Re: Bowtudgelean

David J. Peterson wrote:
> Carl:
> <<
> 1. Bowtudgelean has ten states of definiteness.  Most languages only
> distinguish between definite and indefinite; mine distinguishes
> different types of definiteness and inflects nouns, pronouns, and
> adjectives accordingly:
>  >>
>
> Gundel et al.* identified a maximum of six possible states of definiteness
> (what they call "givenness"), and all languages encode them (but
> not all the same way, and not all explicitly, of course).  So while
> English has simply "a" and "the", it actually has various strategies
> to produce each of the six points on the givenness hierarchy (as
> do all other languages).  For more info, there was a discussion on
> Conlang a few years back:
>
> <http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0505A&L=CONLANG&P=R169>
>
> It would seem that the difference in Bowtudgelean is not the
> things it encodes, but how regularly it encodes them (and also
> that it treats certain items as similar that Gundel et al., for
> example, would not).

I don't follow.  I'm not sure what you mean by "how regularly it encodes
them".

I looked the post over and I think Bowtudgelean states are a different
dimension from the ones listed.  Perhaps "state" is the wrong word for
the distinction Bowtudgelean makes?

That post describes a distinction of to what degree a thing is
identified, whereas Bowtudgelean state distinguish the manner in which
something is identified.  I could see how "state" could be more
appropriate name for the former distinction.  I'm listening if anyone
has any better suggestions.


> So, with this set of items:
>
> Carl:
> <<
> First Person: is or includes the speaker
> Second Person: is or inlcudes the listener
> Nominal: the word is a name
> Referred: something recently spoken of
> Indicated: a limiting adjective (or phrase) follows
> Local: the thing is near the speaker
> Remote: the thing is distant from the speaker
> Past: the thing happened in the past
> Future: the thing happened in the future
> Indefinite: indefinite
>  >>
>
> What if something is indefinite and in the future (say, a
> party that might happen)?
Indefinite.

Future state is not used for everything that occurs in the future; it's
used if the fact that it occurs in the future is what's identifying the
thing being spoken of.


> Or what about something
> next to the speaker that happened in the past that was
> recently spoken of (say, a guy died next to him twenty
> years ago, and someone else was just talking about him)?
Referred, unless the speaker needs to make a constrast or resolve an
ambiguity.


> Can you stack these?
Nope, but it's not needed.  Something close to the speaker isn't
required to be in the local state, unless the speaker wishes to identify
the thing being spoken of by the fact that it's close to him or her.
Usually there isn't much of a dilemma: you only need to identify
something once.

So in the above case, just pick the most convenient means to identify
the thing being spoken of; referred state is usually enough.


Thanks for the feedback.

Carl Banks


> *As I said in the original post way back when, Gundel et al.'s
> paper is problematic--not so much in that their givenness
> hierarchy is wrong or uninteresting, but the way they applied it
> to certain natural languages seems puzzling.
>
> -David
> *******************************************************************
> "sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
> "No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
>
> -Jim Morrison
>
> http://dedalvs.free.fr/
>
> On Apr 27, 2008, at 10∞06 AM, Carl Banks wrote:
>
>> Bimo, dorahay,
>>
>>
>> I have a brief description of Bowtudgelean (version 0.1) at
>> http://www.aerojockey.com/blog/bowtudgelean1.html
>>
>> I'm curious how common some of my "innovations" are.  I've read a lot of
>> conlang archives and never saw much discussion about these particular
>> ideas.
>>
>>
>> 1. Bowtudgelean has ten states of definiteness.  Most languages only
>> distinguish between definite and indefinite; mine distinguishes
>> different types of definiteness and inflects nouns, pronouns, and
>> adjectives accordingly:
>>
>> First Person: is or includes the speaker
>> Second Person: is or inlcudes the listener
>> Nominal: the word is a name
>> Referred: something recently spoken of
>> Indicated: a limiting adjective (or phrase) follows
>> Local: the thing is near the speaker
>> Remote: the thing is distant from the speaker
>> Past: the thing happened in the past
>> Future: the thing happened in the future
>> Indefinite: indefinite
>>
>> Adjectives agree with nouns and pronouns in state.  That's why there is
>> a first person state: the adjective gets a different state ending in
>> that case.  There are no nouns in first person state of course (except
>> for appositives; but appositives take adjectival endings).
>>
>> I got this idea from Arabic, which has three states.  (Though it's not
>> the same thing, because the construct state in Arabic carries no
>> semantic value.  Still, construct is somewhat comparable to indicted
>> state in Bowtudgelean.)
>>
>>
>> 2. Bowtudgelan doesn't have any sort of fixed framework for participants
>> of actions to fit into.  There are no cases; no agents and patients; no
>> triggers; not anything like that.  Instead, each verb carries its own
>> set of proclitic markers that indicate participants.
>>
>> The set of markers a verb uses (called the signature) has to be learned
>> as part of the verb, but there are common signatures that can be thought
>> of as conjugations.  For example, one such conjugation is for verbs of
>> manipulation (where a person physically manipulates an object) which
>> usually use the za-epu- signature.  "Za" precedes the manipulator; "epu"
>> the thing being manipulated.
>>
>> For a different verb, the "agent" might have a different marker
>> altoghether.  For example, the verb "azhde" uses the signature
>> ar-to-mogi- ("ar" preceding the builder, "tor" the material used, and
>> "mogi" the resulting structure).
>>
>> I'm pretty sure this never happens in any natlang (it's probably
>> linguistically unstable).  I wonder if there are any other conlangs that
>> do anything like this?
>>
>> I imagine some poeple might wince at this, but I got the idea from
>> computer languages.  In Python, when calling a function, the arguments
>> come in a specific order:
>>
>>     open("somefile.txt","rw")
>>
>> But it's also possible to use keyword arguments:
>>
>>     open(filename="somefile.txt",mode="rw")
>>
>> Furthermore, the keyword arguments don't need to appear in the same
>> order as in the fixed order call:
>>
>>     open(mode="rw",filename="somefile.txt")
>>
>> Translating this idea to human languages I came up with the idea of
>> participant markers.
>>
>>
>> Carl Banks
>