Re: Relational language

Hope this works like I want, im not really familiar on how to post easy to
topics/replies, cant really find an easy FAQ and such...

Thanks for the comment Jim Henry!


>... You might find Rick Harrison's article on verb aspect useful
for ways to derive a lot of specific verbs from a few verb roots.

Thanks for the tip it gave me some extra ideas for derivations.

>... Interesting.  Lojban and some other engineered languages aim to
eliminate syntactic ambiguity, but regard a fair amount of semantic
ambiguity as unavoidable even in a conlang with no arbitrary
homophones.  It sounds like you're trying to create structures
to reduce semantic ambiguity to an arbitrarily small amount?

At the moment im trying to get a better structure for derivations for
morphemes as it didnt work out with only 992 roots with 155 relations
descriptions, in addition to that it quite used up all the rest of the
possibilities. As it stands now i have,

only 16 mainroots so far, the words between () is a description and possible
root words:

-interaction (talk, speak, scream, see, uninteract(prohibit/not acting),
trade, use, interact)
-grouping (add as group, use as group, identicate as group, ungroup, addin
to group)
-creation (create, give birth, help, improve, repair, discreate(like disappear))
-destruction (destroy, break, renew, damaging)
-identification (identify/copula, search, help to identify, unidentify,
find, endarken)
-change (change surface, change inside, change outside(light,small,etc),
normalizing, gradually changing)
-"tijden" (found this required, but im still brainstorming on how to
explain/use it, it would be easily translated "to spent someones time .."
and roots are quite unknown for this one)
-Existence(there is, there is none, exists, help to exist, starts to come),
-Connecting (connect, break apart, engage connecting, relativating, to know,
to have(still thinking about it))
-Placing (as in movement, coming and going, put something on)
-Surfacing (to close/open, surround, cover)
-None (directally takes rootderivations, as in none+idea = idea, where as
interact+idea = idea behind interacting, likewise with: none+location =
location, interact+location = location of described(context) interaction)
-Attraction(like connecting but not as in 'adding up together' or directly
connecting, words like love, hate, pull, going away from, push)
-Supporting (support, encourage, unsupport, follow(not sure))
-"to Or" (another weird verb root, its derivations make up words as
"decision, selection, arrange, or make something an option or an disjunction)


Im still thinking about how to distinguish
faces/forms/objects/relations/animals/ other special words from those root
words without overusing or words that are hardly distinguishable. (for
example only difference is the first consonant: s and sj, doubt that is
easily understandable/learnable for everyone. On top of this it makes it
more redundant capable.)

Im still searching for more derivations, (so far I got 15, which some of
them are actually 'partlly' derivations) to get more further options. The
Interact option already has an 'affix' part which describes through what the
interaction was done. (by matter/by sound,waves/light/etc and those has
whether it is small/big/normal/invisible/inside/etc. This to create words
as: whisper, say, scream, sonar, fibration and as mutual: talk softly, talk,
scream to each other, and other valence aspects: scream together at, scream
after each other, scream  in reaction to, etc.)

>I suspect that may be contradictory with your other goal, but I wish
you luck.  Having easy pronunciation (meaning, I guess, a relatively
small phoneme inventory and restrictive phonotactic constraints)
means that you're not going to have very many possible short
words.  Then either you assign multiple senses to the same short
words (hopefully in widely different semantic fields, so they won't
often occur in the same context and cause confusion, but even
so that seems to contradict your other goal).  Or you expand
your vocabulary to have many highly precise roots and plenty
of affixes to make them even more precise, but would then have
to use a lot of longer words.

So far the pronunication of 'easy words' (as in, not highly structured
placement/relational situations or descriptions, but normal words and verbs)
is about:
(V-af)C-rootVC-deriv(C-passive/causative/normal*valence)(V-thru)(optional-affixes)
Making normal words as big as 3 letters, more complex average verbs 4-6
letters and for now up to 10 letters for highly informated words.
However this is subject to change as the derivations are still being looked on.

>... For describing motion and position, in addition to Ithkuil's
spatial coordinate system, you might look at my gzb's
spacetime postposition system.  It's not perfect -- there
are a few annoying gaps -- but it has the advantage over
Ithkuil of being proven by nine years of experience
to be learnable and speakable in real time.  (I'm not
perfectly fluent in gzb yet, but the postposition system
is one aspect I have learned to use fluently, constructing
ad-hoc precise postpositions for particular situations on the fly.)

I didn't have time to read it thoroughly (site was down first when I tried),
but the Ithkuil description for spatial aspects was a bit odd to me,
although it seems descriptioned well and has a good idea, I rather describe
the view from a "personal view" instead of using the sun (or maybe I didnt
read/understood it that well from what John wrote down). To be honest I
wanted to add more possiblities then diagonal/left/right/forward but
directions between those. (a Sapir-whorf's thingy if I got it right).

As for now I got the biglines written down:
(dont be scared by the amount)
Construction of form/relation:

-Horizontal/vertical/diagonal and kinda any combination of that... (as it
may occur in different looks)

-Mainforms: ball/square/piramides/triangle/etc as main C's with derivations
describing the the length/width/height(depth), to describe how complex as it
is now: a circle might be a line. (if the balance is 1:unlimited, it becomes
a line)

-Holes/oddforms/surface descriptions, are there some odd surface openings
and such

-Connections: where it is connected with another object (described as
mainform as well), and what edge of the object is touching (for example a
square may hit it by a side but also with an edge...)
X-Transition aspect, for example you have a picture of a ball and cube that
are partially "inside" each other, but there is something ambigu about it.
Are the objects completely abrupt 'ball' and 'cube' or does the ball
gradually "convert" into the cube so that changes shape, or does the object
stops to exist when it comes to approaching that side? (To describe this is
quite hard, but lets say that on a side of the above of a cube a ball
"approachs/connects" to the upperedge of the cube. I created an image to
show a bit what I mean:
http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL1395/6824594/13106544/239451810.jpg excuse
me for my bad drawing skills.

-Relational Aspect: how is this related to another object, i thought of
different solutions to this:
X-Describing a form in which objects are described (when identical/about
identical/not relevant order to be precise) uses mainform objects
descriptions, for example 4 pipes are ordered as a square, so every angle of
the triangle has a pipe.
X-Using gradiants and distance + normal/standardized relation concepts. So
you can describe that for example a person in front of you, is actually a
bit to the right.


Of course this all is to describe the most outrageous forms, dont know if
this is a good option for normal explanations as I doubt that the fantasy of
everyone is going that far. So otherwise i should just use the 'big lines'
of using forms (i had written down about 46) and give it a derivation on the
scale of it.

>...Interesting.  You could have a number of short morphemes
for shapes and angles, and a number/measurement system
that lets you describe the relative sizes and distances of
different facial features...?

Im still brainstorming at this part, I wouldn't be surprised if it became
something like I wrote down with the Form description. To explain my
thoughts: I regularly come across faces which im "familiar" with, not as in
family, friends or people I know, but totally unknown people which I relate
to different faces of (un)known people that I have seen before. On top of
that, some of those faces seem to be location-related(at least to me). (To
describe it in better words, I hope..., to distinguish typical
American/europeaan/etc. faces (and hopefully even there
countries/districts)). You could say that this would be another way to
arrange/identify people next to the options: "motherlanguages", "ethnicity",
"involved with group X".


About the phonetic part of the conlang:
So far it uses the typical latin alphabet and combinations of consonants
(kr/rk/sr/st, etc, however im attempting to make the amount as low as possible)
Vowels is a harder aspect (well I guess for people who aren't that familiar
with diphthongs).

Before I created a way to make 155 derivations from the roots, the 155
relations was made up by 3 vowels, a single, dual and triple vowel. It would
look hard at first, "triple vowel? WOW!", but the idea is to break it into
two parts, the 3rd vowel going with the next consonant (as the root ended
with a consonant, easily said: same structure as ithkuil).

But for now I got in total 30 most important relational aspects which would
be easily described by 5 singular vowels and 25 diphthongs (5x5).


Hope that wasn't too much of text..