Re: ANNOUNCE: My new conlang S11

[Multi-reply to conserve posting limits]

On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 03:33:14AM -0000, Christian Thalmann wrote:
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@Q...> wrote:
[...]
> > designing Ebisédian grammar. For a long time I was so obsessed with
> > how to handle verbs, that I completely forgot about stative
> > statements. When I suddenly realized I needed a way to express those
> > as well, it took me a while to try to rationalize it with the
> > verb-centric system that I had developed. (This is one of the reasons
> > stative sentences in Ebisédian are so strange---they were patched on
> > after the fact, so some ugly kludges had to be made.)
>
> I haven't studied Ebisédian in detail, but from what you
> say now and from what I remember of your PDF grammar,
> the definitions of the cases make lots of sense to me,
> and the assignment of meanings to verbless combinations
> of case arguments no less so.
I guess they do make sense in their own way... the difficulty was more
with the overall syntax. It made sense if the sentences existed in
isolation, but when it's part of a larger prose, it seems to be unable
to 'flow' as fluidly as I'd like it to.


[...]
> > Ebisédian uses another (some may consider 'crazy') way of expressing
> > position: the combination of the conveyant (the thing being owned)
> > with the receptive (the owner). This is actually adapted from Greek,
> > where the dative case is used for the owner. The receptive case does
> > behave somewhat like a dative. One way to understand this is that two
> > people are sitting at a table deciding to whom object X on the table
> > belongs. The result of the decision would be the transferring of X to
> > the owner, so the owner would be in the receptive. Hence the
> > conveyant-receptive paradigm.
>
> That use of the dative seems intuitive to the point of being
> boring to me, as a native speaker ("natblab"? ;o) of a lang
> that routinely parses "it is to me" as "it belongs to me".
Right, except that the receptive isn't quite the same as the dative.
:-)


> I think you need to be less apologetic and more proud about
> your grammar.  The vocabulary and the concepts it describes
> are a wholly different matter, of course.  You have every
> right to apologize for those.  :))
lol... :-)  Which is probably why I think Tatari Faran would be much
more palatable to, uh, mere earthlings. ;-) Tatari Faran is
essentially Ebisédian's case system (and vocabulary, for that matter)
done right.


[...]
> > 	fia nei kuini   bibi sei bunari kei dakat.
> > 	Fia RCP acquire doll CVY woman  ORG COMPL
> > 	Fia acquires a doll from the woman.
> >
> > 	fia nei kuini   bibi sei dakat.
> > 	Fia RCP acquire doll CVY COMPL
> > 	Fia acquires a doll. / Fia has a doll.
>
> Apart from the seemingly unnecessarily large predicate
> (what is that complement good for anyway?), I see
> nothing wrong with that.  And the syllable count
> awareness is just a freaky little obsession of mine.  ;)
[...]

Well, although I've chosen to write the case clitic separately from
the noun itself, it really should be thought of as part of the noun.
As for the complement... I'm starting to feel like I'm repeating
myself, so perhaps I should just point to the (hopefully lucid)
explanation contained in:

	http://conlang.eusebeia.dyndns.org/fara/tutorial.pdf



On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 03:03:04PM +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
[...]
> > On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 11:47:53PM +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> > [...]
> > > Speaking of discoveries: when translating the Fukhian grammar from
> > > German into English, I was surprised to see that by my current
> > > analysis, Fukhian does not have verbs.  Just nouns and adjectives.  Or
> > > better: nouns and verbs syntactically behave so similarly that, when
> > > not knowing the meaning, it is impossible to tell from a sentence
> > > whether a stem is a verb stem or a noun stem.  That's because:
> > [...]
>
> Just another comment: after having written this, I doubted again about
> these findings and checked the original grammar (the German version).
> But indeed, there's no distinction between noun stems and verb stems,
> although throughout the grammar, these terms are used.
That's an interesting existential question: if X and Y look the same,
has the same properties, and essentially behaves the same way, are
they the same thing? :-)


[...]
> That's about the kind of stuff I noticed in Fukhian, too.  In Fukhian,
> you can attach case endings to 'verb' stems and you can use the plain
> noun stem as a predicate (there are not verb affixes, only clitics).
> This led to my new analysis.
Cool. I should rethink the verb/noun distinction in Tatari Faran.
Right now, it's starting to acquire a personality of its own, and is
starting to scream at me that the distinction may not be as clearcut
as I'd made it out to be.


> The basic structure of a Fukhian sentence is:
>
>   N-<case>-<verbal_clitics> N-<case> N-<case> ... N-<case>.
>
> The order of the N-<case> is free, however the focus changes depending
> on order.  The grammar says that 'any constituent can be made the verb
> by fronting it'.
>
> E.g.:
[...]
> Thus for an X, an unknown stem, cannot predict whether it's a verb
> stem or a noun stem.  The copulaless sentences look the same (and
> after your description, it must be about the same in Ebisedian):
In Ebisédian, there's a clear distinction between verbs and nouns.
It's Tatari Faran where this distinction seems a bit blurry.


[...]
> Funny enough, however, adjectives are a separate category.  Still
> adjective stems can directly be used as verbs (but not vice versa...):
>
>    dal  mis
>    dal  mis-0
>    big  man-NOM
>    'The man is big.'
>
> I now see that Fukhian is also polysynthetic, isn't it?  Very strange!
I like it! The use of clitics to mark verbs/aspect/tense is very cool.


> I should start an investigation project about good ol' Fukhian. :-)
:-)


[...]
> > Fluency, after all, is one of my goals in conlanging... even if I
> > never actually attain to it. :-P
>
> This is a difference: it's not a goal for me.  However, becoming able
> to at least pronounce the langs is becoming a more and more important
> goal for me, especially after listening to the impressive sound
> samples that have recently be posted here.
Would fluency become a goal for you if, by some crazy circumstances,
there would be conlang meetings where people actually conversed in
their conlangs? ;-)


[...]
> > However, if there is no originative NP, the meaning becomes "to have".
> > E.g.:
> >
> > 	fia nei kuini   bibi sei bunari kei dakat.
> > 	Fia RCP acquire doll CVY woman  ORG COMPL
> > 	Fia acquires a doll from the woman.
> >
> > 	fia nei kuini   bibi sei dakat.
> > 	Fia RCP acquire doll CVY COMPL
> > 	Fia acquires a doll. / Fia has a doll.
>
> This is a bit strange to me: the aspect is totally different in
> 'acquire' and 'have'.  No perfect aspect marker necessary to derive
> 'have got' from 'get'?
Tense/aspect marking is optional in Tatari Faran. If you *really*
wanted to draw a distinction, you could have _kuini kana ... dakat_
for "I acquire a doll (now)" vs. _kuini nara ... dakat_ for "I have a
doll (I acquired it in the past)".


[...]
> > =-O  When I conlang, I do have the aspiration (if not the ability) to
> > be able to compose sentences on the fly.
>
> No, I don't have that.  I would feel too limited in conlanging with
> this constraint. :-)
:-) For me, I feel that it would be too limiting if I had to resort to
software to compose sentences for me, esp. if I hope to someday be
able to converse in my conlang!


[...]
> > Tatari Faran has quite a number of sandhi rules which I sometimes
> > get wrong. But I'm learning.
>
> Hehe. ;-)  Even in Da Mätz se Basa, I make serious mistakes, although
> it's very close to my L1.  That's a language that has no Lisp
> grammar yet...
[...]

Heh. I like how you conlang by creating Lisp grammars. Does that mean
you can do automatic translation between your conlangs? (That'd be
awesome.) Perhaps the Universal Translator *is* possible after all...!
;-)


T

--
Windows: the ultimate triumph of marketing over technology. -- Adrian von
Bidder

Reply