Re: Ebisedian, or takrem e Teoh (earth to Teoh) :)

Well, my personal, if temporary, abode is on Earth as my Creator has
assigned to me; it's just my Ebisedian informants who live in the
Ferochromon. :-)

On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 06:40:44PM -0500, Sally Caves wrote:
[snip]
> I don't know where David Bell is... whether or not he's still subscribed to
> CONLANG or what, but we miss him.
Surely Mr. Cowan can exercise his Strange Powers to find out? :-)

[snip]
> >         http://quickfur.ath.cx:8080/~hsteoh/conlang/tutorial.pdf
>
> Oh, Stars above!  I lost your other reference to it months ago (didn't you
> have this up before?), so I'm so glad you provided this again!  And in pdf
> format, too, which means if I print it out it will look like a book.
I believe I've posted it numerous times, although possibly buried deep in
the usual off-topic threads we get digressed into, so it may not be
immediately obvious.

[snip]
> get new toner, though.  Now then.  I got as far as the originative and the
> receptive case with the examples of  "I look at the man" and "I see the man"
> and I thought HOLY MOLY!  This is sort of like Teonaht's volitional system!
> Yryi, il zef ry ke, or Yry, il zef ry ken:  I actively direct my eyeballs at
> the man versus the man comes into my line of sight.  Yes YES!  Only
> expressed in such an original way.
That's one funny thing about Ebisedian... it seems to intersect so many
examples in other langs, natlang or conlang, yet it branches off in its
own totally unique ways from those little, one might say coincidential,
points of reference.

>  I will go on with this (husband calling
> me to restaurant--last nights gig was too exhausting for either of us to
> cook), but I wanted to say that right from the get-go, H.S. TEOh has proved
> that he belongs in TEOnhea, as an instructor to Teonaht logophyles. :)
LOL... an analogous compliment in Ebisedian would probably be to call one
a _oKasani'_ [?ok_hasa"ni]. A (very crude) translation of that term would
be "Expert" (with a capital E, mind you, it's a proper noun), in the sense
of "guru", or "master". (I leave it to you to look it up in the Ebisedian
lexicon should you desire more details.)

> (The stative is strong in T. as well, especially with the -ndi verbs and the
> zero copula).  I also like your imaginative use of the locative as vocative.
> What type of language would you call this?  (I know, been discussed already,
> but I'm late.)
I think the consensus in the most recent discussion on this topic is that
Ebisedian is a semantic-marking language. I.e., noun cases in its core
grammatical structure are determined semantically rather than
syntactically like in accusative languages.

>  It seems that you have a very creative structure that
> devises new categories and new concepts for word relations that are
> expressed in other languages in more traditional ways.
Well, I've to admit that the most of the foundational parts of Ebisedian
were laid during the initial excitement of discovering CONLANG, so there
are a lot of gratuitously different features, just because. (Such as the
nullar noun number; the optionality of verbs (or any part of speech for
that matter); or perhaps more the maggelitinous pronominal system, which
only has 1st person singulars and no 2nd/3rd person distinctions
whatsoever.)

However, the one thing that I had formed long before I stumbled across
CONLANG is the case system. You might consider that as my answer to the
what I considered the "problem" of the passive in accusative languages.
Basically, at the time I regarded the passive as a redundant construction
semantically, because "X is Y'd by Z" is the same as "Z Y's X" (if you'll
forgive my programmer's tendency of speaking in terms of variables). And
things get rather muddy when you start introducing indirect objects and
turn those into subjects (antipassive contruction?). So I imagined a
language where the active and its passive equivalent would be identically
expressed. There would be no "problem" with passives, since they would be
identical to the active. It didn't take very long for me to realize that
for such a system to work, it must necessarily assign noun cases by
semantics rather than syntax.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I began with 3 cases, the originative,
the conveyant, and the receptive. I decided that for every action, I would
classify one party as the originator of the action, and the other as the
party the action is directed at, and the conveyant is what is conveyed by
the action from the originator to the recipient. Ebisedian's current
5-case system is basically an extension of this basic concept.

[snip]
> Seriously, Mr. Teoh, or however I'm supposed to address you (in Teonaht it
> comes out as the surprisingly funny Hmeo Hteo!);
Most people around me IRL call me "Teoh" (that's [t_hio]), at least on
this continent. It seems more easily memorable to people who are
unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies of Chinese "dialects".

> Seriously, Hmeo Hteo, I'm disappointed you didn't take my Lunatic
> (Celticonlang) Survey.  If you did, then I'm an idiot--unmemorious,
> kicked by the god of fools and the goddess of lost things.
Actually, I did begin replying to it, but for various reasons which I
can't remember now, I never completed it and never sent it.

> You can skip the Celticonlang part, even the Tolkien part, if it's not
> relevant.  May I issue it to you, because I'm interested in hearing your
> answers to my specific questions about attitudes towards conlanging and
> obscurity, to issues of demographics and profession, how you came up
> with Ebisedian, and generally more of the stuff you express above.
>
> Hdar vesry?  (may I?)
[snip]

ji'e. ["dZi?&] (Yes.)

Or more idiomatically,

0so'. [?A"so] (It should be so.)

Sure, feel free to send it to me again. This time I promise I'll reach the
end before I change my mind. :-)


T

--
It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
-- Sammy

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