecedent. ++++> It is indeed interesting to speculate on this. There are certainly elements in some languages which must come second in a clause. But when Jacques Guy comments: ++++> Nasioi (spoken in Papua-New Guinea) provides a counter-example. It has a rule according to which a syllable of the verbal prefixes is doubled depending on whether the verb has an even or odd number of syllables. >+++++ this is simply not to the point. It is an easy mistake of our over-numerate upbringing to assume that odd-even in this sense is a manipulation about number. Consider a piece of regular metric verse, like Hiawatha (or the Kalevala). You would immediately know if the final syllable were omitted from a line, but most people would not know without laborious counting how many syllables there were in the line. It is rather like the assumption that people whose language does not contain words for numbers above three cannot know whether one of their goats is missing. Counting is a process of matching, and does not necessarily require words - or even mental representations - for numbers. On phonology, And says: >+++++ Nevertheless, there are cross-linguistic preferences for some phonological structures over others, and there is accordingly a scale of naturalness. -td- for instance will be rarer and less natural than -nd-. A major goal of phonological theory is to account for this. >++++ Granted. But people often express intuitions about what would be a stable sound that are simply false. I remember doing so myself when I noticed the sequence /close-e open-e/ in Volapu"k and suggested that that seemed unnatural and unstable. A friend pointed to the French word 'nucle/aire', which is attested certainly from early last century. Jacques Guy again: ++++> Chomsky's argument is based on the notion of the innateness of fundamental language abilities, which denies language evolution (by which I do not mean language change), but e-volvere: to go from the simple to the complex. We even witness the beginning of what Chomsky deems impossible in many Ameridian languages which have a "fourth" person, i.e. second-mentioned third person. >++++ I don't understand this point. Certainly Chomsky's argument denies language evolution, in the sense that there is in his view some basic hard-wired substratum (and I suspect even then he would have to allow this to evolve as the species evolved). So what? Your comment about 'from the simple to the complex' strikes me rather like the arguments advanced last century (and still, in some quarters) AGAINST biological evolution: 'that the complex cannot evolve from the simple'. I do not know what you mean by these terms, and so what your argument amounts to. Does Chomsky really deem a 'fourth person' impossible? I would be surprised. And in any case as I understand it obviatives are well established in many Amerindian languages (Algonkian particularly, I think, but I'm not sure): what justification have you for 'we ... witness the beginning'? I am sure Chomsky would be the first to admit that he hasn't got all the answers (yet). Colin Fine ______________________________________________________________________ >From ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Thu Jun 2 22:06:24 1994 From: ucleaar Message-Id: <130611.9406022006@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Jacques's obviatives Date: Thu, 02 Jun 94 21:06:24 +0100 Jacques says: > We even witness the beginning of what Chomsky deems impossible > in many Ameridian languages which have a "fourth" person, i.e. > second-mentioned third person. I sympathize (though only slightly) with certain reasons for casting Noam as bad guy, but it is a bit unfair on him to conclude the above solely from my remarks. [I don't know if Jacques is joking: on the one hand he jokes a lot, but on the other hand he Chomsky-bashes a lot too.] The point is that syntax can't count, even though people can. 'Seven' is not a possible component of a syntactic rule. Even if obviatives were proved to have a numerical basis (and I think there are languages that do use pronouns meaning things like 'third character to enter narrative') this wdn't be part of syntax; it wd be part of semantics. And semantics of course can cope with numbers, since we can talk about them. [I am inclined to agree with Chomsky's observation/claim. If one tries to invent a flexible yet unabiguous syntax for a conlang, one is naturally drawn to use numbering, yet the result is impossible to use - it's unprocessable, & you can only parse by using pen & paper, just as with multiple centre embeddings (e.g. Fish cats dogs enjoy chasing like to eat live in water).] Colin's reply deals with the Nasioi example. ------ And ______________________________________________________________________ >From j.guy@trl.oz.au Fri Jun 3 18:00:16 1994 From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9406022200.AA13932@medici.trl.OZ.AU> Subject: Re: Jacques's obviatives To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Fri, 3 Jun 1994 08:00:16 +1000 (EST) > [I don't know > if Jacques is joking: on the one hand he jokes a lot, but > on the other hand he Chomsky-bashes a lot too.] No, I was not joking this time. I was pointing out what might (emphasize: *might*) be witness to the emergence of a new ... syntactic relationship for want of a better word. I know languages which have nothing like relative clauses for instance. Oh sure, you can call this and that "relative clause". But those "relative clauses" also function as temporal and conditional, so it's calling upon Procrustes and his bed for a fit. Have those languages lost relative clauses? Or is ours which have innovated (evolved) them? I do not know. But the fact is: we have here evidence for language evolution (evolution this time in the sense of evolution theory: it can be devolution as well). Chomsky bashing. Yes. I have been there and back. I have read Maurice Gross, who also was there and back. And, to repeat myself, I hold TG, GB, the kaboodle to be on par with pre-Newtonian, no, pre-Copernican astronomy: epicycles, deferents. And ether and phlogiston. No wonder language seems so complex with such an inept model. No, I do not know what the correct model is. I have caught glimpses, some of them from this interest group. Some from my tinkering with strange languages, or tackling weird problems. Some from other sources. Mainly that Russian fellow, B.V. Sukhotin. And there was an article, 2 years ago, which I just discovered, in the research journal of French Telecom, "L'echo des Recherches", No.146, 4th quarter 1991 pp.51-60: "Interrogation en langage naturel du Minitel Guide des Services" (M.Gilloux, E.Lassalle, J-M. Ombrouck). The methodology they developed to process customer queries strangely parallels a model I have been developing from a totally different angle: machine translation of English into..... Klingon! > The point is that syntax can't count, even though people can. Syntax can't count? What does that mean? People can? Not unless they have been taught. Counting is not only enumerating, but computing. Me: Lote, how many pigs have you got? Lote (proudly): I have *left clavicle* pigs! Me: If I gave you as many again, how many would you have? Lote: ... In fact, I could not even say "as many again". But this: Me: If I gave you *left clavicle* pigs, how many would you have? Take a guess at the answer before you look. Lote: I would have *left clavicle* pigs and *left clavicle* pigs! > 'Seven' is not a possible component of a syntactic rule. What? Can singular be a component of a syntactic rule? Or plural? If they cannot, then what is allowed to be a component of a syntactic rule? Are we not entering a tautology there? And if they can, so can dual, trial, paucal, and plural: one, two, three, four to around ten, more. > Even if obviatives were proved to have a numerical basis > (and I think there are languages that do use pronouns > meaning things like 'third character to enter narrative') It is the other way around. Number developed later. There are many traces of this still. Take Latin even: "alter" means "second" as well as "other". > this wdn't be part of syntax; it wd be part of semantics. > And semantics of course can cope with numbers, since we > can talk about them. So what? Semantics can cope with obviatives, since we can talk about them. And deictics (here, there, yon: one, two, three, or: zero, one, two away). Come to think of it, semantics can cope with syntax since were are talking about it. So? Nothing follows. > [I am inclined to agree with Chomsky's observation/claim. > If one tries to invent a flexible yet unabiguous syntax > for a conlang, one is naturally drawn to use numbering, > yet the result is impossible to use - it's unprocessable, > & you can only parse by using pen & paper, just as with > multiple centre embeddings (e.g. Fish cats dogs enjoy > chasing like to eat live in water).] Ah!!!! Internal contradiction there! That kind of embedding which never occurs in real language is given as grammatical by Chomsky, whence the theory of competence versus performance. If we accept such sentences as grammatical, i.e. as part of language, we have no basis for refusing that other type, even though the result is impossible to use. That touches the very bone of contention, the reason for my Chomsky-bashing. His theories have no more scientific value than astrology. -- Persons born with Venus in Taurus have blue eyes. -- I am born with Venus in Taurus and I have brown eyes! -- You are possessed with the competence of having blue eyes but your competence is manifested by brown eyes. Or: -- Planets move in circular orbits. -- No, they don't. Look at Pluto! -- Its performance isn't up to its competence. But if we observe Venus.... Charlatanry. (By the way, I have neither Venus in Taurus, nor blue nor brown eyes. So astrology is proved correct. QED) ______________________________________________________________________ >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Fri Jun 3 11:50:01 1994 Date: Fri, 3 Jun 1994 10:50:01 +0100 Message-Id: <5432.199406030950@discovery.brad.ac.uk> From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: embedding And remarks: ++++> If one tries to invent a flexible yet unabiguous syntax for a conlang, one is naturally drawn to use numbering, yet the result is impossible to use - it's unprocessable, & you can only parse by using pen & paper, just as with multiple centre embeddings (e.g. Fish cats dogs enjoy chasing like to eat live in water). >++++ Are people familiar with Ian Watson's thought-provoking novel 'The Embedding'? It's all about the astonishing mental effects of a language in which such constructions could be commonplace - or rather, the psyche of people who could actually use such a language. It's a long time since I read it, so it's rather confused in my mind, but I think there's two parallel story-lines, one in some experimental facility where they're bringing children up with some sort of wierd mentality (by the use of drugs?) and the other in the Amazonian forest, where the locals use drugs and have a supposedly very embedded language anyway. Colin ______________________________________________________________________ >From viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi Fri Jun 3 23:45:49 1994 From: viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi (Ville Heikkila) Message-Id: <9406031745.AA28841@freeport.uwasa.fi> Subject: Fictional languages To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Fri, 3 Jun 1994 20:45:49 +0300 (EET DST) Quoting Colin Fine.. > Having said that, I think you're being naive on the 'factors': Yes, yes, I was desperately seeking a way to put my thoughts into text. So it's very probable that the readers didn't fully understand this... ;) > ++++> > Weirdness. Especially on alien languages. I personally don't consider a > fictional language very unique if it directly mimics some already > existing language. A fictional language, as an opposite of an auxilary > language, must have some exotic new ideas, though if its vocabulary was > borrowed or so. (What this is all about, is art, isn't it?) > >++++ > I agree, but there are two problems. One is that real earth languages > are so amazingly varied that you'll have to be really way-out to > out-weird some of them. On the other hand if you went even half-way > to some of the real languages, you'd leave most of your readership behind. Yes, real languages are amazingly varied. A constructor of a fictional language can never understand every weird element of every strange real language - so I think an invented language always has some 'interference' or 'cliches' from the languages that are already known to its constructor. The "weirdness factor" may indicate the amount of "artist's imagination" used in the language invention process, the ability to avoid that 'interference' or those 'cliches'. > ++++> > Simpliness: The language must not be so exotic and weird that it's > impossible to master. Strange, illogical and strict rules force the user > of a language to have the notes ahead all the time, which really doesn't > help in the development of the language. If the language is "too" simple > or logical, it may reduce the important factors of weirdness and life. > >++++ > I don't entirely understand what you mean here: are you talking about > a serious learner, or a reader of fiction in which the language occurs? I wrote from language creator's point of view. I've never actually got so far in my "fiction" that it would be even close to get published or something. The one who invents a language is the first one who knows it, and if the inventor doesn't have his/her language in the intuition, he/she actually can't develop it further. To further readers/users learning of the language will be easier because it is already 'tested', and there is written material available for it. > One may create a strict rule that says that the plural of a noun, in > terms of simpliness, is always created using -go suffix. So the plurals > of the words ending in -k would be so hard to pronounce that a living > language could use this kind of plural only if it were a disappearing or > rarely used form. One must not be too sure if the rules of his/her > language work or not, and he/she always has to prepare to modify or > eliminate them with a rude hand. > >++++ > I think I agree with your general point, but you have chosen an > unfortunate example. From the viewpoint of a Finn, with next to no > consonant clusters in your language, no doubt plurals is '-kgo' seems > strange and wierd. But if you look at (say) many Amerind languages > you'll find plenty of consonant clusters that seem quite unachievable > even to us poor English speakers. I agree, but an universal rule really is that the pronounciation of any language gets easier (in the terms of getting understood and not confused). If the '-kgo' plural is used frequently enough and there's no risk of confusion, the other of the two clusiles will disappear or the pronounciation get easier some other way. (If that kind of cluster is against the phonetic rules of a language, the process will be extremly rapid... ;) > You can argue forever about what constitutes euphony, but the > fact is that one language's normal sound patterns may be ugly or > even unthinkable in another language. A universal fact is that, for example, pronouncing "kg" requires more work from the phonetic organs than pronouncing "nt". But the difficulty in pronouncing them depends on how the speaker has got used to it. Viznut.H. _ -- Ville Heikkila Miskala, Vaajasalmi 77700 Rautalampi Finland ______________________________________________________________________ >From viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi Fri Jun 3 23:47:49 1994 From: viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi (Ville Heikkila) Message-Id: <9406031747.AA28927@freeport.uwasa.fi> Subject: Fictional lgs & lg universals To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Fri, 3 Jun 1994 20:47:49 +0300 (EET DST) Quoting ucleaar : > whole world, and randomly distributed within it. When Conlang > was first set up I was agog with excitement. BTW: Is there any archive of conlang postings? It would be very interesting to see such. > > I've been discussing the topic with a couple of persons via email. We've > > swapped text files about grammars etc. > How about posting these to the list? If the net just is not going to jam of huge text files... ;) > Chomsky asserts that all languages are basically the same, with the > differences between them being rather trivial. You probably find this > rather provocative, but - as inventors of languages in particular should > be aware - it is interesting to consider the ways languages could work > but don't. I've read of "language universals" in some science magazine - is this about the same thing? Who knows, how will an invented language 'survive' if some of the universals is violated? Some of those universals really seem very strange, at first seeming to 'limit' the possible 'weirdness' of a language: For example, every language, according to the universals, has a word for "me". This is, after all, very reasonable. People _could_ refer to themselves using their name instead of a first-person pronoun, but there are some problems. Let's think about a discussion in such language: Bub: Bub is going to leave. Qob: Who is Bub? Bub: .... The only way Bub would be able to answer now, is sign language, because there is no word for "me". To avoid confusion, the name, for example, could be pronounced differently when it is referring to the speaker: Bub: Bub` is going to leave. But there we are again: we have a way to distinguish "me" from "he" or "she". This seems to be caused by universal human psychology: we've got a need for self-identity and individuality, so this feature appears in all languages. Viznut.H. _ -- Ville Heikkila Miskala, Vaajasalmi 77700 Rautalampi Finland ______________________________________________________________________ >From hmiller@origin.ea.com Sat Jun 4 00:17:22 1994 To: conlang@diku.dk From: hmiller@origin.ea.com (Herman Miller) Subject: Re: fictional languages Date: Sat, 4 Jun 1994 00:17:22 GMT Message-Id: In article irina@rempt.hacktic.nl (Irina Rempt) writes: >In your article on the conlang mailing list (how exactly does one reply >to something on a mailing list that's been forwarded into a local >newsgroup? I had to address and paste it by hand) you wrote: I presume from this comment that you intended to forward this to the conlang mailing group. I hope you don't mind... To answer your question, I don't know how to do this. I get this mailing list by subscription. If anyone out there has this list on a newsgroup and knows how to reply to it, please tell us how. >> If anyone is interested, I have more details and grammatical notes available, >> mostly for Olaetyan (o-LYE-tyahn) and Cispa (CHIS-pa) Zaik. Is there an >> anonymous FTP site for uploading this sort of thing? >[and then something that I'd love to see fully glossed] A Nenskian Creation Myth A lina'n, ypha' oxe'nik; asela'n s-ekplentu nensko. Ot y xyya-ne' xakhe'nik: kh-u y ohas', kh-u y tensko. Xes xa proxyrg nextaredhli xyika ninska le' unilatya Xy ne'z xyli e nararedhli sepe'an ilats y il' redhlatya. (pasted from my outgoing mail.) a at (in this context, "in") lina'n beginning (< lin "first" + a'n "time") ypha' there was (3s. past tense of yphaw) oxe'nik nothing (< ox "no" + e'nik, from same root as ynik "thing") asela'n then (a "at" sel "that" a'n "time") s-ekplentu self-described (3s. past tense of ekplenty "to describe") nensko Nensko, a mythical being (sim. to "Great Spirit") ot gender-neutral animate 3rd person singular nominative pronoun y is (3s. present of y "to be") xyya living things (plural of xyyal "living thing") ne' made (past participle of ny "to make") xakhe'nik something kh-u neither y of ohas' (a mythical substance) kh-u nor y of tensko (another mythical substance) xes but xa an proxyrg immense (pro "great" + xyrg "large") nextaredhli being of energy xyika living (lit. "able to live", < xyy "to live" + ika "able") ninska energy field le' being (pres. part. of y "to be") unilatya everywhere xy life ne'z power xyli animal e and nararedhli plant (active) sepe'an of space (gen. of sepe'a "space") ilats music y is il' the redhlatya theme (archaic for redhlat "theme", to rhyme with unilatya) More notes about this piece in an upcoming post that I originally sent to Viznut. >Yes, we're interested! If you can't post or upload it, will you please >send it to us? Either by e-mail, no matter if it's long, or by snail mail >to > Boudewijn & Irina Rempt > Kloosterstraat 34 1.2 > 2021 VN HAARLEM > Netherlands I'll start by posting a few of the things I originally sent to Viznut. If the conlang group as a whole doesn't want to see that much detail, I can send files directly to individuals who are interested. >> Edhlyt Narlend Rillintel (Herman Miller) The "Edhlyt Narlend" part, as many names, no longer has a meaning in the source language. I have adopted his name since he is one of my fictional characters who creates languages himself. "Rillintel" is the name of one of his own invented languages: it means "love of dragons." >(please gloss your name as well) >-- >---- >-------- >---------------- ================================= Irina Rempt-Drijfhout hmm ______________________________________________________________________ >From hmiller@origin.ea.com Sat Jun 4 02:34:15 1994 To: conlang@diku.dk From: hmiller@origin.ea.com (Herman Miller) Subject: Revised Kolagian Orthography (my phonetic alphabet) Date: Fri, 3 Jun 1994 19:34:23 UNDEFINED Message-Id: I have recently standardized the spelling of my invented languages. Before this it was a real mess, with a different spelling for each language. If anyone cares about the correct pronunciation of the languages of Kolagia (my fictional world), keep this list around as a reference. -hmm The Revised Kolagian Orthography There have been many attempts to standardize spelling for Kolagian languages, but Kolagian Orthography is still in a state of change. The main elements, though, have probably reached a certain stability. Revised Kolagian Orthography (RKO), as shown here, is a Kolagian Orthography representation of the basic symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA): CONSONANTS | bi- | labio-| dental,| retro-| palato-| | labial| dental|alveolar| flex |alveolar|palatal --------------+-------+-------+--------+-------+--------+------- Nasal | m | mh | n | n3 | | nh | | | | | | Plosive | p b | | t d | t3 d3 | | ck cg | | | | | | (Median) | | | | | | Fricative | ph bh | f v | th dh | s3 z3 | sh zh | ch jh | | | s z | | | (Median) | | | | | | Approximant | | vh | r | r3 | | y | | | | | | Lateral | | | | | | Fricative | | | thl dhl| | | | | | | | | Lateral | | | l | l3 | | lh (Approximant) | | | | | | | | | | | | Trill | | | rr | | | | | | | | | Tap or Flap | | | r' | r'3 | | | | | | | | Ejective | p' | | t' | | | | | | | | | Implosive | b' | | d' | | | | | | | | | (Median) Click| cp | | cT ct | | | | | | | | | Lateral Click | | | ctl| | | | | |labial-|labial-|pharyn-| | velar | uvular|palatal| velar | geal |glottal --------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------- Nasal | ng | N | | | | | | | | | | Plosive | k g | q G | | kp gb | | ? | | | | | | (Median) | | | | | | Fricative | kh gh | qh rh | | hw | x 9 | 'h `h | | | | | | (Median) | | | | | | Approximant | wr | | y" | w | | | | | | | | Lateral | | | | | | Fricative | | | | | | | | | | | | Lateral | | | | | | (Approximant) | | | | | | | | | | | | Trill | RR | | | | | | | | | | | Tap or Flap | R | | | | | | | | | | | Ejective | k' | | | | | | | | | | | Implosive | g' | | | | | | | | | | | (Median) Click| | | | | | | | | | | | Lateral Click | | | | | | VOWELS Front Back Front Back +-------------------------+ +-------------------------+ | i' i` u` | Close | u" y' u' | | i^ | | i" u^ | | e' o` | Half-close | o" o' | | e` | | o~ | | e^ e" a^ | Half-open | oe o^ | | ae a` | | | | a" a' | Open | a~ a* | +-------------------------+ +-------------------------+ Unrounded Rounded Others: c voiceless alveopalatal affricate [tsh] j voiced alveopalatal affricate [dzh] bb voiced bilabial trill pp voiceless bilabial trill dt sound intermediate between [d] and [t] rj fricative trill rl combination of [r] and [l] xh combination of [sh] and [kh] wl voiced velar lateral (not in IPA, but found in Deve'rrin) T, D, N dental t, d, n .. separates consonants [n.g]. c- clicks [cp], [cT], [ct], [ctl], [ct3], etc. cn- nasalized clicks h- voiceless [hn], [hm], etc. -'h aspirated [t'h], [k'h], etc. -0 labialized [t0], [d0], [n0], etc. -1 palatalized [t1], [d1], [n1], etc. -2 velarized or pharyngealized [t2], [d2], [n2], etc. -3 retroflex [t3], [d3], [n3], etc.; r-colored vowels [a3], [e"3], etc. -n~ nasalized [an~], [en~], [on~], etc. -j alveopalatal [tj], [dj], [nj], [sj], [zj], etc. ' primary stress " secondary stress : long [a:], [i:], etc. [tone symbols omitted] This new definition is a massive simplification of the chaotic mess of previous Kolagian Orthography standards, which themselves were much simpler than the dozen or so different standards for different languages that had existed previously. Straight RKO, in general, is preferable to a number of ad hoc variations for each language. This does not change the actual native spelling of the Kolagian languages, of course, only their English transcription. Still, a number of unusual sounds (the laminals of Olaetyan, for instance) do not fit well within this system, and many languages will need a modified form of RKO for various reasons. 1) "R" sounds. RKO distinguishes seven different kinds of "r" (more if voiceless variants are counted). Most languages have one, two, or rarely three "r" sounds, but the more common variety of "r" may be represented awkwardly in RKO. Spanish, for example, has [r'] and [rr]. For the purposes of a Modified Kolagian Orthography (MKO), the most common variety of "r" may be simply written [r]. 2) Vowels. If a language has only one form of a vowel, the unaccented form of the letter may be used. Note that all RKO vowel symbols are either accented letters or ligatures. If a language has two or more vowels that use the same basic vowel letter, then at most one of them can be represented by the unaccented form of that letter. 3) Suprasegmentals. Tones and stress marks are very poorly represented in RKO. An MKO may have to supply its own special symbols for these phonemes. 4) Unique sounds or phonemes not found in RKO. Some of these, such as "dt" for the ambiguous sound in American English _metal_ or _meddle_, may be represented in future versions of the RKO standard. 5) Non-human sounds. These may be represented by arbitrary symbols, such as the Neyasai "whistles" [omitted]. Older versions of KO: [omitted] Examples: m English "m" in "mat" mh * n English "n" in "need" n3 Sanskrit "n" in "karnah" nh Spanish "n~" in "man~ana" ng English "ng" in "sing" N * p English "p" in "speak" b English "b" in "boy" t English "t" in "stop" d English "d" in "do" t3 Sanskrit "t" in "ghatah" d3 Sanskrit "d" in "pandita" ck Olaetyan "ck" in "kli'ck" cg * k English "k" in "skip" g English "g" in "go" q Arabic "q" in "qalb" G * kp * gb * ? English "-" in "uh-oh!" ph Olaetyan "ph" in "phirime" bh Spanish "v" in "uva" f English "f" in "fox" v English "v" in "vine" th English "th" in "thick" dh English "th" in "that" s3 Sanskrit "s" in "krsna" z3 * sh English "sh" in "shout" zh English "s" in "measure" ch German "ch" in "ich" jh * kh German "ch" in "Bach" gh Spanish "g" in "lago" qh * rh * hw * x Arabic "h" in "tuffaah" 9 Arabic "`" in "arba`a" 'h English "h" in "help" `h * s English "s" in "see" z English "z" in "zoo" vh * r (American) English "r" in "row" r3 * y English "y" in "year" wr * y" French "hu" in "huit" w English "w" in "word" thl Welsh "ll" in "llan" dhl Zulu "dl" in "indlela" l English "l" in "leaf" l3 * lh Portuguese "lh" in "olho" rr Spanish "rr" in "perro" RR * r' Spanish "r" in "pero" r'3 * R * p' * t' Navajo "t'" in "t'iis" k' Navajo "k'" in "k'ad" b' * d' * g' * cp * cT Zulu "c" in "ngiyacela" ct Zulu "q" in "uqonde" ctl Zulu "x" in "uxolo" ______________________________________________________________________ >From hmiller@origin.ea.com Sat Jun 4 00:37:27 1994 To: conlang@diku.dk From: hmiller@origin.ea.com (Herman Miller) Subject: Some notes on Olaetyan grammar Date: Sat, 4 Jun 1994 00:37:27 GMT Message-Id: This is a copy of the Olaetyan grammar notes I originally sent to Viznut before I subscribed to conlang. -hmm The Olaetyan Language [Olaetyan spelling omitted.] Notes: Olaetyan is not yet completely updated to the Revised Kolagian Orthography (RKO). The letter "y" (or "y'") is used as a vowel, sounding like [i']. The letter "i" can represent either [i^] or [i']. Olaetyan also has two "laminal" sounds which aren't represented in the RKO. These are pronounced similar to [s] and [z], except that the tip of the tongue touches the lower teeth, and the sound is articulated with the blade of the tongue. In Olaetyan, these sounds are spelled "c," and "x". In addition, double consonants in Olaetyan are pronounced as a single sound. MORPHOLOGY Olaetyan words are made by adding prefixes and suffixes to root words. The assimilation that goes on is often quite complex. In addition, many words have shortened forms which may be used only in certain forms of the word. An example of assimilation occurs in the singular/dual possessive noun suffix -dra, as shown by the following examples: aer aerdra (dual: aerambra) (normal pattern) kayat kayatra (-ra after b, bh, v, dh, t, d, ck, g, gh) e'niram e'nirambra (-bra after m) oizak oizaktra (-tra after p, ph, f, th, s, thl, c,, sh, k, kh, q, h) Note the different phenomena which interact to create this situation: 1) A voiceless consonant cannot be followed by a voiced stop. For this reason, d is realized as /t/ after most voiceless consonants. 2) Labial consonants cannot be followed by non-labial stops. This is why d -> b after m. 3) Double consonants are not allowed. For this reason, td -> t (not tt), bd -> b (not bb), and dd -> d. 4) Certain combinations of two or three consonants are not allowed. In this case, the disallowed combinations are cktr, bhbr, vbr, dhdr, gdr, and ghdr. The middle consonant is not pronounced. More rules for assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis, and other phenomena will be given as needed. Olaetyan morphology is still not very well understood, and many of the existing examples are unreliable. Particularly complex is the system of abbreviation which is such an important part of the Olaetyan language. This grammar, and future editions of the Olaetyan Dictionary, will include notes on all standard abbreviations, particularly the dropping of -at and -an in plural nouns, and -se'l in singular nouns. All nouns which drop letters to form the plural will have their plurals noted. NOUNS Nouns are generally recognized as having eight cases: nominative/accusative, possessive, material, genitive, dative, instrumental, comitative, and ergative. Of these, the first three are the only ones in common use for all nouns. Prepositions have made most of the other cases unnecessary, although the similar form of these prepositions makes it necessary to use the cases once in a while to resolve ambiguities. Specific cases of some nouns have become established as adjectives or adverbs, and given their own place in the dictionary. Besides case, nouns are also inflected for number: singular, dual, and plural. Dual is normally reserved for those things that come in pairs. It is now considered somewhat archaic. Other forms of nouns include diminutive and augmentative. Diminutives are very idiosyncratic, but augmentatives are easily formed by adding prefixes and suffixes. Nominative Case: The most widely used case, nominative/accusative is used as the subject or object of a verb, and as the object of a preposition. (In the archaic ergative-absolutive system of Ancient Olaetyan, this was the absolutive case.) It is usually the same as the root of the word, but sometimes this is shortened even further. For example, many nouns ending in -se'l drop this ending in the entire singular declension (and change it to -se' in the dual and plural). Possessive: This case indicates ownership or membership. For example, "a person's hand" would be put in the possessive because the person owns the hand, but "a person's family" would be possessive because the person is a member of the family. Other kinds of relationships which would be possessive in English (brothers, sisters, friends, neighbors, enemies, etc.) are genitive in Olaetyan. The singular ending is -dra, which assimilates as explained above. The same ending is used in the dual, after the dual ending. A potential problem, though unlikely to occur, happens when the dual ending is -sp (see below). The unwieldy -sptra ending is reduced to -spra. The plural ending, added to the plural form of the noun, is -(d)rit. The d in parentheses is only added when the plural ends in -n, to avoid the undesirable "nr" combination. Material: This case tells what material something is made of. It is almost always used in the singular, even with nouns such as "tonan" which are normally found only in the plural. The ending is -al. Many nouns use a shortened form with the material and genitive endings. Unaccented final vowels are usually dropped. The endings -al, -an, and -at (also -ad?) are also frequently dropped. Such words will be noted in future editions of the dictionary. Genitive: The genitive case covers most other uses of the English "of" that are not covered by the possessive and material cases. The preposition y is equivalent to this case. The ending is -an, which is identical to the plural -(a)n ending for many nouns. The difference is that shortened forms of nouns are often used with this case. Dative: This case has practically disappeared from the language. The preposition a is equivalent to this case. The ending is -(d)rel. Instrumental: Although rarely used, this case is the source of some common adjectives. The preposition en is equivalent to this case. The ending is -ailh. Similar to the genitive and material cases, this case may also use shortened forms of nouns. Comitative Similar to Italian "con" in "con brio", this case is a fertile source of new adjectives. The preposition ac is equivalent to this case. Note that if the literal meaning "with fire" is intended, the instrumental case would be more appropriate. The literal meaning of ac is "together with" or "associated with". Compare to en, which means "using". The ending is -elh. Dual: Dual nouns are generally the same as plural, with "m" added to the plural or taking the place of the plural -n ending. Exceptions will be noted below. Plural: The standard plural ending is -(a)n. The (a) is added after consonants. Many nouns, however, have a short plural form. If a noun of more than one syllable ends in a single consonant, it is common to drop that consonant to form the plural. For historical reasons, th and dh are considered couble consonants (they were tf and dv in earlier languages). Examples: kayat -> kaya, nayakh -> naya, wilagh -> wila. Note the possibility for confusion. Some plurals are nonstandard. All nouns ending in -ck change -ck to -s in the plural (and -sp in the dual). Nouns ending in -ks change to -c,a in the plural. (The dual, though also nonstandard, follows regularly from the plural in this case: -c,am.) Examples: mycina^ck -> mycina^s, mo~rks -> mo~rc,a. (The more regular mo~rksan is becoming more common.) Some nouns do not have plural forms. Most of these are foreign borrowings such as rysh or materials such as ber. A very few words (such as tonan) are used primarily in their plural forms. The plural of xakh is irregular: xann. Accent Marks: This is as good a place as any to mention the complex function of accent marks in the Olaetyan language. When short, unstressed endings are added to words, an accent mark is often added to keep the stress on the right syllable. The effect of stressing that syllable is to alter some vowel sounds. The phonemic change is that normal vowels become long vowels. Short and modified vowels remain unchanged. In the written language, the ze'qox accent ' is added to the "normal" vowels a, e, y, w, and a*, and the "modified" vowel o~ (in which case it merely marks stress). The tev accent ^ is added to other vowels. (Although w' is more accurate for a long /u'/, u^ is used to show that it was originally a normal u. There is no unambiguous way to mark a long /o'/, so o^ is used.) Examples of this phenomenon: kaleth, nom. pl. ka'lethan reuni, gen. pl. re'uninan ydhlary, future ydhla'ryra, ydhla'ryro~, etc. siros, gen. si^rosan Ergative Case: Almost too rare to consider, this ancient case is only used in poetry, where the word order has been changed. Its ending is -redhli. See "poetry" section below. PRONOUNS Pronouns only have three cases: nominative, accusative/dative, and possessive/genitive. The accusative/dative case also has reflexive forms. Nominative pronouns are hardly ever used except for emphasis. ACC/ POSS/ NOM. DAT REFL. GEN singular: 1st ar ka ko kasO 2nd (f) klo`y fo` fa fo`sO 2nd (p) xei me mo mesO 3rd Ot tO sO tOsO plural: 1st an gu go / ga gusO 2nd (f) klo`n so` sa / su so`sO 2nd (p) xe'n re ro / ra resO 3rd tOn vo c,o / va vOsO (ga/su/ra/va = "each other".) The symbol O is a gender-specific vowel. A is masculine, e feminine, o animate, and i inanimate. U is indefinite, as in ut = "what". The final O of the possessive/genitive pronouns indicates the gender of the thing possessed. All other cases of O here indicate the gender of the entity which the pronoun stands for. Gender in Olaetyan is natural. Parts of an animate being (hands, eyes, hair, etc.) are considered animate, and of the same gender as their owner. (A man's hand is masculine, a woman's hand is feminine.) The "animate" category is used by default. VERBS Conjugation of y (to be): uzlykh ko~rkat xarren thlyngga (imperfective) (perfective) (subjunctive) (imperative) present past present past present past positive negative ae em oi a aye ana o khy yo o"n er a* o"k o"in o"nk i khy ya zi ongg ya' ez zii o"z zi^ khy zi^a y yr ui u u" u` u" khy yu"a aen am oin as ayen ans ayen khy ayena o" ar a*n o"ks o"i o"nks it khy ita' zin engg ya'n es ziin o"s zi^n khy zina yn ur uin us u"n u`s u"n khy yu"na Future forms are made by inserting -yr- before the ending: yrae, yrem, yroi, yra, yraye, yrana, yro, khy yryo, etc. This is realized as -yz- before -z: yzzi, yzzin, etc. Active participles: le' (present), ic,o` (future) Passive participles: e' (past), ic,e' (future) Other verb conjugations: The forms of -y verbs (those ending in an unaccented -y ending) follow the conjugation of "to be" by simply replacing the -y ending with the appropriate form of y. The forms of -y' verbs (with an accented -y' ending) alter some of these endings by adding a ze'qox ['] or tev [^] accent depending on the vowel. (The letters i, o, u, and a* take a tev accent; all others take a ze'qox.) Here is the conjugation of the verb seny' "to give" as an example: uzlykh uzlykh ko~rkat ko~rkat present past present past sena'e sene'm seno'i sena' seno"n sene'r sena* seno"k senzi^ seno'ngg senya' sene'z seny' seny'r senu'i senu' sena'en sena'm seno'in sena's seno" sena'r sena*n seno"ks senzi^n sene'ngg senya'n sene's seny'n senu'r senu'in senu's xarren xarren thlyngga thlyngga present past positive negative senaye senana seno khy senyo seno"in seno"nk seni khy senya senzi^y seno"z senzi^ khy senzi^a senu" senu` senu" khy senyu"a senayen sena'ns senayen khy senayena seno"i seno"nks senit khy senita' senzi^yn seno"s senzi^n khy senzina senu"n senu`s senu"n khy senyu"na Note that the future endings are unaffected, but that the infix -y'r- is used instead of -yr-: uzlykh uzlykh ko~rkat ko~rkat future conditional future conditional seny'rae seny'rem seny'roi seny'ra seny'ro"n seny'rer seny'ra* seny'ro"k seny'zzi seny'rongg seny'rya' seny'rez seny'ry seny'ryr seny'rui seny'ru seny'raen seny'ram seny'roin seny'ras seny'ro" seny'rar seny'ra*n seny'ro"ks seny'zzin seny'rengg seny'rya'n seny'res seny'ryn seny'rur seny'ruin seny'rus xarren xarren future conditional seny'raye seny'rana seny'ro"in seny'ro"nk seny'zzii seny'ro"z seny'ru" seny'ru` seny'rayen seny'rans seny'ro"i seny'ro"nks seny'zziin seny'ro"s seny'ru"n seny'ru`s Some verb stems undergo phonological changes before certain endings. Many verbs with a stem ending in a sibilant, for example, add the unaccented short vowel e` before the ending -zi (to avoid a cluster that is impossible to pronounce). As an example, here is the conjugation of c,y "to have", which also illustrates the rule of spelling the sound "c," in Olaetyan [Olaetyan spelling deleted]. uzlykh uzlykh ko~rkat ko~rkat present past present past c,ae c,em c,oi c,a c,o"n c,er c,a* c,o"k c,e`zi c,ongg c,ya' c,ez c,y c,yr c,ui c,u c,aen c,am c,oin c,as c,o" c,ar c,a*n c,o"ks c,e`zin c,engg c,ya'n c,es c,yn c,ur c,uin c,us xarren xarren thlyngga thlyngga present past positive negative c,aye c,ana c,o khy c,yo c,o"in c,o"nk c,i khy c,ya c,e`zii c,o"z c,e`zi^ khy c,e`zi^a c,u" c,u` c,u" khy c,yu"a c,ayen c,ans c,ayen khy c,ayena c,o"i c,o"nks c,it khy c,ita' c,e`ziin c,o"s c,e`zi^n khy c,e`zina c,u"n c,u`s c,u"n khy c,yu"na Triple consonants are not allowed, so the stem kazz- of (kazzy') reduces to kaz- before endings beginning with z: kazzi^ "you say". Verb stems ending in -x optionally assimilate to -z before -z- endings: rexy' "to greet", rexzi^ or rezzi^ "you greet". Other verbs dissimilate an -l or -dhl before the - le' ending of the present active participle, for example: kaly' "to write", kadhle' "writing"; elakhadhly "to help", elakhadh.le' "helping". These historical irregularities were preserved (and spread to new verb forms) because they help to distinguish the active from the passive participle. The verbs ey "to sense" and oy "to see" are slightly irregular: to avoid forms like * eem and * oongg, which are impossible, they change the vowel of the ending to a neutral e`: ee`m "I was sensing", oe`ngg (or oa`ngg) "you were seeing". Verbs with accented -e'y and -o'y endings do not have this problem. Use of the verb tenses: The present imperfective is used to indicate that something is happening at the present time: _kaly' ayeklak sela'n_ "he/she is writing a letter now". It can also indicate something that is done repeatedly or habitually, or something that is planned for the near future: _xalis kaly' ayeklak lina'n ry trytyme_ "he/she always writes a letter once a week", _tae a Nysa atpure'_ "I am going to Neesa tomorrow". The past imperfective is used to describe an action already in progress when something else happened: _La'ni olzy'r sela'n tina' khangg_ "La'ni was reading when I entered the room". It is also commonly used to describe things that were done continuously or repeatedly in the past, even if these actions were completed: _Eskonnayed xalis serata'syr nizak ilats_ "Eskonnayed always composed excellent music". It also tends to be more frequently used than the past perfective forms of the verb "to be", particularly when the latter would be confusing: _em a selityo ati'lh nuka_ "I was at the theater last night" (not "a a selityo") The future imperfective is used for any action that will happen in the future: _tyrae a nreilhs atpure'_ "I will go to school tomorrow". The perfective form is not generally used in the future, even if the action is expected to be completed: _c,e'kwisae a'ndhly olzle' taec,ya prex trytyme_ "I want to finish reading the book next week"; _a'ndhlyra t-olzle' taec,ya prex trytyme_ "I will finish reading that book by next week". The present perfective is rarely used, except in a few traditional phrases where it expresses a meaning similar to the subjunctive (but with a sense of completion): _ypha xann prennaya un xar c,yzzii serikh ftisa' yil m-adsac,uin_ "there are some dragons who would find you if you had the right crystal"; _ko~rka'tyme xann prennaya ano~ xyyru'in a Lyene_ "someday dragons again may live on the Earth". Occasionally it is used to express a completed act in the immediate past: _a'dinast ko a'ndhloi_ "I just finished". The past perfective is used for any completed action in the past, or any past situation that has not continued into the present: _ralez Zrishek talnaru sein_ "a hundred Zrishek fell to the ground"; _x-a'ny lez ypha' a Lyene prennaya_ "at a time in the past there were dragons on the Earth". The subjunctive tenses indicate something that may or may not happen. They are usually used with words such as _xar_ "if", _xinxekh_ "maybe", or _osye`ra_ "possibly". The subjunctive present tense is also used to express a wish: _u" ak me Nensko_ "may Nensko be with you". The subjunctive future tenses are often used to express conditional or counterfactual statements such as _xar yraye me_ "if I were you". Commands are expressed by the imperative, or by a form of the verb _wu_ with a subjunctive form of the command verb. For example, _kali li ayeklak_ and _u kalo"in li ayeklak_ both mean "write the letter". Participles are used as adjectives, or combined with forms of the verb _c,y_ or _y_ to form compound tenses. When a present passive or past active participle is needed, the past passive participle can be used if confusion is not possible: for example, _xalis y seladxa me'_ "it is always done that way". Otherwise, a form equivalent to _le' me'_ "being done" or _c,le' me'_ "having done" is necessary. Note the common phrase _kaz mic,e'_ "your voice-command shall be done", used by computers and robots to acknowledge receipt of a command. A Nenskian Creation Myth A lina'n, ypha' oxe'nik; asela'n s-ekplentu nensko. Ot y xyya-ne' xakhe'nik: kh-u y ohac,, kh-u y tensko. Xes xa proxyrg nextaredhli xyika ninska le' unilatya Xy ne'z xyli e nararedhli sepe'an ilats y il' redhlatya. In the beginning, nothing existed. Then Nensko described itself. It is a thing made by life, not of ordinary matter, but an immense being of energy, a living force that is everywhere. The life-power of animals and plants is the theme of the music of the cosmos. Interpretation: A lina'n, ypha' oxe'nik; "In the beginning [literally, at the first time], nothing existed." The use of ypha' rather than the negative kh-ypha' seems to imply that this "nothing" was a real physical thing that could be said to "exist," not just the absence of matter. This point is somewhat controversial. asela'n s-ekplentu nensko. "Then Nensko described itself." Nensko is the major Olaetyan god, the creative force responsible for the existence of all things. When Nensko "describes" anything, it comes into being. Ot y xyya-ne' xakhe'nik: "It is a thing made by life," Ot is a pronoun of neutral animate gender. The word xakhe'nik means "thing, object," clearly implying that Nensko is a physical thing (xakhe'nik arkeizzal), not just a spiritual thing (xakh surine'al). It is "made by life," which implies that its cause follows itself, since life did not exist at the "first time." kh-u y ohac,, kh-u y tensko. "not of ohac, or tensko," This seems to mean that Nensko is not made of ohac, or tensko, or by extension, of any ordinary matter, but of a different kind of matter. Xes xa proxyrg nextaredhli "but [it is] an immense being of energy," Ye'skone once remarked that the idea of a being that is at the same time matter (xakhe'nik) and energy (nextaredhli) anticipated the equivalence of matter and energy according to the theory of relativity by over three thousand years. xyika ninska le' unilatya "a living force that is everywhere." The position of the adjective xyika before the noun ninska emphasizes the extraordinary nature of a living force (sometimes translated, misleadingly, as "spirit"). The word ninska is more often used for forces like gravity and electromagnetism. Xy ne'z xyli e nararedhli "The life-power of animals and plants," The unusual use of the instrumental case is intended to emphasize that the "life-power" is created by animals and plants, not just an attribute of them. sepe'an ilats y il redhlatya. "is the theme of the music of the cosmos." Note the unusual word order (y il redhlatya y ilats sepe'an is normal; in less archaic language, y redhlat y ilats sepe'an). Like most uses of unusual word order, the idea here is to emphasize a particular word, but in this case the word is redhlatya. ______________________________________________________________________ >From j.guy@trl.oz.au Sat Jun 4 07:06:21 1994 From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9406040506.AA17432@medici.trl.OZ.AU> Subject: Re: Fictional lgs & lg universals To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Sat, 4 Jun 1994 15:06:15 +1000 (EST) > For example, every language, according to the universals, has a word for > "me". A lot of languages have no true personal pronouns. They do not have words for "me" but nouns, or deictics, which are used to express the meaning "me". This is not the same thing. Take modern Japanese for instance. "Me" is "boku" (a Chinese word meaning "servant") or "watakushi" (a Japanese word meaning "selfishmess"). Medieval Japanese had many more, one of them being "omae", literally "honorable in-front". If you spoke to an inferior, the honorable one in front being you, it meant "me". Speaking to a superior, the honorable person was of course the person in front of you, so that in that case "omae" meant "you". The common words for "me" in Cambodian (khn~om) and in Vietnamese (to^'i) both mean "slave". ______________________________________________________________________ >From ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Sat Jun 4 16:12:08 1994 From: ucleaar Message-Id: <52601.9406041412@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Fictional lgs & lg universals Date: Sat, 04 Jun 94 15:12:08 +0100 viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi (Ville Heikkila) wrote: > > Chomsky asserts that all languages are basically the same, with the > > differences between them being rather trivial. You probably find this > > rather provocative, but - as inventors of languages in particular should > > be aware - it is interesting to consider the ways languages could work > > but don't. > I've read of "language universals" in some science magazine - is this > about the same thing? Partly. One might distinguish 'formal' universals from 'functional' universals. 'Functional' universals are universal because all lgs get put to similar uses; they do the same job. I guess the universality of 'me' is such a universal - a lg can't efficiently get by without such a word. But formal universals (if they exist), a.k.a. Universal Grammar are due to the nature of the innate language faculty. It's as if human beings are linguistically like PCs, able to run a great variety of DOS-based applications, but not Unix-based ones. > Who knows, how will an invented language 'survive' if some of the > universals is violated? The prediction wd be that you couldn't use a language that violates Universal Grammar - the mind/brain just couldn't cope. It is a question of particular interest to conlangers, I suppose. Is Lojban compatible with UG? I'd love to know. Lojban is especially interesting because it is not modelled on natural languages. Noone has learnt it as a native tongue, but Lojbab's kids are learning it as a second language, and Lojbab is keeping us posted about how things turn out. It's rather exciting to see whether they're going to creolize it. ---- And ______________________________________________________________________ >From ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Sat Jun 4 16:35:24 1994 From: ucleaar Message-Id: <27015.9406041435@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Jacques's obviatives Date: Sat, 04 Jun 94 15:35:24 +0100 From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) > > The point is that syntax can't count, even though people can. > Syntax can't count? What does that mean? People can? Not unless > they have been taught. Counting is not only enumerating, but > computing. Our general cognitive faculties can cope with counting. But we couldn't have a syntactic rule "insert a particle after the seventh word of the clause". It's easy to invent a lg that works like that, but it is not natural, & one would not be able to speak it as a natural language, & no child wd acquire the rule. > > 'Seven' is not a possible component of a syntactic rule. > What? Can singular be a component of a syntactic rule? Or > plural? If they cannot, then what is allowed to be a component > of a syntactic rule? Are we not entering a tautology there? > And if they can, so can dual, trial, paucal, and plural: > one, two, three, four to around ten, more. To the extent that these participate in syntactic rules, they are mere morphosyntactic features. A word has the feature 'trial' and certain rules could pertain to such features. But the connection to three-ness is irrelevant to syntax; the link between [trial] and 'three' is at the interface between syntax and semantics (or in Chomskyan terms, at the conceptual-intentional interface with LogicAL Form). As far as syntax is concerned the [trial] feature cd be semantically vacuous, or cd be linked to the concept 'blue', or whatever. > > [I am inclined to agree with Chomsky's observation/claim. > > If one tries to invent a flexible yet unabiguous syntax > > for a conlang, one is naturally drawn to use numbering, > > yet the result is impossible to use - it's unprocessable, > > & you can only parse by using pen & paper, just as with > > multiple centre embeddings (e.g. Fish cats dogs enjoy > > chasing like to eat live in water).] > > Ah!!!! Internal contradiction there! That kind of embedding > which never occurs in real language is given as grammatical > by Chomsky, whence the theory of competence versus performance. > If we accept such sentences as grammatical, i.e. as part of > language, we have no basis for refusing that other type, even > though the result is impossible to use. That touches the very > bone of contention, the reason for my Chomsky-bashing. We say that the multiple embeddings are generated by the grammar because the grammar generates relative clauses and because rules are typically recursive. The theory of generative grammar doesn't need to rule out multiple embeddings, because a theory of processing can (one trusts) do it. You are probably right that if somehow the grammar generated sentences such that particles follow the seventh word of the clause we wdn't be able to process or compute this, but in fact there is no way to generate such sentences in the first place, given the machinery assumed by theories of generative grammar. ---- And ______________________________________________________________________ >From KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE Sun Jun 5 17:41:32 1994 Date: Sun, 05 Jun 1994 16:41:32 +0100 From: KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE Subject: Re: Fictional lgs & lg universals To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01HD6TVAR0TE936VCB@MZDMZA.ZDV.UNI-MAINZ.DE> Maybe there was some time, when language universals where regarded as some kinds of constraints our brain puts on language. However, most, if not all, stated universals I have heard of are not of that kind. They are described better as ,,sinks'' of language evolution: I.e. you are able to construct a language violating the given universal and to learn it, however, in course of language evolution it would move to the universal; and there is no evolutionary way away from the state where the universal holds. Some authors have argued, that language evolution tended towards an isolating language, and isolating languages therefore represent the highest state of language evolution. However, this argument must be wrong, because then all languages of the world _must_ be isolating and isolationism would be an universal. Incidentally, these authors were speaking an isolating language (english). It might be well, that lojban (and even loglan) violate some language universals, but are still learnable, even as a first language. Try and imagine a natural evolution of all the features of lojban! Yours, J"org Knappen. ______________________________________________________________________ >From BobMichael@aol.com Sun Jun 5 16:27:28 1994 From: BobMichael@aol.com Sender: "BobMichael" Message-Id: <9406052027.tn860124@aol.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Sun, 05 Jun 94 20:27:28 EDT Subject: Re: Fictional lgs & lg universals J"org Knappen says: <From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Mon Jun 6 12:14:35 1994 Date: Mon, 6 Jun 1994 11:14:35 +0100 Message-Id: <23115.199406061014@discovery.brad.ac.uk> From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Fictional languages: phonetics, 'me', Babel-17 Viznut continues our exchange on phonetic complexity: ++> I agree, but an universal rule really is that the pronounciation of any language gets easier (in the terms of getting understood and not confused). If the '-kgo' plural is used frequently enough and there's no risk of confusion, the other of the two clusiles will disappear or the pronounciation get easier some other way. (If that kind of cluster is against the phonetic rules of a language, the process will be extremly rapid... ;) >++ In the sense that processes of phonetic change such as assimilation, dissimilation, syncope, epenthesis, metathesis, raising, lowering, palatalisation, vowel-fracture etc. demonstrably occur in languages over the course of time one has to assume that in a sense 'the pronunciation ... gets easier; and furthermore some of these processes seem to have occurred more frequently than others, and so in some universal sense these correspond to 'easier'. However, we fall into a trap if we assume that we know what constitutes 'easy' universally. To borrow a point somebody just made about language typology, if some particular kind of configuration were universally 'more difficult', then you wouldn't find it. Unfortunately for this argument, if you go looking round the languages of the world you find the most amazing (to Europeans) collections of phonetics. I happen to find the sequence 'aspirated stop - unaspirated stop' extremely difficult to produce (eg Sanskrit 'dekhta') and might naively assume that such a collocation would not long survive. Unfortunately, it did survive (and lest you think that Sanskrit was a special case, being a literary conlang, such sequences occur in modern Georgian, where there is also a third type of stop: glottalised). There must be limits to the sound-sequences that humans can utter, but it is risky to assert what they are on the basis of a small sample. Viznut's argument contains a non-sequitur: he explains 'easier' as 'in the terms of getting understood and not confused', but then argues the specific case in terms of ease of production. These are two very different areas. He continues: ++> A universal fact is that, for example, pronouncing "kg" requires more work from the phonetic organs than pronouncing "nt". But the difficulty in pronouncing them depends on how the speaker has got used to it. >+++ I don't accept this as fact. /kg/ requires a (probably extended) stop, with the vocal cords activated part way through - for everything above the larynx, there is no more work than /k/ (or at least than /kk/). /nt/ requires a movement of the velum to open and then close the nasal passage, synchronised with the cessation of voice for the unvoiced plosive. Here we see subjective judgments elevated to 'universal fact'. /kg/ is not common in English, but it occurs - consider 'oak-gall', 'black gum'. It does not show any tendency to change into anything else (it *might* if the sequence were more common, but I don't think you can assume that it necessarily would.) (I think 'blackguard' /blagard/ is a folk-etymology, not a case in point). On universals, Viznut says: ++++> For example, every language, according to the universals, has a word for "me". This is, after all, very reasonable. People _could_ refer to themselves using their name instead of a first-person pronoun, but there are some problems. Let's think about a discussion in such language: Bub: Bub is going to leave. Qob: Who is Bub? Bub: .... The only way Bub would be able to answer now, is sign language, because there is no word for "me". To avoid confusion, the name, for example, could be pronounced differently when it is referring to the speaker: Bub: Bub` is going to leave. But there we are again: we have a way to distinguish "me" from "he" or "she". >++++ Jacques Guy has already criticised this claim as a matter of fact. I want to point out the glottocentrism in the claim. Can you imagine a language lacking the distinction of 'questa' and 'quella' (Italian I think - I'm a bit hazy on Italian), 'sore' and 'are' (Japanese), 'ta' and 'tu' (Lojban)? Let's think about a discussion in such a language: Bub: I want that one. Qob: Which one? Bub: That one Qob: That one? Bub: No, not that one, that one! The only way Bub could make him/herself clear now is 'sign language' ('pointing' to you and me) because the language (which we'll call 'English') has no word for 'are' as opposed to 'sore'! [In fact, this final claim is false, because English does have linguistic ways to convey the difference - such as 'that one over there'. But Viznut's claim is equally false, because a language can have linguistic ways of designating the speaker short of personal pronouns, such as 'the unworthy one who has the honour of addressing the exalted'] Viznut goes on to say: +++> This seems to be caused by universal human psychology: we've got a need for self-identity and individuality, so this feature appears in all languages. >+++ I dispute this as well. The construction of the 'individual' is distinctly in the European rationalist-liberal tradition. I am not saying that other cultures do not have a concept of individuals, but how the concept relates to other concepts such as 'community' is very variable - you are again making universal claims (in this case about psychology) from a narrow basis One final point about a language without 'me' (and getting back to fictional languages): are people familiar with Delany's "Babel-17" a novel about a language which lacked any concept of 'I'? Delany is an engaging fraud, who has the knack, like Frank Herbert, of making it look as if he is talking high-grade sense when he's actually bullshitting (there's a pseudo-linguistic tour-de-force in Babel-17 when somebody realises how to escape from a physical restraint just by naming it properly - nominalism with a vengeance!), and the consequences to people who learn to think in Babel-17 are preposterous. But it was an interesting idea. Colin Fine ______________________________________________________________________ >From hmiller@origin.ea.com Mon Jun 6 18:10:37 1994 To: conlang@diku.dk From: hmiller@origin.ea.com (Herman Miller) Subject: Re: Fictional languages: phonetics, 'me', Babel-17 Date: Mon, 6 Jun 1994 18:10:37 GMT Message-Id: In article Colin Fine writes: >There must be limits to the sound-sequences that humans can >utter, but it is risky to assert what they are on the basis of a >small sample. In my invented language Deve'rrin, there are words with consonant clusters that are "difficult" for English-speakers, for example, in the words "mna*renm" and "smnitsy". After a lot of practice I can pronounce these almost as well as a "native" speaker, but I still have problems with "isv". The combination of a voiceless fricative followed by a voiced fricative at the end of the word is not one that I've seen in any other language, either. (Please send counterexamples if you know of any.) In isolation, I pronounce "isv" as "isf", but in the inflected forms "isvitiz" and "isvrei" the "v" gets its correct value. The Nikta language is one that I created to be extremely difficult to pronounce. (It is the language of an alien species.) It has combinations of clicks and glottalized stops that, even after much practice, are very hard to get right. ______________________________________________________________________ >From viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi Tue Jun 7 00:21:45 1994 From: viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi (Ville Heikkila) Message-Id: <9406061821.AA25114@freeport.uwasa.fi> Subject: Something about Jurs language To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Mon, 6 Jun 1994 21:21:45 +0300 (EET DST) I've been inventing own languages for several years, a language named "Jurs" [yoors] being one of them. What is notable in it is that it's the language that has gained most place in my subconsciousness; I actually "know" it, as I know foreign languages. Jurs is an old language and many languages have come and gone after it. But with them I've never reached something I reached with Jurs. I created Jurs for a scifi world of my own (called Zurs [choors]) when I was about twelve years old, and I worked on it actively till I was fourteen or so. The technique which I used was the one I would now call "subconscious creation technique" and as far as I can remember, Jurs was the last language I created using this technique. In the first stages of creation, I just wrote something and gave it meaning. I never actually made up all kinds of mechanical rules for grammar and vocabulary - I just let the language grow in the "natural way". Later, though, I disbanded the "subsconscious creation technique", but I'm trying to return to it in a more 'controlled' way. Perhaps that'll be the secret of inventing languages that really work. The other element is that I need a permanent world for my language... There is also a text file analysis of Jurs language available in English: it contains pronounciation rules, sample texts, some vocabulary, and the syntax and grammar I've analyzed afterwards. If you're interested, please mail me to get it. - VOCABULARY - I had some kind of pattern that I used to make up the words. It indicated the way that the words should sound like: estimudasti, emestimudal, etc. Further, the grammar and the vocabulary stabilized. The new words were not created with the old pattern. I made lots of compound words. The new words were partly borrowed from other languages, such as 'i' and 'u' (from English I and you). I also had Finnish borrowings, e.g. 'ma' and 'gu' from Finnish 'maa' and 'kuu' (Earth and Moon). I think it was some kind of analogy; these words meant good and bad. I tried to hide the most 'transparent' borrowings: 'ma' and 'gu' turned into 'ezma' and 'ezgu'. I also tried to hide 'lus' (from 'plus') by turning it into 'los' in my vocabulary, but I had got too used to the old version... The other part of the words was created onomathopoetically, such as "tuit" (= off, from, out of) that sounds like something is going away. Or "dik" (originally meaning time) that sounds like clock's ticking. There are also some words of which I can't tell the origin, e.g. "gis" (= work, to work), "o'" (= called, named). Tanking hundreds or thousands words into the active vocabulary would have been too hard for me. I had small active vocabulary containing "root words". I mixed them together into compound words, or put suffixes or prefixes into them to change the meaning. Some of these inventions became too "clumsy" for me and I tried to hide their origins. The word for holiday, for example, was put up from "al" and "gis" into "algis", "not-work". I turned it into "algest" or something like that. There was still a word "algis" but it was an adjective that was used when referring to devices that didn't work. Some of the words were in very common use and they gathered lots of meanings. "Kni" for example, had adjective meanings for 'hard' and 'united', noun meanings for 'diamond', 'uniting', and 'joining', verb meanings for 'to join', 'to unite', 'to keep', 'to hold', and prepositional meaning for 'together'. Many of the meanings of the words of this kind were splitted into two separate words. E.g. "gis" had originally verb meanings 'to do', 'to work' or 'to make'. I created a new word, "gits" that took the meaning 'to make' from the original "gis". All of these words were read as Finnish words with a couple of expections. I haven't studied Jurs phonology very much, but it seems that it's a funny combination of "Finnish" and "foreign" elements. The whole language, for example, doesn't use doubled letters. All the sounds are similarly long or short (except 'i' and 'u' in singular), when in Finnish the length of vowels and consonants is very important thing. Most of the words of Jurs end in consonant when in Finnish they tend to end in vowel. In addition of Finnish sounds I used some "strange" sounds that don't appear in normal Finnish words, such as b, g, f or z. But, on the other hand, there were not very complex consonant clusters in Jurs; most of the ones I used in Jurs appear both in Finnish and English. If I had used "pure Finnish" clusters such as 'ht' or 'lp', the language would not have been as 'foreign' as I wanted it to be. - GRAMMAR - Because of the subconscious technique I used in the creation process, the grammar of Jurs appeared during writing texts in it. The grammar was closer to the one of English than to the one of Finnish; creating complex morphology, such as in Finnish, would have required very much work with grammar or so. While creation, I actually "threw words in line" using standard Finnish word order and turning locative cases into preposition+mainword combinations. There was also very much interference from my first foreign language, English. I e.g. borrowed almost every suffix from English: plural was -se or -es and past tense suffix was -set. The genitive was also -se as in plural for some time, but I changed it to -ste to avoid confusion. Later, Jurs grammar become more unique and complex. Jurs had very few irregularities and its basic syntax/grammar was very simple in every aspect: there was no predicate suffix in the verbs, no object/subject suffixes in the nouns, etc. Every word could be used as a noun, a verb, an adjective, even as an preposition - wherever the usage seemed "suitable". There are no actual articles in Jurs language (it's because Finnish lacks them - I still have problems with articles in English!). Perhaps the toughest thing in the whole language was understanding the sentences... ;) Analyzing the structure of the language afterwards, though, has been interesting and I actually have found new grammatical rules all the time during the analysis. Viznut.H. _ -- Ville Heikkila Miskala, Vaajasalmi 77700 Rautalampi Finland ______________________________________________________________________ >From j.guy@trl.oz.au Wed Jun 8 20:42:14 1994 From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9406080042.AA00915@medici.trl.OZ.AU> Subject: Re: Fictional lgs & lg universals (Logical Language Group To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Wed, 8 Jun 1994 10:42:14 +1000 (EST) > A.Kotsikonas; > Isn't it a rather arbitrary assumption that the underlying structure is always > SVO? For every non-SVO language, you would have to assume the existence of a > rule that automatically transforms this into SOV, or VSO, or whatever the > particular language's structure happens to be. How would one test this > hypothesis? I could just as easily argue that the underlying form of English > is VSO, which is then transformed to SVO. Same here. > Unless there is other evidence to the contrary, I prefer assuming that the VSO > languages actually have a VSO underlying structure. No. This amounts to the same mistake: the confusion of signifie' and signifiant, and winds back the state of linguistics a good hundred years, before Saussure. The confusion of signifie' and signifiant is pervasive in generative theory. We had a bit recently on recursiveness in language, and this gave me some food for thought. It is in fact another instance of confusion (I am putting together a very short paper on this which I will send off to... I do not think I should bother with Language, except to collect a rejection slip). It goes about like this: Consider this grammar: program ::= begin end. statement list ::= | statement ::= ; variable ::= a|b|c operator ::= | assignment ::= := operator ::= or|and constant ::= true|false This grammar generates stuff like this: begin a:=true; b:=a; c:=a or b; a:=b and true; (* and so on, ad nauseam *) end. This (primitive, to say the least) computer language is not recursive. But its description is. Recursiveness is a property of the Backus-Naur form, not of what is describable in BNF. Here is the fallacy: because the description uses recursive procedures, what it describes uses recursive procedures. Because "red" is made up of three letters, the colour red which it describes is made up of three letters. Confusion of the signifiant ("red") with the signifie' (the colour red). Deep structure, affix-hopping, in fact the whole of generative theory stems from this confusion. I wrote that this wound the clock back 100 years before Saussure? Wrong. It winds in back 700 years, before Roger Bacon. Now Lojbab writes: >And's comments give one reason why I am skeptical of much modern linguistic >theory. What does it mean to say that every language has a phoneme /a/? >The exact phones that correspond to each phoneme in a language will differ >from language to language. Only in languages that can be historically related >do I see that it is implicitly appropriate to say that particular phonemes >in different languages are 'related', and even then are not 'the same'. >Once you get to this point, then, you realize that phonemes are a mental ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >Construct and the labels for them are arbitrary. What phoneme in Chinese ^^^^^^^^^ >is /a/, and why is it labelled /a/ and not something else? Precisely! Here we have a confusion between a phoneme and its realizations. A phoneme is a *set* of conditionally-defined phones. The confusion here is between sets and their members. If "every language has a phoneme /a/" is to mean anything at all you must give the membership of set A. This assertion then collapses. To keep it true, either you must considerable the membership rules, or you must say "every language has a phoneme, which we call /a/, at least one member of which is the phone [a]". This is false of Hungarian, wich has only [a:] (long [a]). Back to the drawing board then: "every language has a phoneme, which we call /a/, at least one member of which is the phone [a], or [a:], or...". This leads nowhere and is no basis for any linguistic theory nor methodology. >I am also skeptical of course of anything that reaches the conclusion that >SVO is universal, as much as that all languages are isolating, for the reason >that the linguists who came up with the theory are generally speakers of >such a language. Indeed. You will have notice that S is *always* interpreted as NP+VP. This is none but the influence of traditional English grammar which analyzes the sentence as Subject+Predicate. Nothing like what I was taught in French primary school (yes, we were taught parsing; it was called "analyse logique"). We were taught that the verb is the centre, the pivot, the linchpin of the sentence, around which revolve subject, direct object, indirect object, circumstancal complements, all on the same "level". The notion of "order" did not come into that. If it had, I expect it would have been shattered as soon as we were introduced to Latin. Deep-structure SVO, VOS, whatever, is not only an effect of confusing lexemes with their grammatical categories and the notions which they represent, but also an effect of .. what shall I call this? glotto- centrism is too learned a word for what, ultimately, is ignorance and linguistic blindness. More Chomsky-bashing I suppose this will be called. So? "On ne doit e'reinter que les suppo^ts de l'erreur" and Chomsky is one. ______________________________________________________________________ >From viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi Thu Jun 9 00:32:02 1994 From: viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi (Ville Heikkila) Message-Id: <9406081832.AA25475@freeport.uwasa.fi> Subject: Fictional lgs: phonetics, universals etc. To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Wed, 8 Jun 1994 21:32:02 +0300 (EET DST) Quoting Colin Fine .... > ++> > I agree, but an universal rule really is that the pronounciation of any > language gets easier (in the terms of getting understood and not > confused). If the '-kgo' plural is used frequently enough and there's no > risk of confusion, the other of the two clusiles will disappear or the > pronounciation get easier some other way. (If that kind of cluster is > against the phonetic rules of a language, the process will be extremly > rapid... ;) > >++ > In the sense that processes of phonetic change such as assimilation, > dissimilation, syncope, epenthesis, metathesis, raising, lowering, > palatalisation, vowel-fracture etc. demonstrably occur in languages > over the course of time one has to assume that in a sense 'the > pronunciation ... gets easier; and furthermore some of these > processes seem to have occurred more frequently than others, > and so in some universal sense these correspond to 'easier'. .... > Viznut's argument contains a non-sequitur: he explains 'easier' as > 'in the terms of getting understood and not confused', > but then argues the specific case in terms of ease of production. > These are two very different areas. Perhaps I didn't express myself clearly enough. "Easy" means that a word can be pronounced with no much effort from the organs needed in speech. I would claim that it's quite universal that pronouncing "nah" is far 'easier' than pronouncing "sprlechthklobm". (please don't mess this up with different phoneme varieties in different languages or something like that - the point here is most important..) But if all words in a language were like "nah", its users would mix up the words, without getting understood. But if a word such as "sprlechthklobm" was used frequently enough, its pronounciation would become 'easier' (probably, at least by getting shorter). And a suffix such as 'kgo' would also become 'easier' to pronounce if it just was used frequently enough. This is what I meant. > ++> > A universal fact is that, for example, pronouncing "kg" requires more > work from the phonetic organs than pronouncing "nt". But the difficulty > in pronouncing them depends on how the speaker has got used to it. > >+++ > I don't accept this as fact. /kg/ requires a (probably extended) stop, > with the vocal cords activated part way through - for everything > above the larynx, there is no more work than /k/ (or at least than > /kk/). > /nt/ requires a movement of the velum to open and then close > the nasal passage, synchronised with the cessation of voice for > the unvoiced plosive. It seems that we're talking about different things... I was talking about "kg" that explodes twice (is that correct term?). Like the ck-g combination that occurs when pronouncing "black" and "guard" as separate words but without pause between them. That consonant cluster requires more work from the organs than simple cluster of nasal and corresponding clusile (= plosal in English?) such as /nt/ or /nd/, doesn't it? > Jacques Guy has already criticised this claim as a matter of fact. I want > to point out the glottocentrism in the claim. Can you imagine a language > lacking the distinction of 'questa' and 'quella' (Italian I think - I'm a bit > hazy on Italian), 'sore' and 'are' (Japanese), 'ta' and 'tu' (Lojban)? Let's > think about a discussion in such a language: ... > The only way Bub could make him/herself clear now is 'sign language' > ('pointing' to you and me) because the language (which we'll call > 'English') has no word for 'are' as opposed to 'sore'! > [In fact, this final claim is false, because English does have linguistic > ways to convey the difference - such as 'that one over there'. But > Viznut's claim is equally false, because a language can have linguistic > ways of designating the speaker short of personal pronouns, such as > 'the unworthy one who has the honour of addressing the exalted'] You're right. But if there wasn't any way to communicate the idea of "me" using words, it would be a little bit difficult to use sign language when having hands full of work, or talking on a phone, wouldn't it? Actually, we wouldn't need any names for different objects. We could just point to them and say "that one"... ;) > Viznut goes on to say: > +++> > This seems to be caused by universal human psychology: we've got a need > for self-identity and individuality, so this feature appears in all > languages. > >+++ > I dispute this as well. The construction of the 'individual' is distinctly > in the European rationalist-liberal tradition. I am not saying that other > cultures do not have a concept of individuals, but how the concept > relates to other concepts such as 'community' is very variable - > you are again making universal claims (in this case about psychology) > from a narrow basis I'm again afraid of that we're not talking about exactly same thing. Let us put it like this: when someone is using language, there's an _individual_ human speaking out something that is production of his/her own brain - and that is something that occurres also outside the range of European culture, perhaps universally in all cultures: Bub: Cats are black. Zab: Cats are white. Qob: Who said that cats are black? Zab: Bub did. Communication works like this (based on individual speakers) until there is some way of communication (telepathics?) that has no limit of individual minds. But if this kind of communication was developed, who would need something like language anyway? Viznut.H. _ -- Ville Heikkila Miskala, Vaajasalmi 77700 Rautalampi Finland ______________________________________________________________________ >From hmiller@origin.ea.com Wed Jun 8 18:39:17 1994 To: conlang@diku.dk From: hmiller@origin.ea.com (Herman Miller) Subject: Re: Fictional lgs & lg universals (Logical Language Group Date: Wed, 8 Jun 1994 18:39:17 GMT Message-Id: In article j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) writes: >> >> Unless there is other evidence to the contrary, I prefer assuming that >> the VSO languages actually have a VSO underlying structure. >> >No. This amounts to the same mistake: the confusion of signifie' and >signifiant, and winds back the state of linguistics a good hundred >years, before Saussure. There is some confusion as to what I meant here. Perhaps if I put it in terms of computer languages, with specific examples, you can see what I mean. Let's assume that all computer languages have an underlying structure that is postfix (such as RPN). We can invent whatever transformational rules we wish in order to convert this hidden, "underlying" form (which is never seen) to the "surface" form (which is, in fact, seen). But if someone were to invent such a grammar for Pascal, they would be flunked out of class. Pascal is not a postfix language, and it never will be. The fact that Pascal was a French mathematician, or that "Pascal" has six letters, or any such thing, is not relevant to the actual structure of the grammar. Forth, on the other hand, IS a postfix language, so it is perfectly reasonable to construct a postfix grammar for it. When I say that I believe "VSO languages actually have a VSO underlying structure", that is actually a generalization, a shorthand for saying "I believe that when a native speaker of Irish says 'Olann an garsun an bainne' they don't have an 'underlying' representation of 'an garsun olann an bainne' which is then transformed into the 'surface' manifestation", and thousands of similar statements. I find the "stratificational" school of syntax more to my taste than the "transformational". *--------------------------------------------------------------------------* | Herman Miller | "For a successful technology, reality must | | (hmiller@origin.ea.com) | take precedence over public relations, for | | (thryomanes@aol.com) | Nature cannot be fooled." - R. P. Feynman | *--------No animals were harmed in the preparation of this message.--------* ______________________________________________________________________ >From ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Thu Jun 9 00:40:24 1994 From: ucleaar Message-Id: <40649.9406082240@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Fictional lgs & lg universals Date: Wed, 08 Jun 94 23:40:24 +0100 Lojbab avers: > And's comments give one reason why I am skeptical of much > modern linguistic theory. What does it mean to say that > every language has a phoneme /a/? For the sake of poor unbeloved modern linguistic theory I'll try to explain. > The exact phones that correspond to each phoneme in a > language will differ from language to language. > Once you get to this point, then, you realize that phonemes > are a mental construct and the labels for them are > arbitrary. True. Jacques concurs: > Precisely! Here we have a confusion between a phoneme and > its realizations. Who is confused? > A phoneme is a *set* of conditionally- defined phones. The > confusion here is between sets and their members. If "every > language has a phoneme /a/" is to mean anything at all you > must give the membership of set A. Not necessarily. You can instead state conditions on membership. One way of interpreting my conjectural universal is that every language possesses a low/nonlow contrast. The lowest phone (e.g. [a]) used for the lg wd definitely belong to this category, and the highest phone (e.g. [i]) definitely wouldn't. One might consider as an analogue certain cultural universals: every culture has concepts of Incest, Siblinghood, Motherhood, and so on, and though they many vary somewhat from culture to culture, the various versions of these concepts still have enough in common for us to say their is some universal cultural core to these concepts. From: hmiller@origin.ea.com (Herman Miller) > Isn't it a rather arbitrary assumption that the underlying > structure is always SVO? For every non-SVO language, you > would have to assume the existence of a rule that > automatically transforms this into SOV, or VSO, or whatever > the particular language's structure happens to be. How > would one test this hypothesis? I could just as easily > argue that the underlying form of English is VSO, which is > then transformed to SVO. As I tried to explain, in all languages clause structure at minimum involves derivation from SVO to SOV (according to P&P theory), so if there is a bias it is not exclusively to SVO. I don't know enough of the details to say how VSO (or OSV, OVS or VOS) derive, but it would certainlt be from general principles rather than specific rules - that would be contrary to the spirit (and the letter) of the theory. The theory is sufficiently elaborated for the SVO to not be stipulated it falls out from other principles (i.e. it is NOT arbitrary): S originates as aunt (specifier) of V, and O originates as sister (complement) of V; linear order with respect to X is the only way of distinguishing aunt/specifier of X from sister/complement of X, so the only underlying options are SVO or OVS. Perhaps OVS is a parametric option - I don't know the theory well enough. I don't know how to test the hypothesis. Herman certainly could argue that English is VSO transforming into SVO, but could he make this case for all languages, with the barest minimum of stipulated derivational devices? That is the goal of Principles & Parameters theory. I don't believe any of this either, but I do have a lot of respect for it. From: hmiller@origin.ea.com (Herman Miller) > Of course, the reverse process would also have to exist. > When parsing a sentence, it would have to be converted back > to an underlying form. Chomsky is extremely vague about whether 'derivation' is the same as production. I don't know anyone who is sure what his position on this is. At any rate, it certainly isn't being claimed explicitly that for parsing/comprehension you run the system backwards. > Unless there is other evidence to the contrary, I prefer > assuming that the VSO languages actually have a VSO > underlying structure. Me too. From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) > No. This amounts to the same mistake: the confusion of > signifie' and signifiant, and winds back the state of > linguistics a good hundred years, before Saussure. The > confusion of signifie' and signifiant is pervasive in > generative theory. > Here is the fallacy: because the description uses recursive > procedures, what it describes uses recursive procedures. > Deep structure, affix-hopping, in fact > the whole of generative theory stems from this confusion. This misunderstands generative grammar. The claim that grammar uses recursion is not made because the metalanguage uses recursion; rather the claim is made that grammar uses recursion and then a metalanguage that reflects this is chosen. > Indeed. You will have notice that S is *always* interpreted > as NP+VP. This is none but the influence of traditional > English grammar which analyzes the sentence as > Subject+Predicate. Nothing like what I was taught in French > primary school (yes, we were taught parsing; it was called > "analyse logique"). We were taught that the verb is the > centre, the pivot, the linchpin of the sentence, around > which revolve subject, direct object, indirect object, > circumstancal complements, all on the same "level". I believe you are right about the historical origins of these opposed analytical systems. But it would be wrong (fallacious) to argue that because you discover the puerile origins of the theory it must therefore be wrong. > Deep-structure SVO, VOS, whatever, is not only an effect of > confusing lexemes with their grammatical categories and the > notions which they represent, What does this mean? Which grammatical categories are confused with lexemes? And which notions that what represents gets confused with what? > but also an effect of .. what > shall I call this? glotto-centrism is too learned a word for > what, ultimately, is ignorance and linguistic blindness. We all of us are largely ignorant about how language works. Remembering that this is Conlang List, I reiterate my view that it is interesting to endeavour to ascertain whether an invented language is compatible with theories of natural language. If they're not compatible, but they turned out to be as usable as natural languages, this should be of much interest to linguistic theory. --- And ______________________________________________________________________ >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Thu Jun 9 12:16:13 1994 From: C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Date: Thu, 9 Jun 94 11:16:03 BST Message-Id: <4574.9406091016@ccw305.brad.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Fictional lgs: phonetics, universals etc. Viznut continues our exchange > Perhaps I didn't express myself clearly enough. "Easy" means that a word > can be pronounced with no much effort from the organs needed in speech. > I would claim that it's quite universal that pronouncing "nah" is far > 'easier' than pronouncing "sprlechthklobm". > (please don't mess this up with different phoneme varieties in different > languages or something like that - the point here is most important..) > But if all words in a language were like "nah", its users would mix up > the words, without getting understood. But if a word such as > "sprlechthklobm" was used frequently enough, its pronounciation would > become 'easier' (probably, at least by getting shorter). And a suffix > such as 'kgo' would also become 'easier' to pronounce if it just was > used frequently enough. This is what I meant. It is obvious that all (or most) languages have a scale of 'easier'. It is also obvious that there are large areas of agreement on these scales - to take your example, I agree that it is universal that 'nah' is easier than 'sprlechthklobm'. I also agree that the process of language change usually increases the 'ease', as perceived by speakers of that language. What I urge caution about is in assuming that we know in an absolute sense which patterns will be reduced or changed. Consider the sequence -lm in English. In words like 'calm' and 'palm' Americans that I have heard generally pronounce the 'l': /kalm/, whereas in England we do not: /ka:m/. On the other hand, in 'film' we do pronounce the l: /film/ but in Ireland and some parts of Scotland, they insert an epenthetic vowel: /fil@m/. To me, /a:m/ seems easier than /alm/, but /ilm/ seems easier than /il@m/. I dispute your bald assertion "would become easier to pronounce" - the most I would allow is "would be likely to". > It seems that we're talking about different things... I was talking > about "kg" that explodes twice (is that correct term?). Like the ck-g > combination that occurs when pronouncing "black" and "guard" as separate > words but without pause between them. That consonant cluster requires > more work from the organs than simple cluster of nasal and corresponding > clusile (= plosal in English?) such as /nt/ or /nd/, doesn't it? Fair enough, I didn't think of that possibility. Yes, such a combination does take more work from the organs. My interpretation of 'easier' was at work when I interpreted /kg/ as a single plosion. (The term we use is 'plosive' by the way). But note (as I have mentioned recently somewhere - was it in my last message?) Sanskrit forms such as 'dekhta' 'likhta', which I have always assumed must be double plosive in order to be able to aspirate the first one. > You're right. > But if there wasn't any way to communicate the idea of "me" using words, > it would be a little bit difficult to use sign language when having > hands full of work, or talking on a phone, wouldn't it? > > Actually, we wouldn't need any names for different objects. We could > just point to them and say "that one"... ;) > It probably is the case in fact that all languages have ways of designating the speaker. But they do not necessarily get used the same amount in different languages. In Japanese (already discussed by Jacques), the fact is that many sentences lack an expressed subject. > > Viznut goes on to say: > > +++> > > This seems to be caused by universal human psychology: we've got a need > > for self-identity and individuality, so this feature appears in all > > languages. > > >+++ > > > I dispute this as well. The construction of the 'individual' is distinctly > > in the European rationalist-liberal tradition. I am not saying that other > > cultures do not have a concept of individuals, but how the concept > > relates to other concepts such as 'community' is very variable - > > you are again making universal claims (in this case about psychology) > > from a narrow basis > > I'm again afraid of that we're not talking about exactly same thing. Let > us put it like this: when someone is using language, there's an > _individual_ human speaking out something that is production of his/her > own brain - and that is something that occurres also outside the range > of European culture, perhaps universally in all cultures: > Bub: Cats are black. > Zab: Cats are white. > Qob: Who said that cats are black? > Zab: Bub did. > Communication works like this (based on individual speakers) until there > is some way of communication (telepathics?) that has no limit of > individual minds. But if this kind of communication was developed, who > would need something like language anyway? > But we can at least imagine a people for whom the idea of the individual is so slight that this kind of question could not arise - that "Who said that cats are black" is as meaningless a question as "Which of the water did they swim in?" Colin Fine ______________________________________________________________________ >From lojbab@access.digex.net Thu Jun 9 06:47:18 1994 From: Logical Language Group Message-Id: <199406091447.AA07241@access2.digex.net> Subject: Re: Fictional lgs: phonetics, universals etc. Date: Thu, 9 Jun 1994 10:47:18 -0400 (ADT) Cc: lojbab@access.digex.net (Logical Language Group) Colin Fine writes: > Consider the sequence -lm in English. > In words like 'calm' and 'palm' Americans that I have heard generally > pronounce the 'l': /kalm/, whereas in England we do not: /ka:m/. Really? I have always said /ka:m/, and my dictionary (not a very good one, alas) lists it as the only usual pronunciation. Ditto for /pa:m/. > On the > other hand, in 'film' we do pronounce the l: /film/ but in Ireland > and some parts of Scotland, they insert an epenthetic vowel: /fil@m/. I suppose you mean /fIlm/ and /fIl@m/. [deleted] > But we can at least imagine a people for whom the idea of the individual > is so slight that this kind of question could not arise - that "Who said that > cats are black" is as meaningless a question as "Which of the water did they > swim in?" This is very hard for me to believe. To shift the question, can you believe in a culture in which the question "Who ate the meat?" is as meaningless as "Which cloud just passed overhead?" One cloud is the same as another, for ordinary purposes; but it is not all one whether Bub ate the meat or Zab ate the meat -- certainly not to Bub and Zab. -- John Cowan sharing account for now e'osai ko sarji la lojban. ______________________________________________________________________ >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Thu Jun 9 18:35:23 1994 From: C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Date: Thu, 9 Jun 94 17:33:10 BST Message-Id: <6153.9406091633@ccw305.brad.ac.uk> To: LOJBAN@CUVMB.EARN, conlang@diku.dk Subject: Apology - misdirected message .u'u mi puzi srera mrilu fu le lojbo samymriste .enoi le rutni bangu samymriste .i ko e'o fraxu mi doi se cfipu .i mi minra te mrilu gi'ebabo krefu je drani mrilu vau le notci mi'e kolin fain I've just accidentallysent a message to lojban list instead of Conlang. Apologies to those confused by it. Once I get it back from the list, I'll repost it to Conlang Colin Fine ______________________________________________________________________ >From hmiller@origin.ea.com Thu Jun 9 17:50:14 1994 To: conlang@diku.dk From: hmiller@origin.ea.com (Herman Miller) Subject: Re: Fictional lgs: phonetics, universals etc. Date: Thu, 9 Jun 1994 17:50:14 GMT Message-Id: >Really? I have always said /ka:m/, and my dictionary (not a very good one, >alas) lists it as the only usual pronunciation. Ditto for /pa:m/. I've always been a little curious about this word, since I pronounce it with the same vowel that I use in the word "call". This contrasts with the vowel in "bomb". I would write these in phonemic transcription as /kom/, /bam/. I even have a minimal pair between "calm" /kom/ and "COM" /kam/ (as in .COM files or COM1, COM2, COM3 ports on the PC). I will pronounce the l in careful pronunciation, but I think this is the influence of spelling. I think the /ka:m/ /pa:m/ pronunciations are common in New England dialects, but I'm not sure how widespread they are. >> On the >> other hand, in 'film' we do pronounce the l: /film/ but in Ireland >> and some parts of Scotland, they insert an epenthetic vowel: /fil@m/. >I suppose you mean /fIlm/ and /fIl@m/. I've seen both kinds of phonemic transcriptions. Some use /i/ and /iy/, others use /I/ and /i/, or even /I/ and /i:/. I suppose the @ is a representation of schwa. Is there a standard for representing IPA in ASCII, or is this an informal thing that grew up on the conlang group? *--------------------------------------------------------------------------* | Herman Miller | "For a successful technology, reality must | | (hmiller@origin.ea.com) | take precedence over public relations, for | | (thryomanes@aol.com) | Nature cannot be fooled." - R. P. Feynman | *--------No animals were harmed in the preparation of this message.--------* ______________________________________________________________________ >From thorinn@diku.dk Fri Jun 10 13:13:33 1994 Date: Fri, 10 Jun 1994 11:13:33 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <199406100913.AA18995@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Phonetic transcription (ASCII IPA) A couple of years ago, Evan Kirshenbaum from HP organized a project on sci.lang to develop a convention for representing the IPA in ASCII. (The result turned out to be a bit more general, including a system to describe arbitrary phonemes by their features.) This convention has been stable since January 1993, and I suggest that we should adopt it as the default here as well. I have put a set of articles describing the ASCII IPA in the conlang archives; use 'get conlang ascii-ipa' to retrieve. (The stuff ought to be online on any respectable NNTP server, but I don't see it on ours right now; perhaps it is not being posted periodically (enough).) Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) ______________________________________________________________________ >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Fri Jun 10 12:41:55 1994 From: C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Date: Fri, 10 Jun 94 11:05:44 BST Message-Id: <8294.9406101005@ccw309.brad.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: '-lm' and non-individual languages I accidentally sent this message to Lojban instead of Conlang. Here it is to Conlang (though come to think of it, somebody's already answered it - can it be that the intersection of Conlang and Lojban list members is large? John Cowan answers me: > Really? I have always said /ka:m/, and my dictionary (not a very good one, > alas) lists it as the only usual pronunciation. Ditto for /pa:m/. I suspected it might not be universal American, but I certainly know people who regularly do pronounce the 'l' > > > On the > > other hand, in 'film' we do pronounce the l: /film/ but in Ireland > > and some parts of Scotland, they insert an epenthetic vowel: /fil@m/. > > I suppose you mean /fIlm/ and /fIl@m/. Of course. I forgot there was a way of making the distinction in ASCII. > > [deleted] > > > But we can at least imagine a people for whom the idea of the individual > > is so slight that this kind of question could not arise - that "Who said that > > cats are black" is as meaningless a question as "Which of the water did they > > swim in?" > > This is very hard for me to believe. To shift the question, can you believe > in a culture in which the question "Who ate the meat?" is as meaningless as > "Which cloud just passed overhead?" One cloud is the same as another, for > ordinary purposes; but it is not all one whether Bub ate the meat or Zab > ate the meat -- certainly not to Bub and Zab. I can believe in such a people - but I am talking fiction (which is where this thread started), not here and now reality on this planet. If you start out with a hive-mind where individuals are no more significant than the individual cells of your body, you can get this. (Note by the way that 'Which cloud just passed overhead?' is not meaningless - it may not be a significant question, but it's not meaningless. I was trying (and failing, evidently) to get a question that actually was meaningless. Unfortunately 'Which of the water did you swim in', though not quite normal, has a reading which makes sense. My suggestion was that 'Who said that?' would be not just a question whose answer was unimportant (like 'which of your cells just divided') but one which would actually have no comprehensible meaning to the people concerned. Perhaps a better attempt would be "Whup did you go?' - where trials went on to reveal that the questioner did not mean 'when', 'where', 'why', 'how', 'how often', 'how quickly', 'resembling what wild animal' or any other question we can get our minds round.) Colin Fine ______________________________________________________________________ >From allan@elvis.tamu.edu Fri Jun 10 04:49:08 1994 Date: Fri, 10 Jun 94 09:49:08 -0500 From: allan@elvis.tamu.edu (Allan Bailey) Message-Id: <9406101449.AA04630@elvis.tamu.edu> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Interlingua, anyone know the address of an organization? Does anyone know the address for an existing Interlingua organization? I want to find a place where I can order Interlingua materials (dictionaries, study books, reading materials, etc.) Any pointers would be much appreciated. -- Allan Bailey, allan@elvis.tamu.edu | "Freedom is not free." Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations | allan.bailey@tamu.edu Esperanto: MondLingvo, lingvo internacia. ______________________________________________________________________ >From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Fri Jun 10 12:58:06 1994 From: shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu (Mark E. Shoulson) Received: (shoulson@localhost) by startide.ctr.columbia.edu (8.6.7/8.6.4.788743) id QAA06033; Fri, 10 Jun 1994 16:58:06 -0400 Date: Fri, 10 Jun 1994 16:58:06 -0400 Message-Id: <199406102058.QAA06033@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Fictional lgs: phonetics, universals etc. >Date: Thu, 9 Jun 1994 17:19:44 +0200 >Comment: Issues related to constructed languages >From: Logical Language Group >Colin Fine writes: >> Consider the sequence -lm in English. >> In words like 'calm' and 'palm' Americans that I have heard generally >> pronounce the 'l': /kalm/, whereas in England we do not: /ka:m/. >Really? I have always said /ka:m/, and my dictionary (not a very good one, >alas) lists it as the only usual pronunciation. Ditto for /pa:m/. I never pronounced the l in calm and palm, and I'm also an American speaker (as opposed to English...) Maybe the a: is a little rounded in the back, and more so in a word like "almond", but that's about it. >John Cowan sharing account for now > e'osai ko sarji la lojban. ~mark ______________________________________________________________________ >From LYEAGER@business.auburn.edu Fri Jun 10 05:57:22 1994 Date: Fri, 10 Jun 1994 11:57:22 CST From: LYEAGER@business.auburn.edu Subject: Re: Interlingua, anyone know the address of an organization To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: Priority: normal Dear Mr. Bailey: The US address is Interlingua Institute, 332 Bleecker Street, #G34, New York, NY 10014, 212-929-0264. An information kit is available free, and some books are for sale. An address in Denmark is Dansk Interlingua Union, c/o Thomas Breinstrup, Ho/je Taastrup Boulevard 49, lejl. 3, DK-2630 Taastrup, Denmark. The most nearly complete source of publications is Servicio de Libros UMI, Zonnegloren 30, 7361 TL Beekbergen, Netherlands. I'd be glad to try to answer any of your questions about Interlingua. Sincerely, Leland B. Yeager ______________________________________________________________________ >From Thryomanes@aol.com Sun Jun 12 19:21:16 1994 From: Thryomanes@aol.com Sender: "Thryomanes" Message-Id: <9406122321.tn1116181@aol.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Sun, 12 Jun 94 23:21:16 EDT Subject: ASCII-IPA, Kolagian languages This is still Herman Miller, hmiller@origin.ea.com, but I'm posting this from home through my America Online account. I got the ASCII-IPA document, and I will try to start using it to represent the sounds of my invented languages. Following the guidelines, I will reassign the symbol /R/ to represent /{alv,trl}/ rather than /{mid,cnt,rzd,vwl}/. I only have one language with that vowel sound, and that language has a whole set of vowels with the feature {rzd}. This has the added benefit that I can represent /{alv,frc,trl}/ (as in the name of the Czech composer Dvorak) more simply as /R/ rather than /r/. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent for the IPA symbol "turned a", but I suppose I can use /V"/ for this without ambiguity. I would like to have convenient symbols for /s/ and /z/, so I'll use the unassigned diacritic "+" to represent {lat}. I will leave "=" unassigned so that I can use it according to the needs of each language, but I will probably end up using it mainly for {apr}. So here is a first attempt at transcribing some Olaetyan and Mizarian sentences into ASCII-IPA. Olaetyan: Ayene x-okten orinzya-sentath.le' zi xei. ['AjEnE 'z;oktEn o'*InzjV" sEntAT'le: zI z;Ej] "You are at the edge of a breath-taking view." Zanoiko, ry prenornel, ry as'ers'en y oran vlio. [zA'nojko ri 'p*Eno*nEl *j a's;E*s;En j 'o*An vljo] "O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain." Sela'n lann ne' otsa'y, narne' ry Khorlag li Nyekaprennayakh, s'ur e' edhle' a vosi ne'z ti Kassane'lan, lann Noyntai khyedu'r myca'y ry lann Prennaya Lonnaral. [sE'la:n lAn ne: o'tsa:j nA*'ne: *i 'xo*lAg lI ,njEkV"p*E'nAjV"x s;u* e: E'z+e: A 'vosI 'ne:z tI kAsV"'ne:lan lAn 'nojntAj xjE'du:* mi'tSa:j *i lAn p*E'nAjV" lo'nA*Al] "When the forces of evil, led by Khorlag the Black Dragon, had been gaining power in Kassanelan, the Elves began to be concerned about the Platinum Dragons." Note that the Olaetyan s' and x sounds are not really {pzd}, but that is the closest feature I could find. The distinctive feature that distinguishes them from s and z is that they are laminal (as opposed to apical) fricatives. Mizarian: Chit yeepsa trip tchrackta taik. /tSIt 'ji:psa trIp 'tS`rak`ta taik/ "No one else can hear me." Chista zaishra chark. /'tSIsta 'zaiSra tSark/ "I'm telling you the truth." Za zeerkcha tricksa ta katcha chickpa. /za 'zi:rktSa 'trIk`sa ta 'katS`a 'tSIk`pa/ "If you open the box it will give you power." *--------------------------------------------------------------------------* | Herman Miller | "For a successful technology, reality must | | (hmiller@origin.ea.com) | take precedence over public relations, for | | (thryomanes@aol.com) | Nature cannot be fooled." - R. P. Feynman | *--------No animals were harmed in the preparation of this message.--------* ______________________________________________________________________ >From jsp@betz.biostr.washington.edu Mon Jun 13 05:57:02 1994 Date: Mon, 13 Jun 94 12:57:02 -0700 From: jsp@betz.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero) Posted-Date: Mon, 13 Jun 94 12:57:02 -0700 Message-Id: <9406131957.AA10916@betz.biostr.washington.edu> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Counting ucleaar writes: | Our general cognitive faculties can cope with counting. But | we couldn't have a syntactic rule "insert a particle after | the seventh word of the clause". It's easy to invent a lg | that works like that, but it is not natural, & one would | not be able to speak it as a natural language, & no child | wd acquire the rule. This impinges on an interest of mine, actually, so I'll pipe up out of curiosity: Is your "... no child would acquire the rule" purely citing the hypothethical prediction of the language-universals folks, or is there actual evidence supporting the assertion? If the latter, I'd be interested in references. (History seems to show that what children can learn is often a superset of what they are actually taught, in any given era, and a desultory study of the history of "computing prodigies" would seem to indicate in particular that humans easily acquire arithmetic/counting skills far beyond the current norm, given exposure and motivation.) ______________________________________________________________________ >From rempt!boudira@rempt.hacktic.nl Wed Jun 15 17:13:47 1994 From: boudira@rempt.hacktic.nl (Boudewijn & Irina Rempt) Date: Wed, 15 Jun 94 16:13:47 +0100 Message-Id: <7D2-tAzLBh107h@rempt.hacktic.nl> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Valdyan/English parallel text recipe This is a recipe that really works. It's in Valdyan, the language of the (imaginary) kingdom of Valdyas. Biryinin tacholsenan da folay To make nut balls. fere. Biryinan nestyenan sa hyrnena Take almonds or other nuts and custay ali so myray az dayen grind them with water or wine sa sumen datay dayan hostea cul until the liquid looks white brythea lea chalet. Byren li like milk. Put it in a denay. Cyne samina nadayenan pot. Then put in dried fruit, crinena li denay so rustei so cut up small, and enough bread ostenin crosei ersinin irashean. crumbs and sponge cake crumbs. Lhasea dilynay dustie sa chelie To make it taste good, add sugar so carisinen. Ayali meray datay or honey and spices. Simmer until bruvie gori. Rhisay tacholsenan it's nice and stiff. Let cool and so folay. make little balls. List of abbreviations at the end; read between the lines for notes. I've glossed the pronouns extra for clarity. biryinin ta.cholsenan da folay fere nut-gen-p DIM.ball-acc-p in-order- make-2s-PRS -to da V fere: "in order to V", "so that V" biryinan nestyenan sa hyrnena custay ali so myray nut-acc-p eye-acc-p or other-acc-p take-2s-PRS P3pN-O and grind-2s-PRS (eye-nut = 'almond') "them" az dayen sa sumen datay dayan hostea together.with water-dat-s or wine-dat-s until liquid-acc-s white-acc-s cul brythea lea chalet like milk-acc-s LEA look-3s-IRR Impersonal construction (elaborate explanation forthcoming). *lea* is an "empty pronoun", only there because the verb needs a subject. The logical subject *dayan* is in the object form. byren li denay pot-ill-s P3sN-O put-2s-PRS "it" cyne samina nadayenan crinena li denay then fruit-acc-c dry-acc-p divided-acc-p P3sN-O put-2s-PRS "it" so rustei so ostenin crosei ersinin irashean and bread-gen-s and egg-gen-p cake-gen-s crumb-gen-c enough-acc-s irashen is a numeral really; it means "a count of ten" < "a double handful" (with dual prefix i-) lhasea dilynay dustie sa chelie taste.nice-acc-s cause-2s-PRS sugar-ins-s or honey-ins-s so carisinen and spice-ins-c ayali meray datay bruvie gori everything simmer-2s-PRS until look.nice-ins-s stiff-nom-p rhisay tacholsenan so folay cool-2s-s DIM.ball-acc-p and make-2s-PRS Abbreviations: 2 second person 3 third person acc accusative case c collective plural number dat dative case DIM diminutive prefix gen genitive case ill illative case ins instrumental case IRR irrealis aspect LEA pronoun "lea" in context where it can't be translated N neuter nom nominative case O object form of pronoun (oblique case) P pronoun p plural number PRS present tense s singular number I tried and tried to say something general about Valdyan, but it all came out so dull that I finally decided to start from the specific. Hope some of you actually try the recipe. Use ground almond paste (like peanut butter only made from almonds, in the health food shop) diluted with about the same volume of white wine. Thicken with fresh breadcrumbs and/or cake crumbs; if you started with half a jar of almond paste you'll need a good double handful. Flavour with demerara sugar, ground ginger and cinnamon. It's a traditional Valdyan sweet. Irina ______________________________________________________________________ >From ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Fri Jun 17 02:09:09 1994 From: ucleaar Message-Id: <129636.9406170009@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Counting Date: Fri, 17 Jun 94 01:09:09 +0100 From: jsp@betz.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero) > This impinges on an interest of mine, actually, so I'll pipe > up out of curiosity: Is your "... no child would acquire > the rule" purely citing the hypothethical prediction of > the language-universals folks, or is there actual evidence > supporting the assertion? If the latter, I'd be interested > in references. So far as I know, experiments have not been conducted in which children were exposed to 'impossible languages'. (Maybe Avgust & Angela are pioneers, destined to be legends in the annals of science...?) Chomsky cited an experiment done by Neil Smith & Ianthi Tsimpli ('Learning the impossible', published in Lingua, 1993). They've done lots of work with a 'polyglot savant' (i.e. idiot-savant), whose general cogntive capacities are severely impaired but who is brilliant at learning languages (I think he's about 30). They tested him on languages he'd not been exposed to before (e.g. Berber) and he acquired them with vastly greater facility than any normal adult. Then they tested him on an invented language in which some crucial construction (maybe questions) were marked by inserting a particle after the third word of the sentence. Christopher (the subject) did not learn this. He seemed to know intuitively that languages don't work this way. I don't know what would have happened if they'd actively taught him the rule - I imagine he and normal people could cope with it, just as we cope with the 'unnatural' 'respectively'-construction, but it's not something we can do naturally or with ease. [I fear my own conlang is like this, so I've given it the status of a classical language, like Latin or Sanskrit, used only as a second language by the educated.] ---- And ______________________________________________________________________ >From matthew@cpdapo.ntc.nokia.com Fri Jun 17 21:09:55 1994 Message-Id: <199406172123.AAA12497@nokia.com> Date: Fri, 17 Jun 1994 21:09:55 GMT From: matthew@cpdapo.ntc.nokia.com (Matthew Faupel) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Non-aural constructed languages I've just been catching up on over a month's worth of conlang posts, having been away on holiday for a while, and noticed someone mention an alien language that they had invented that was "full of glottal stops etc. to deliberately make it hard, as it's alien" or words to that effect. This got me thinking about something I'd noticed about SF treatment of alien languages in general: nearly every book I've read has taken the same approach as this, i.e. come up with a spoken language that has been made in some way "alien". Very few authors seem to have considered the fact that aliens probably don't have monotonal voice-boxes generating sounds within the audible human range; I can think of a few that mention alternative communication systems but the only author that springs to mind as having thought about what effect different media of expression might have on a language is C.J.Cherryh (the Chanur series has a snake-like species that thinks in patterns of 9 concepts at once I seem to remember). So, to come to the point of the post, has anyone come across and/or invented conlangs that are designed to be expressed in a non-verbal form and which actually make use of this feature in an interesting fashion? Cheers, Matthew ______________________________________________________________________ >From BobMichael@aol.com Fri Jun 17 15:27:05 1994 From: BobMichael@aol.com Sender: "BobMichael" Message-Id: <9406171927.tn70988@aol.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Fri, 17 Jun 94 19:27:05 EDT Subject: Rules of Accentuation I've been working on a little conlang project for a while, and I'm wondering about the various rules for stressing syllables in a word others have used. I find the penultimate stess of say Esperanto very tiresome, and often stresses relatively insignificant elements of a word. Initial stress works very well, and tends to stress the most important element in a word, but again is somewhat inflexible. I'd reaaly like a system that allows the stress to fall on different syllables depending on the word's construction without the use of diacritics. There's also the "music" of the language to consider. I want my lang to be equally at home with any musical meter, from waltz to rock and roll. Can you share your experience with these issues? Thanks! ______________________________________________________________________ >From rempt!irina@rempt.hacktic.nl Sat Jun 18 00:31:25 1994 From: irina@rempt.hacktic.nl (Irina Rempt) Date: Fri, 17 Jun 94 23:31:25 +0100 Message-Id: Reply-To: irina@rempt.hacktic.nl To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Valdyan/English bilingual recipe Rolandt Tweehuysen sent me mail (or did it go to the whole list after all? [1]) with inferences about Valdyan grammar, some of which are correct. It's interesting enough to share. I'll comment on them one by one and paraphrase any Dutch for non-Dutch readers. [1] We have conlang dropped in a bottomless mailbox that goes straight into a local newsgroup, so I can't tell. If any of you want to send mail to either of us, please send it only to boud@rempt.hacktic.nl or irina@rempt.hacktic.nl, *not* to boudira (even though that may sometimes appear in the header). Warning: this is quite long, about 7K before editing. It's full of examples though, so I don't think it'll be too boring. If you'd like to read more about the Valdyan language, *please* ask me questions. I work much better when provoked. >Uit het Valdyaanse recept meen ik de volgende [grammatica]regels te >kunnen halen: (infers the following from the Valdyan text:) >NOMINATIEF: Nominative singular is usually unmarked. Some endings are typical for classes of nouns/adjectives (not much difference between noun and adjective in Valdyan): for instance, -an is an agent marker (_tyl_ "metal, iron", _tylan_ "smith") and nouns in -e usually, but not always, designate animates (_nane_ "mother"). Nominative plural: the original vowel in the ending is replaced with -i(-) tylan "smith" - tylin "smiths" nane "mother" - nani "mothers" >GENITIEF: -i- Actually -ei. Roughly, nouns ending in a vowel get -ei (instead of the original vowel) and words ending in a consonant get -eiC, with some variations when there is a semivowel in the ending. (I'll abbreviate -V# = word ending in a vowel -VC# = word ending in vowel + consonant) tylein "a/the smith's" nanei "a/the mother's" This form is also used for the ablative case. >DATIEF: -e- Actually -en: tylen "to a/the smith" nanen "to a/the mother" Dative plural: -ene (-V#) or -eneC (-VC#) >ACCUSATIEF: -a- Actually -ea-: tylean "a/the smith DIR.OBJ" nanea "a/the mother DIR.OBJ" The accusative is used (a) for the direct object (b) as the logical subject of some impersonal constructions, e.g. Ardyath lea chylat forean Ardyth-acc LEA seem-3s-PRS priest-acc "Ardyth seems to be a priestess" "it looks like A. is a priestess" Accusative plural is -ena (-V#) or -enaC (-VC#) >ILLATIEF: -e- (als datief? Of hoort -n erbij?) Illative is the same as dative nowadays. They used to be separate, but a few successive vowel shifts reduced the number of forms for the original nine cases to five or six in the singular and four or five in the plural (some classes don't have a separate vocative case). I still mark all cases separately for syntactic and historical reasons. (Please will some Finn enlighten me on whether Finnish has prepositions and/or postpositions at all, or is it all done with those glorious eleven cases?) >INSTRUMENT: -ie- (combinatie v. genitief en datief?) -ie- is correct; with -VC endings you get -ieC. It's a separate case, not a combination of genitive and dative. tylien "by means of a/the smith" nanie "by means of a/the mother" This form is also used for the locative case: _Valdies_ "in Valdis" _Hostlie Criez_ "at the Black Swan (Inn)" and to form adverbs: _bruvie_ "nicely" from _bruve_ "nice". Instrumental and locative plural are identical to dative/illative plural. > -ine- (bij collectief?) (see below) >ENKELVOUD: -n (bij vloeistof als 'water', 'wijn', 'vloeistof', maar niet > bij 'melk'; ook bij 'pot') (singular) The singular ending has nothing to do with the meaning of the word, just with form (word class). Singular as such is unmarked. >MEERVOUD: -n (soms ook 0, zoals bij hyrnena/hostea/brythea) (plural) ^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^ (those are singular) Plural oblique cases have an infix -en-. The ending depends on the noun class; there are nouns in -V and in -VC, C usually being /n/ or /s/ in words of more than one syllable. Words of one syllable are in a class by themselves and can end in any consonant. (well, not quite *any*, but I'll write about noun classes later) >COLLECTIEF: 0 (zie ook bij MEERVOUD) Collectives are plural in form but take singular verbs and adjectives. Often (not always, depending on dialect) the plural infix -en- is replaced by -in- in the collective. A collective plural designates a number of things seen as a whole or as a class: ashen "edible plant, vegetable" ashin "greens" daysen "drop of water" daysin "rain" rhin "ship" rhini (pl) "ships" (coll) "fleet" Some words occur exclusively in the collective plural: _ansin_ "mind" from _anie_ "person, spirit" + _-sen_ "thing", literally "collection of things of the spirit" >DIMINUTIEF: ta- Absolutely correct. There's also an augmentative do- and a comparative a-. These are used for degrees of comparison as well: rhaslei tamoy "smaller than a sparrow" sparrow-abl DIM.big rhaslei domoy "bigger than a sparrow" sparrow-abl AUG.big rhaslei amoy "as big as a sparrow", "the size of a sparrow" sparrow-abl CMP.big ("compared to a sparrow, equally big") the last prefix can also be used to compare two things: inute amoy "the twins are the same size" dual.child CMP.big in contrast with inute imoy "the twins are both big" (but not necessarily dual.child dual.big the same size) Note that in the last two examples _imoy_ implies a *large* size whereas _amoy_ does not, and that Valdyan (like Russian) has no copula "to be". >2e PERSOON: -a- >3e PERSOON: -e- >TEGENW.TIJD: -y (present tense) >IRREALIIS: -t You've got it the wrong way round. The present tense marker is -a-, irrealis (subjunctive) marker is -e-, -t is third person singular, -y is second person singular, also used for the imperative. >WOORDVOLGORDE: SOV met een dummy-O achter V (word order) >Ik kan niet nagaan in hoeverre die O vOOr V een 'echt' object is. Wellicht >is die dummy achter V het echte object, en staat er een soort bepaling >vOOr V. (can't determine whether O before V is a real object, or whether the dummy after V is the real object and the thing before V is an adjunct) It's straight (S)OV, but I see how you could have got the idea: Biryinan nestyenan sa hyrnena custay ali so myray ... nuts eye or others take them and grind "Take almonds or other nuts and grind them" The problem lies with _so_ "and". If this connects two parts of a constituent: _chelie so carisinen_ "with sugar and spices" it's straightforward, but if it is used to connect phrases or sentences it creeps behind the first constituent: _ali so myray_ "and grind them". If the verb is marked for person already and there is no explicit subject, a pronoun is only necessary for emphasis: _ali miray_ "you grind them" or "grind them!" vs. _tine ali myray_ "YOU grind them (because I won't)". If there *is* an explicit subject the SOV order is clear: S O V nane ali myrat "mother grinds them" mother them grinds >Werkwoorden lijken genominaliseerd te kunnen worden na een voorzetsel: (it seems to be possible to nominalize verbs after a preposition) >...datay bruvie > until look.nice-ins-s _datay_ is not a preposition; _bruvie_ is not a verb. It may have been confusing that I translated _bruvie_ with "look.nice", what I meant is "nice-looking", "pleasant to see". >(als bruv... een ww is!) (if bruv... is a verb) It's an adjective in the instrumental case, the usual way to form adverbs. [Spocanian examples deleted, they're very interesting but it would take me another 7K to comment on those...] -- ---- ======== = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Irina Rempt-Drijfhout ______________________________________________________________________ >From hmiller@origin.ea.com Sat Jun 18 08:48:02 1994 Date: Sat, 18 Jun 94 13:48:02 -0500 From: hmiller@origin.ea.com (Herman Miller) Message-Id: <9406181848.AA17483@origin.ea.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Rules of Accentuation Aside from penultimate and initial stress, one system that I like to use is to stress the penultimate syllable if it is LONG, or the syllable previous to that if it is SHORT. Your definitions of long and short syllables may vary. Another is to stress the first syllable of the main root word regardless of what affixes are added to the word. Of course, you could avoid this problem altogether by constructing a monosyllabic isolating language! :) Of course, other than problems with ASCII text on the computer, there's no reason you need to avoid diacritics. If stress is phonemic in a language (as it is in English: perMIT vs. PERmit), it should be written. If it's not, the phonological rules of the language should be able to predict it. Stress in Olaetyan is phonemic: there is a minimal pair [A'ne:] vs. ['Ane:], but in many cases it is predictable, so I only mark it in rare cases. ______________________________________________________________________ >From hmiller@origin.ea.com Sat Jun 18 08:36:06 1994 Date: Sat, 18 Jun 94 13:36:06 -0500 From: hmiller@origin.ea.com (Herman Miller) Message-Id: <9406181836.AA17333@origin.ea.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Non-aural constructed languages I've never gone beyond a very bare description of such a language (for example, communicating by light, or ultrasonic pulses, or some such thing). I have some alien languages that include whistles and other non-vocal sounds, but none that consist *entirely* of non-vocal sounds. The problem with alien languages is the same as the problem with humanoid aliens in general -- why would they exist? But someone once said (was it Asimov?) that science fiction writers are allowed one impossible assumption to get a story going, as long as the rest of it fits together. (I hope this works, I'm having problems with Trumpet so I'm using the unix Mail command.) ______________________________________________________________________ >From matthew@cpdapo.ntc.nokia.com Sat Jun 18 21:10:17 1994 Message-Id: <199406182124.AAA20553@nokia.com> Date: Sat, 18 Jun 1994 21:10:17 GMT From: matthew@cpdapo.ntc.nokia.com (Matthew Faupel) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Rules of Accentuation BM: I'm wondering about the various rules for stressing syllables in BM: a word others have used. I'd reaaly like a system that BM: allows the stress to fall on different syllables depending on BM: the word's construction without the use of diacritics. There's BM: also the "music" of the language to consider. I want my lang to BM: be equally at home with any musical meter, from waltz to rock BM: and roll. Can you share your experience with these issues? BM: Thanks! Various possibilities from real and constructed languages: 1. Glosa's rule of "stress the last syllable before the last consonant" seems to produce a fairly euphoneous result. 2. Another possibility if you want variable stress with fixed rules is to do something similar to Spanish, which stresses the penultimate syllable if the word ends in a vowel, n, or s, and the last syllable otherwise (Spanish of course has exceptions, which is where the written accents come in, but there's no reason why your conlang should have them). 3. A third possibility is to base the stress on the grammatical function of the word. Ido has a very simple form of this rule in that words are normally stressed on the penultimate syllable, but the infinitive form of verbs has final stress (or something like this, I think). Matthew ______________________________________________________________________ >From Ken.Beesley@xerox.fr Sun Jun 19 15:29:06 1994 Date: Sun, 19 Jun 1994 14:29:06 --100 From: Ken.Beesley@xerox.fr (Ken Beesley) Message-Id: <9406191229.AA05861@grenoble.rxrc.xerox.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Non-aural constructed languages >>> I have some alien languages that include whistles and other non-vocal sounds, but none that consist *entirely* of non-vocal sounds.<<< Whistled languages, or at least completely whistled varieties of language, are not unknown even on Earth. The most famous example is on the island of Gomera, where the local Spanish dialect has a whistled form used for communication over long distances by isolated shepherds. There are whistled forms of all the phonemes, and they can whistle arbitrary messages. The messages reportedly can carry for miles through the rocky canyons. There are similar reports of a whistled dialect in the French Pyranees and another in Turkey, again used by shepherds over mountainous terrain. The whistled form of Tojolabal, used by vendors in marketplaces, apparently whistles the tones only, making it like the better known "talking drum" languages of Africa. It is easy to imagine a SciFi world where the constraints of anatomy or geography might lead credibly to whistled languages. And, by the way, whistled sounds ARE vocal sounds. The various sign languages for the deaf are clear examples of full-blown language communicated in a non-verbal/aural medium. Ken ken.beesley@xerox.fr ______________________________________________________________________ >From donh@netcom.com Sun Jun 19 02:26:32 1994 Message-Id: <199406191626.JAA23138@netcom4.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Cc: Don Harlow Subject: Re: Non-aural constructed languages Date: Sun, 19 Jun 94 09:26:32 -0700 From: Don Harlow > >>> > I > have some alien languages that include whistles and other non-vocal > sounds, but none that consist *entirely* of non-vocal sounds.<<< > > Whistled languages, or at least completely whistled varieties of > language, are not unknown even on Earth. The most famous example is > on the island of Gomera, where the local Spanish dialect has a whistled > form used for communication over long distances by isolated shepherds. > There are whistled forms of all the phonemes, and they can whistle > arbitrary messages. The messages reportedly can carry for miles > through the rocky canyons. > According to something I read once -- I believe it was in Andrew Large, _The Artificial Language Movement_ -- the French military at one point considered using Sudre's Solresol. I suspect that this was for a similar reason -- because Solresol (which was a "musical" language) when played on trumpets could be heard and understood over very great distances. Don Harlow donh@netcom.com Esperanto League for N.A. elna@netcom.com (800) 828-5944 ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/elna/elna.html Esperanto ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/donh/donh.html ______________________________________________________________________ >From Edmund.Grimley-Evans@cl.cam.ac.uk Mon Jun 20 12:18:40 1994 Date: Mon, 20 Jun 1994 11:18:40 +0100 From: Edmund.Grimley-Evans@cl.cam.ac.uk Message-Id: <9406201018.AA06562@nene.cl.cam.ac.uk> Subject: Re: Rules of Accentuation I thought it might be a good idea to mention a few examples of languages with the mentioned stress rules. In Polish and Esperanto the stress is always on the penultimate syllable. In Hungarian and Finnish the stress is always on the first syllable. > Aside from penultimate and initial stress, one system that I like to > use is to stress the penultimate syllable if it is LONG, or the > syllable previous to that if it is SHORT. Your definitions of > long and short syllables may vary. Another is to stress the first > syllable of the main root word regardless of what affixes are added > to the word. The former is the rule in Latin. The latter is the rule in Volapuk. (Please correct me, if any of my examples are wrong. But don't bother to mention pendantic and rare exceptions to the rules.) By the way: Someone complained that they didn't like the rhythm of a language stressed always on the penultimate syllable. I don't quite understand this, because, unless you actually speak the langauge or are comparing it with a written transcript it's hardly possible to hear which syllables are being stressed. All you actually hear is a string of syllables, some of which are stressed. The gaps between the words are not usually marked other than by the stress. Edmund ______________________________________________________________________ >From mlh@stud.unit.no Mon Jun 20 16:40:54 1994 From: "Magnus Lie Hetland" Message-Id: <9406201440.ZM16424@signy8.stud.unit.no> Date: Mon, 20 Jun 1994 14:40:54 +0200 Subject: Re: Non-aural constructed languages On Jun 19, 7:24pm, Don Harlow wrote: > the French military at one point > considered using Sudre's Solresol. I suspect that this was for a similar > reason -- because Solresol (which was a "musical" language) when played > on trumpets could be heard and understood over very great distances. I have been looking for some info on Solresol, but I can't seem to find any; does anybody know of any (more or less) specific info? mlh ______________________________________________________________________ >From non12@cyber.net Mon Jun 20 06:26:32 1994 From: "John H. Chalmers" To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: SF languages Date: Mon, 20 Jun 94 13:26:32 PDT Message-Id: <9406201326.aa04427@cyber.cyber.net> Speaking of non-vocal SF'nal languages, James Blish wrote about a creature who communicated with colored light. "VOR" (aka RVOG) is what I remember its being named (Violet Orange Red). I presume such a language would be similar to Solresol. In fact, it could be isomorphic if Solresol used only the 7 tones of the diatonic scale. The SF story Robin mentioned reminds me of Jack Vance's "The Languages of Pao," a novel based on a weak form of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis. Pao is a populous, but undeveloped planet, at the mercy of its rapacious neighbors. Its ruler hires a consultant to create 3 new languages for three new sub-societies under the assumption that such languages will facilitate, but not compel, new and necessary modes of thought. The three languages are "Technicant, for industrialists and technologists, "Cogitant," for researchers, and "Valiant," for the newly organized military. A caste of language teachers is trained to teach the new languages and act as interpreters between the general population and the new groups. They create their own language,"Pastiche" from the other 3 plus Paonese. The plot gets rather involved when the consultant tries to take over Pao, the military revolt, etc., but the linguists prevail as they alone can cummunicate with all parties. Charles Hockett wrote an essay in a slim volume titled something like "Universals of Language." In it he listed some properties of human language and desiderata for languages in general. In addition to the vocal channel, he mentions "anal spirants" en passant as an usused alternative.His analysis and suggestions are relevant both to STF'nal languages and conlangs in general. While I don't remember all the details and the book is in storage in Texas, the universals/desiderata that I can recall were the following: 1). Non-directionality: Groups as well as individuals should be addressable, i.e., warning calls, etc. should be possible. 2). Reflexivity: The sender should be able to receive and perceive its own messages. All members of the group should potentially be able to send and recieve messages. 3). Fading: old messages should fade rapidly. THis would apppear to rule out odor trails, but perhaps not airborne deney's "Planiverse," a hypothetical 2-D world. Apparently sound waves in two dimensions do not fade rapidly, but have long "tails" which might interfere with new messages. 4). Multiple Patterning: Essentially, this means having a small number of "cenemes" organized into a much larger number of "pleremes" (or vice-versa). Cenemes are phonemes, letters, gestures, etc.; pleremes are morphemes, words etc. Cenemes and pleremes are arbitrary, though onomatopoeia, sound symbolism, and imitation can also exist. Hockett also says that unpatterned systems where "utterances" differ holistically must have iconic semantics. Perhaps Dolphin language, if it exists, is iconic and based on sonar signatures. If so, it might be very difficult for humans to learn or even recognize. 5). Learnability: Language is learned, not inherited genetically. Hockett once wrote an unpublished SF story about aliens whose language was transmitted genetically and who therefore were unable to learn terrestrial languages. As for the channel, Roger Wescott has proposed the word "streptitation" to describe non-vocal sound production such as the stridulation of crickets, cicada's, etc. Hence any sound producing mechanism is potentially usable. One might add bioluminescence, and electric fields, at least for creatures living in dark and/or aqueous environments. In Jack Vance's "Gift of Gab" a previously non-linguistic alien aquatic species is taught to use a gestural language. Other SF writers have postulated using any part of the body that is visible. I remember another language suggestion in which intonation (tonemes) expresed the basic root words as in Solresol while affect, assertion, and other sentential modifications were carried by more ordinary phonemes. Given a physiology that provides a channel with enough capacity, any movement or emission modality could be used linguistically. One can even imagine multichannel sources where part of the message is generated by one mechanism and another by some other system. For example, the vocal apparatus could carry basic information, while a stridulatory organ could modify this according to emotional state, assertion mode, reliability, etc. These might even send simultanewous messages such as quotation and commentary, etc. One might expect 2-D scripts to be constructed for such languages rather than the essentially linear strings used by most human writing systems. -- John I see a Garble in the above. It is Dewdeney's "Planiverse," discussed in Scientific American and in one or two symposium volumes. Great fun. ______________________________________________________________________ >From BobMichael@aol.com Mon Jun 20 16:04:46 1994 From: BobMichael@aol.com Message-Id: <9406202004.tn156136@aol.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Mon, 20 Jun 94 20:04:46 EDT Subject: Re: Rules of Accentuation Edmunds Says: >> By the way: Someone complained that they didn't like the rhythm of a language stressed always on the penultimate syllable. I don't quite understand this << That was me! I suppose being a native English speaker, I enjoy the clang of adjacent accented syllables, and the emphatic nature of final stressed syllables in a phrase. By the way, Volapuk, I believe, carried an invariable final stress. Too bad it didn't take off, it's a decent and colorful attempt at a universal tongue. Bob Michael ______________________________________________________________________ >From donh@netcom.com Mon Jun 20 11:09:13 1994 Message-Id: <199406210109.SAA11164@netcom7.netcom.com> Subject: Re: SF languages Date: Mon, 20 Jun 94 18:09:13 -0700 From: Don Harlow Scripsit John Chalmers: > Speaking of non-vocal SF'nal languages, James Blish wrote about > a creature who communicated with colored light. "VOR" (aka RVOG) > is what I remember its being named (Violet Orange Red). I presume > such a language would be similar to Solresol. In fact, it could be > isomorphic if Solresol used only the 7 tones of the diatonic scale. Apropos of which, see Valentina Zhuravleva's short story "Starlight Rhapsody", translated from Esperanto (into which it was originally translated from Russian) by yours truly and published in _The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction_ in 1963 (I forget the exact issue). Zhuravleva's gimmick was the use of the spectrum of visible light as a means of transmitting music across interstellar distances. The next year I saw a notice in the Sacramento _Bee_ that she had presented the same idea to a scientific conference in the USSR as a possible means of interstellar communication. ______________________________________________________________________ >From donh@netcom.com Mon Jun 20 11:22:15 1994 Message-Id: <199406210122.SAA12711@netcom7.netcom.com> Subject: Re: Rules of Accentuation Date: Mon, 20 Jun 94 18:22:15 -0700 From: Don Harlow Scripsit Bob Michael: > That was me! I suppose being a native English speaker, I enjoy the clang of > adjacent accented syllables, and the emphatic nature of final stressed > syllables in a phrase. By the way, Volapuk, I believe, carried an invariable > final stress. Too bad it didn't take off, it's a decent and colorful attempt > at a universal tongue. It did take off -- it just crashed not too far from the runway. After Esperanto, Volapu"k, in terms of number of speakers, was by far the most successful IAL; in terms of initial growth rate, it was more successful even than Esperanto. Its failure was due largely to non-linguistic factors, though these were often dressed up in linguistic arguments. Don Harlow donh@netcom.com Esperanto League for N.A. elna@netcom.com (800) 828-5944 ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/elna/elna.html Esperanto ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/donh/donh.html ______________________________________________________________________ >From Edmund.Grimley-Evans@cl.cam.ac.uk Tue Jun 21 12:34:00 1994 Date: Tue, 21 Jun 1994 11:34:00 +0100 From: Edmund.Grimley-Evans@cl.cam.ac.uk Message-Id: <9406211034.AA27557@nene.cl.cam.ac.uk> Subject: Re: SF languages There is said to be a Pacific island, where the local language makes such great use of facial expressions that the language is barely comprehensible on the phone or radio. It might be a myth, of course. I have no further details. Edmund ______________________________________________________________________ >From Edmund.Grimley-Evans@cl.cam.ac.uk Tue Jun 21 12:51:07 1994 Date: Tue, 21 Jun 1994 11:51:07 +0100 From: Edmund.Grimley-Evans@cl.cam.ac.uk Message-Id: <9406211051.AA28020@nene.cl.cam.ac.uk> Subject: Re: Rules of Accentuation > That was me! I suppose being a native English speaker, I enjoy the clang of > adjacent accented syllables, and the emphatic nature of final stressed > syllables in a phrase. To obtain final stressed syllables in a phrase in Esperanto you can remove the ending "-o" from a noun. Or you can put a pronoun, numerable, or certain particles at the end. (for / kor', mi / harmoni', du / detru', ktp) However it is true that in normal prose or speech Esperanto doesn't often have the last syllable in a phrase stressed. That's possibly why it's relatively difficult to translate songs from English into Esperanto; it's presumably easier to translate from Polish. > By the way, Volapuk, I believe, carried an invariable > final stress. Too bad it didn't take off, it's a decent and colorful attempt > at a universal tongue. I think Volapuk can still claim to be second most successful conlang in history. It certainly took off quite rapidly in its time. There are still some Volapuk speakers around, if you want to learn it. But I am fairly certain that Volapuk's stress is not invariable. I think that you have to morphologically analyse a word in order to know how to stress it, as you have to recognise the prefixes and suffixes in order to stress the last (or first?) syllable of the root, not of the word. Edmund ______________________________________________________________________ >From V119N57H@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu Tue Jun 21 04:19:33 1994 Date: Tue, 21 Jun 1994 08:19:33 -0400 (EDT) From: Dragon Subject: Re: SF languages To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01HDSPNRPBLU934R8J@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu> > I remember another language suggestion in which intonation (tonemes) expressed the basic root words as in Solresol while affect, assertion, and other sentential modifications were carried by more ordinary phonemes. What is the reference to this? It sounds a lot like something I've been tinkering with for a short story about a sentient species on Earth 50 million years from now, long after evolution has left the lifeforms we know of today with the dinosaurs. Although the language isn't central to the story, it is of interest. Craig Kopris ______________________________________________________________________ >From JMAS@eui.uab.es Tue Jun 21 17:17:50 1994 Date: Tue, 21 Jun 1994 17:17:50 GMT+0200 From: JMAS@eui.uab.es Subject: a stupid question To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01HDT8AE01CI9LX3PU@cc.uab.es> Somewhere I heard that a human language should ideally have double modulation, that means, a few phonemes are combined to form many words, instead of having a different sign for each word. Then, could somebody explain me how come that the deaf-mute use definitely not an alphabetic system? If you see in the TV somebody using deaf-mute language, and at the same time the somebody speaks the same words, you soon realize that most gestures are ideograms, except when it comes to proper names, wich are obviously spelled aout with gestures of one hand wich are quite different from the normal, much wider, ideo-gestures. -- Jordi ______________________________________________________________________ >From Ken.Beesley@xerox.fr Tue Jun 21 19:52:18 1994 Date: Tue, 21 Jun 1994 18:52:18 --100 From: Ken.Beesley@xerox.fr (Ken Beesley) Message-Id: <9406211652.AA06400@grenoble.rxrc.xerox.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: a stupid question >>> Then, could somebody explain me how come that the deaf-mute use definitely not an alphabetic system?<< This is not a stupid question. First of all, it is important to realize that there are many sign languages, and they seem to arise wherever you find a reasonable number of deaf people. The French system was apparently not so much invented but extracted from various sign languages already in use in France. It became a standard by being taught in schools for the deaf, and it became the basis for American Sign Language. There is also a British Sign Language, and no one knows where it came from. There are also Israeli and Swedish sign languages, and there are no doubt many more. Despite their obvious differences from spoken language (especially their ability to transmit multiple signs simultaneously) they share most of the features of spoken languages, including having syntactic grammars, an essentially arbitrary relationship between signs and referents, and a "phonology". That is, any sign language has certain particular gestures and movements that are used to make up signs, and there are notation systems for representing them. Even written alphabets. It can easily be argued that the orthographies proposed for ASL (where an orthography is a set of alphabetic characters and conventions for using them) are inadequate, but so are the orthographies for spoken languages. So the signs of sign language are not ideograms--they have internal structures composed of the equivalent of phonemes. One term I have heard used is chiremes. >>> except when it comes to proper names, wich are obviously spelled aout with gestures of one hand wich are quite different from the normal, much wider, ideo-gestures.<<< Some names have sign equivalents. The resorting to hand-spelling is often necessary and is somewhat equivalent to slipping a French word into an English speech. Ken ______________________________________________________________________ >From riolo@PICA.ARMY.MIL Tue Jun 21 09:06:35 1994 Date: Tue, 21 Jun 1994 13:06:35 EDT From: "Joseph P. Riolo" Subject: Re: a stupid question Message-Id: <25797.772218395@pica.army.mil> Jordi (JMAS@eui.uab.es) writes: > Then, could somebody explain me how come that the deaf-mute use >definitely not an alphabetic system? While most of the deaf people do not write their native sign languages, very few are learning to write their native sign languages. Two of the writing systems that I become familiar with are a notation system developed by William C. Stokoe, Dorothy C. Casterline, and Carl G. Croneberg, and a more pictorial system developed by Valerie Sutton with the help from deaf signers. The former is called Stokoe's Notation System and the latter is called Sutton's Sign Writing. These systems do have their own alphabetical systems. Each sign, as analyzed by researchers, has three components - handshape, location, and movement from which the writing systems were developed. The American Sign Language, as used in the U.S., has 44 (more or less) different handshapes. You can visualize a handshape as a sound or a letter and, using this image, it is easy to see that an alphabet really exists. > If you see in the TV somebody using >deaf-mute language, and at the same time the somebody speaks the same words, >you soon realize that most gestures are ideograms, except when it comes >to proper names, wich are obviously spelled aout with gestures of one hand >wich are quite different from the normal, much wider, ideo-gestures. This is called fingerspelling. It is a part of the sign language. Whenever there is a need to communicate a name or a word whose sign does not exist, a deaf signer will spell it out as it is written, not as how it sound for the obvious reason. Joseph P. Riolo ______________________________________________________________________ >From lojbab@access.digex.net Tue Jun 21 10:09:38 1994 From: Logical Language Group Message-Id: <199406211809.AA23198@access2.digex.net> Subject: Sign languages (was: a stupid question) To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Tue, 21 Jun 1994 14:09:38 -0400 (ADT) Ken Beesley writes: > First of all, it is important to realize > that there are many sign languages, and they seem to arise wherever you > find a reasonable number of deaf people. The Ethnologue database maintained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics lists the following 72 sign languages. I have added the country of origin where it is not obvious. Adamorobe (Ghana), Algerian, American, Australian, Australian Aboriginal, Austrian, Belgian, Bolivian, Brazilian, British, Canadian, Catalonian, Chadian, Chinese, Costa Rican, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Ecuadorian, El Salvadoran, Eskimo, Finnish, French, French Canadian, German, Ghanaian, Greek, Hawaii Pidgin (U.S.), Hill Country (Thailand), Indian, Irish, Israeli, Italian, Japanese, Kenyan, Korean, Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Latvian, Lyons (France), Malaysian, Martha's Vineyard (U.S.), Mayan, Mexican, Moroccan, Nepalese, New Zealand, Nicaraguan, Nigerian, Norwegian, Nova Scotian, Old Kentish (U.K.), Penang (Malaysia), Peruvian, Philippine, Polish, Portuguese, Providencia (Colombia), Puerto Rican, Rennellese (Solomon Islands), Russian, South African, Spanish, Sri Lankan, Swedish, Swiss, Taiwanese, Thai, Tunisian, Urubu-Kaapor (Brazil), Venezuelan, Yiddish, Yugoslavian. -- John Cowan sharing account for now e'osai ko sarji la lojban. ______________________________________________________________________ >From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Tue Jun 21 13:58:44 1994 From: shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu (Mark E. Shoulson) Date: Tue, 21 Jun 1994 17:58:44 -0400 Message-Id: <199406212158.RAA23425@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> Subject: Rules of Accentuation >From: Edmund.Grimley-Evans@cl.cam.ac.uk >But I am fairly certain that Volapuk's stress is not invariable. Volap"uk's stress is invariable on the last syllable... sorta. There are two affixes (um... -li and, oh damn, I can't remember the other one) that are not properly suffixed to the word, but are attached by a hyphen, and don't carry the stress, which remains on the final syyllable of the word proper. I think they can both be used as prefixes as well, also with hyphens, and that usage became preferred, to avoid the inconsistency with stress. ~mark ______________________________________________________________________ >From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Tue Jun 21 14:01:29 1994 From: shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu (Mark E. Shoulson) Date: Tue, 21 Jun 1994 18:01:29 -0400 Message-Id: <199406212201.SAA23433@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> Subject: SF languages >Date: Tue, 21 Jun 1994 15:19:44 +0200 >From: Dragon >> I remember another language suggestion in which intonation >>(tonemes) expressed the basic root words as in Solresol while affect, >>assertion, and other sentential modifications were carried by more >>ordinary phonemes. >What is the reference to this? It sounds a lot like something >I've been tinkering with for a short story about a sentient species >on Earth 50 million years from now, long after evolution has left >the lifeforms we know of today with the dinosaurs. Although the >language isn't central to the story, it is of interest. Sounds a hell of a lot like Jim Carter's language -gua!spi. The syllables conveyed meaning, and the grammar was conveyed by the tones. So you'd have a falling tone to introduce noun phrases or something, and rising ones to pop back up to the predicate, etc. I'll see if I can find a copy of the paper he wrote. >Craig Kopris ~mark ______________________________________________________________________ >From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Tue Jun 21 14:11:37 1994 From: shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu (Mark E. Shoulson) Date: Tue, 21 Jun 1994 18:11:37 -0400 Message-Id: <199406212211.SAA23486@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> Subject: a stupid question >JMAS@eui.uab.es > Then, could somebody explain me how come that the deaf-mute use >definitely not an alphabetic system? For starters, the sign language used by interpreters is sort of a pidgin sign, since they're translating on the fly. It's closer to English (or whatever) sentence structure than the natural, conversational ASL (or whatever the regional sign language is). Fingerspelling is something else altogether, and is sort of an escape mechanism for things that have to be described using another (spoken) language, like proper names. You can't really talk using fingerspelling for long (fingers and eyes get really tired). There really are "words" in ASL (the only sign language I have persona familiarity with); there is a gesture that means "send" and one that means bicycle and one that means "rubber" and one that means "marry". Now, there are also signs with broader meanings, that don't translate well, but that';s to be expected. Sign languages have the advantage of having more dimensions than spoken ones. Spoken language has a dimension of sound/pitch/phone and one of time. Sign has time and also three dimensions of space, enclosed in a small chunk of air in front of the speaker, plus handshape. Since the purpose of language is to model concepts and the real world, sign languages have to do less compression to get from the multidimensional world down to the language, while spoken languages have to do more. There's nothing particularly intuitive about the sounds for the word "there" in English that imply "that region of space"... but in a sign language you can just point to it. This doesn't make it any less of a symbol, just a more intuitive and more flexible one (since you can point to other "there"s too). ~mark ______________________________________________________________________ >From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Tue Jun 21 14:16:37 1994 From: shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu (Mark E. Shoulson) Date: Tue, 21 Jun 1994 18:16:37 -0400 Message-Id: <199406212216.SAA23533@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> Subject: a stupid question >Date: Tue, 21 Jun 1994 19:19:33 +0200 >From: Ken.Beesley@xerox.fr (Ken Beesley) >So the signs of sign language are not ideograms--they have internal >structures composed of the equivalent of phonemes. One term I have heard >used is chiremes. I'd heard "cheremes", I think. >Some names have sign equivalents. The resorting to hand-spelling is often >necessary and is somewhat equivalent to slipping a French word into an English >speech. Yes... many cities and countries have signs, and towns often have signs that may be known only to the local populace. People, too, get name-signs, which their friends know (or famous people, like Jesus or Washington or Hitler, for whom everyone knows the sign). Sometimes if the same person is mentioned in a speech many times (as at a funeral I was at, where the eulogy was interpreted), it's spelled at the beginning and then assigned a sign for ease of use in the rest of the speech. ~mark ______________________________________________________________________ >From non12@cyber.net Wed Jun 22 02:58:43 1994 From: "John H. Chalmers" Subject: Tone language Date: Wed, 22 Jun 94 9:58:43 PDT Message-Id: <9406220958.aa04902@cyber.cyber.net> Craig Kopris: I can't remember exactly where I heard about the inverse-tonal conlang. Very possibly it was in the language fanzine "Linguisa" (aka Linguica and a few other names). I used to be be member, but I dropped out for lack of time. If no-one currently in conlang knows the reference, I could email a couple of members who might know the answer. On the other hand, it might have been in a former Conlang post. I think this language was the inverse of guaspi!(sp?) as the tone sequences carried lexical information and the syllable the grammatical and attitudinal structure. I suspect that such a language would require a greater ability for pitch recognition (perfect pitch) and tonal memory (carrying and/or recognizing a tune) than most humans possess. Even Solresol would have been very difficult for most people, even if it were based on the diatonic (7-tone) scale rather than the chromatic (12-tone). Of course, rhythm and possibly timbre (tone color) could be used to help differentiate "words." There is some evidence that humans can make about 5 (7 +/- 2) automatic distinctions along any given perceptual dimension, though training can improve this ability. Most musical scales have 5 or 7 tones, and while there are plausible acoustic and structural reasons which might explain this observation, the limits of human information processing may also be involved. I should think that Solresol would be very hard to learn and use for most people. The elusive T-lang discussed above would probably have to use gliding tones rather than a dozen or so level pitches to construct its lexicon. As far as I know, no tonal language has more than about 5 levels or more than about 8 pitch levels and contours (neumes?). Is this true? -- John ______________________________________________________________________ >From lojbab@access.digex.net Wed Jun 22 09:45:24 1994 From: Logical Language Group Message-Id: <199406221745.AA03851@access2.digex.net> Subject: Re: Tone language Date: Wed, 22 Jun 1994 13:45:24 -0400 (ADT) John H. Chalmers writes: > As far as I know, no tonal language has more than about 5 levels > or more than about 8 pitch levels and contours (neumes?). Is this true? I think the bit about 5 levels maximum is true. While most languages with contour tones have 8 at most, there are exceptions: Cantonese has 11, of which 9 are basic and 2 are marginal (appearing only in colloquial forms). Kam, also spoken in China, of the Kam-Sui branch of Tai, has 15! Ramsey, p. 244: The Kam language is noteworthy for its extraordinarily large number of tone distinctions. Counting six pitch distinctions in "checked" syllables [those which end with a stop], most dialects of Kam are said to have fifteen different tones. This is surely close to a record. The almost unbelievably large number of tone distinctions seems to have resulted historically from at least two tone splits, both of which happened as a result of changes in the initial consonants, particularly devoicing. Kam now has no voicing contrasts. The other Kam-Sui languages have fewer tones and more vowels and more consonants. -- John Cowan sharing account for now e'osai ko sarji la lojban. ______________________________________________________________________ >From viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi Sat Jun 25 00:38:00 1994 From: viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi (Ville Heikkila) Message-Id: <9406241838.AA27334@freeport.uwasa.fi> Subject: Something about Finnish Date: Fri, 24 Jun 1994 21:38:00 +0300 (EET DST) Quoting Irina Rempt: > (Please will some Finn enlighten me on whether Finnish has prepositions > and/or postpositions at all, or is it all done with those glorious > eleven cases?) Yes, there are... They're mostly postpositions, but there are prepositions also (in poetry and things like that there's no difference between them...). They often require the main word should be in specific case (usually genitive), as in many other languages. koiran kanssa = with the dog dog's with talon takana = behind the house house's behind talon sisa"lla" = inside the house house's inside sisa"lla" talossa = inside the house inside in house Sometimes the post/preposition can also be put in different cases... (And ps: as far as I remember, there are _fifteen_ cases in Finnish, I don't master the grammar very well, but eleven seems too few ;) Quoting Edmund Grimley-Evans: > In Hungarian and Finnish the stress is always on the first syllable. > (Please correct me, if any of my examples are wrong. But don't bother > to mention pendantic and rare exceptions to the rules.) This is kind of rare exception... In Finnish 'Aivan!' (= 'Exactly!') the stress is on the second syllable. If the stress was on the first syllable, as it usually is, I think it would not carry its message very well: try this in English: say 'Exactly!' first stressing the first syllable, then stressing the second one. Which one of them sounds better? Viznut.H. _ -- Ville Heikkila Usebol ez joinse tuit; Miskala, Vaajasalmi tot obolros o'Zurs; 77700 Rautalampi dol obol o'Jurs Finland ______________________________________________________________________ >From viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi Sat Jun 25 00:38:43 1994 From: viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi (Ville Heikkila) Message-Id: <9406241838.AA27361@freeport.uwasa.fi> Subject: About descriptions of fictional languages Date: Fri, 24 Jun 1994 21:38:43 +0300 (EET DST) I've seen many detailed descriptions of fictional lgs here in conlang. It's nice to know about grammars and so, but I'd also like to know more about things where the lgs are based: some world description also! I think many of us shares this opinion with me. And, because we're getting so much of these huge lg descriptive texts, It would be nice to see them all collected in some file server (listservs' file systems, ftp's etc) where they could be found by anyone who is interested. Viznut.H. _ -- Ville Heikkila Usebol ez joinse tuit; Miskala, Vaajasalmi tot obolros o'Zurs; 77700 Rautalampi dol obol o'Jurs Finland ______________________________________________________________________ >From viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi Sat Jun 25 00:39:29 1994 From: viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi (Ville Heikkila) Message-Id: <9406241839.AA27389@freeport.uwasa.fi> Subject: A text about "Language Creation" To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Fri, 24 Jun 1994 21:39:29 +0300 (EET DST) I found a text file about language creation on a shareware CD-ROM of a BBS a year or so ago. After I read it, I tried to find some information of contacting the author other than his name (Dan Vanderboom), because the text, though it gave me new ideas and even new points of view, seemed to be suffering of "minor" glottocentrism. Let's have some quotes: > Is the creature naturally peaceful or hostile? For peaceful beings, the > words and syllables will be softer and smoother, while more hostile > races will tend to make sharp, nasty sounds, spitting or barking their > words once in a while. > Prepositions and prepositional phrases are the things that color our > sentences and give them detail. "Under the rock", "around the corner", > "through the roof" are all prepositional phrases. There are so many > prepositions that only a few will be named within these pages. For > more, there can easily be found lists of prepositions in English grammer > texts at your local library. When thinking of prepositions that you may > need, you should consider the nouns you have created. > In the Spanish language, as well as many others, there are male and > female words. This is determined by a suffix, while some other > languages use prefixes. If you wish to do this--and it's not suggested > due to an extreme amount more work--you can do so by formulating your > own suffix/prefix additions to words. But I will show you how, in case > you have other plans for them, such as making them plural, etc. > When adding prefixes or suffixes, don't add more than one or two > letters, as you're significantly change the sound, and thus the meaning, > of the word. > Phase changes you'll want to cover are: singular/plural, gender > (optionally), and other and miscellaneous things (food may be 'hun' for > planted food and 'hunir' for hunted meat food). The CD-ROM may have been So Much Shareware, I'm not too sure. The name of the directory was something like 'unassorted'... The filename was 'language.zip'. If there is one who wants to have a look on this text, he/she can mail me to get it. And if someone has any clue of the origins of this text, then please, share that clue. Viznut.H. _ -- Ville Heikkila Usebol ez joinse tuit; Miskala, Vaajasalmi tot obolros o'Zurs; 77700 Rautalampi dol obol o'Jurs Finland ______________________________________________________________________ >From hmiller@ea.com Sat Jun 25 00:46:54 1994 From: hmiller@ea.com (Herman Miller) Subject: Re: A text about "Language Creation" Date: Sat, 25 Jun 1994 00:46:54 GMT Message-Id: In article viznut@freeport.uwasa.fi (Ville Heikkila) writes: . . . >Let's have some quotes: >> Is the creature naturally peaceful or hostile? For peaceful beings, the >> words and syllables will be softer and smoother, while more hostile >> races will tend to make sharp, nasty sounds, spitting or barking their >> words once in a while. Sometimes it's more fun to do just the opposite. Mizarians are peaceful people, but their language contains no voiced stops, only voiceless ones, and no nasals at all. Not exactly sharp & nasty, but I wouldn't describe it as softer and smoother. Then there's the hostile Leski [l@s'ki:], who have a more "beautiful" language. >> Prepositions and prepositional phrases are the things that color our >> sentences and give them detail. "Under the rock", "around the corner", . . . Why exactly do we use the same word "in" for "in the box", "in town", "in front", "in English"? I would use different words for these in Olaetyan. On the other hand, Olaetyan "a" could be translated "at", "on", or "in", and "y" as "of", "from", or "than". Preposition usage seems to vary quite a bit from language to language. I wonder to what extent this is true in artificial languages that have prepositions or postpositions? Esperanto, from what I remember, has a "catch-all" preposition of indefinite meaning in case one of the regular prepositions didn't fit (a useful concept). "In English" would be an adverb in Esperanto, but what about "in the box", "in town", "in front": would these use the same preposition or different ones? >> In the Spanish language, as well as many others, there are male and >> female words. This is determined by a suffix, while some other . . . I don't use grammatical gender, though there's really no reason not to (in a fictional language). It's just another one of those complications like irregular verbs that no one would ever notice. I do use masculine & feminine suffixes in some languages, though. >> When adding prefixes or suffixes, don't add more than one or two >> letters, as you're significantly change the sound, and thus the meaning, >> of the word. I don't agree with this rule; consider English "-able", Spanish "-mente", Olaetyan "-redhli". >> Phase changes you'll want to cover are: singular/plural, gender >> (optionally), and other and miscellaneous things (food may be 'hun' for >> planted food and 'hunir' for hunted meat food). What about case? Tense, aspect, and mood of verbs? Some languages (like Irish) even inflect their prepositions.