Re: First thoughts on Imperial

En réponse à Ian Spackman :


>Basic idea:
>
>Different classes of noun have different inherent cases, and are marked
>*only* when used in a different function.  So there is likely to be an
>animate->agent class,
Which would contain people (all people? Only those speaking Imperial? Only
those of the "right" "race"/nationality/religion/age/etc...? ;))) ), gods
and maybe a few irregular nouns I guess :) .

>  an inanimate->patient class, a place->locative class
>(and maybe even a container->inessive class), a tool->instrument
>class.  Hm, any others?
Unless your conculture is animistic and treats natural phenomena as
animated spirits, I'd also have a natural phenomenon->causative class, for
things that usually *cause* other things to happen (like fire *causes*
things to burn) without being animate agents themselves. A
road/ways->perlative class is also an option, if you have such a perlative
case (the case of the place you pass by to go from one point to the other).
Or you could go the Latin way (in terms of case use) and consider that ways
are instruments from going from a place to another.

>Question: does this occur in natlangs?  (I think the answer is yes, or at
>least something similar occurs, when it comes to the first two
>classes.)
Similar yes. Take for instance Latin and all other IE languages with a
neuter gender and case distinctions. The neuter gender has always identical
nominative and accusative, which has led (some?) linguists to conclude that
PIE had an animate-inanimate distinction, with the inanimate base form
being patientive. And I think I've heard of other languages having the same
kind of markings (i.e. marking only a noun when it occurs in a function
that is unexpected from its semantic value).

>   And if not, does it at least seem plausible?
Very! It follows the principle of least effort: only mark what's
unexpected. Marking the expected is a waste of time and effort.

>Extended idea:
>
>This might be particularly interesting if the different classes are
>different parts of speech.  But this raises the problem: what could I do
>that would be sufficient that they would be analyzed as different parts of
>speech?
The problem is that to be considered as different parts of speech,
different words must have very different usual functions in the sentence,
and non-overlapping functions. And derivational phenomena that turn a word
of a PoS to a word of another PoS must usually (not always, but often) also
involve at least slight semantic changes (think of be -> being - not the
gerund, which is just a verbal form, but the noun -. The noun "being" is
not just the noun reflection of "be". It has a meaning of its own - here:
"animated, living creature" -). And the way those two words influence
others must be different enough, grammatically speaking. If those three
criteria are not met, then you cannot speak of different parts of speech.
So unless you restrict your classes so that for instance an instrument can
never be used as patient (you need to use another root, or a derivational
process which creates a word of another PoS, with all it implies, like
different markings for case, or gender, or number, etc...), and that you
give them vastly different relationships with other PoS, you will have
difficulties having people considering your noun classes as different parts
of speech (Occam's razor in full glory :)) ).

>It's often discussed that languages don't need such-and-such POS - there's
>such a discussion going on now - but I don't think I've ever seen mention
>of languages with more PsOS than English.  (I'm not speaking here of what I
>call "minor" PsOS - the sort of things than traditionally get lumped with
>adverbs and now are often lumped together as particles, but of major
>classes.)
Let me see. A simple analysis of English tells me that it has 6 PoS:
substantives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and the rest
(onomatopoeia, etc...), with some overlap, but not enough to just wipe out
any of those PoS (that you can say "verbing weirds language" doesn't mean
that adjectives and verbs are a single PoS ;))) ). Remark that I put nouns
and adjectives in the same PoS because the overlap is big there. English
doesn't seem to mind using nouns without modification as adjectives, and
even if the other way is less common, and somewhat restricted, it's not
unknown. Of course, nouns can take plural marks, while nominalised
adjectives can normally never, but that's to me more because nominalised
adjectives only refer to collective entities (like nationalities) and
English has quite a few nouns that refer only to collective entities and
that cannot take the plural ending. If I analyse French the same way, I get
at least 7 PoS, because I cannot lump together nouns and adjectives as I
did with English (and the overlap is much less than in English). Although
it's true that adjectives in French have the same endings as nouns, and can
often be used nominally, the opposite is completely false (it's not
possible in French to use nouns as adjectives without some derivation) and
adjectives can change gender inside their paradigm, while nouns can only do
so derivationally, when they can. And if I take Dutch, a simple analysis
would give me 8 PoS, because there I have to separate conjuctions of
coordinations (which can be used without causing subject-verb inversion or
pushing the verb at the end of the clause) from both adverbs (which cause
subject-verb inversion) and conjuctions of subordination (which push the
verb at the end of the clause). Note that in classical analysis of French,
there is also a distinction between conjunctions of coordination ("mais ou
et donc or ni car puis") and conjunctions of subordination. It feels a bit
shaky to me, and Dutch was a better example in this case anyway. As for
English, the conjunctions of coordination seem to me to be both in overlap
with adverbs and conjunctions of subordination, so I didn't know if I
should call them a separate PoS.

And I've only talked about two of the languages I know. So I don't know if
it's that uncommon to have languages with more PoS than English.

Of course, my analyses were simple, and probably full of holes. With a
correct analyses and a good use of Occam's razor, it may be possible to get
less PoS for French and Dutch. But if it is possible, then the same
arguments will probably decrease the number of PoS in English too.

>   And I wonder if this is because (a) I am ignorant of any such
>analyses, (b) analysts are still biased by classical analyses,
Classical analyses, in my experience, usually give *more* PoS than
necessary ;))) .

>  or (c)
>English really is abnormally complex.  (Quite likely a combination of the
>three, of course!)
In my opinion, it's just as complex as most PIE languages, in terms of PoS.

>But if (b) is at least part of the problem, then I wonder if even giving my
>different nounoids very different morphologies, or setting things up such
>that the relationship between the classes is clearly one of derivational
>not inflectional morphology, would be enough to stop people thinking of
>them as nouns....
If something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck. In
other words, you'll have to make your classes *extremely* different (in
both behaviour and influence on other PoS) to get them to be considered
different PoS.

Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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