Re: Caste Languages

Roger Mills scripsit:

> There is also the case of the 2-or-more (status) levels in Javanese--
> _ngoko_ for everyday use among intimates and to inferiors, _kromo_
> used toward supreriors.
As of forty years ago, at least, there were six levels:  "plain", "plain
with low honorifics", "plain with high honorifics", "fancy", "convoluted",
"convoluted with high honorifics".  The plain/fancy/convoluted levels affect
almost every open-class lexical item in the language, whereas the honorifics
have more sporadic effects.  If I can dig up my materials on this, I will
post a sample sentence in all six levels.

In addition, there is/was a seventh level: "speak Bahasa Indonesia instead".

ObConlang:  Lojban has seven status markers, representing a scale from
"way below" to "way above", that represent the relative rank of the speaker
and the *referent* (not the listener, unless the listener *is* the referent).
These can also be applied to whole sentences:

        ga'icai le xarju pu citka
        [hauteur][emphatic] the pig [past] eat
        The pig ate (which is utterly beneath my notice).

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
Assent may be registered by a signature, a handshake, or a click of a computer
mouse transmitted across the invisible ether of the Internet. Formality
is not a requisite; any sign, symbol or action, or even willful inaction,
as long as it is unequivocally referable to the promise, may create a contract.
       --_Specht v. Netscape_