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

----- Original Message -----
From: "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>


> 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. :-)
I figured; :)  It's just that you remarked that you deleted a number of
things, so I wanted to catch your attention!

> > 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.)
Esry dey... and of course I expect everybody to look up my words in my
Teonaht lexicon, which unfortunately is still quite incomplete, and leaves
out words like "daughter" and "although" and "tree," which I use constantly.
It's being cobbled together by things I remember, things I have to invent,
and things I'm drawing gradually from the yellowed, thumbed material from
two decades ago.

> > (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.
I wonder what natural languages are semantically marked.

> 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.)
Hmmm.  The Ebisedians are very self-focussed? :)  I think Paul has an
interesting number and person distinction.

> 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.
Very true.

> 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.
It's actually very triadic.  A grammatical relationship has to be created by
a third thing, the conveyant.  The Teonim like that.

> > 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.
Okay, Teoh it is, Teoh.  I'll find out what continent from your survey.

> > 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.
> Sure, feel free to send it to me again. This time I promise I'll reach the
> end before I change my mind. :-)
Okay, I'll send it to you privately.  And you can decide whether you want to
post it.  Most others did.  That could be an incentive!

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat, etc.