Re: Language Sketch: Gogido

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 4:59 PM, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 3:19 PM, Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...> wrote:
>
>> b- bilabial plosive
>> d- dental or alveolar plosive
>> g- vela or uvular plosive
> <snip>
>
> Interesting choice, to represent sounds of indifferent voicing
> with Latin letters usually associated with voiced consonants.
> Most conlangs with no voiced plosives or fricatives, or where
> voicing isn't significant, use |p t k| etc.    What does this choice
> imply, if anything?
It implies that my default pronunciation in most cases is voiced,
although there's free variation between the voiced and unvoiced
allophones.
It also implies that, from a written aesthetics point of view, I
wanted it to look significantly different from Hawai'ian or Toki Pona.

>> Pure Vowels-
>> a- /a/, /A/, /{/
>> e- /e/, /E/, /I/
>> i- /i/
>> o- /o/
>> u- /u/
>
>> Diphthongs-
>> ai, ei, oi, ao
>
> If you're going for an inventory pronouncable by the maximum
> range of people, maybe a three-vowel system (/a i u/) might
> be better.  I had a sketch of a fauxlang once that had three
> basic vowels, then length distinctions and diphthongs
> which could optionally be realized as distinct vowels with
> e.g. a glottal stop between, so /a:/ and /a?a/, or /aj/ and /a?i/
> etc. were allophones.
How common are phonemic vowel length distinctions?
My lexicon at the moment is at the point where I could completely
replace the vowel system if I really wanted to, but it would be more
convenient to just keep going with the same writing system at least.
I wanted a mid-sized vowel set to help offset the relatively small
consonant inventory, so there are still lots of one- and two-syllable
words available, and balanced that out by using lots of allophonic
vowels. There are more that I was considering putting in, but I've
been having trouble deciding what the most logical groupings are.
Also, I wanted lots of distinct vowels to use as word-ending
part-of-speech markers (because final consonants are disallowed), but
that system is sort of up in the air at the moment. Primarily, I'm
wondering whether I should have the word endings be part of the root
morphemes which just happen to be standardized, or whether they should
be separable type-marking affixes which can be replaced during
derivation.

>> There's a default order of Agent-Verb-Patient, in which case explicit
>> markings are elided (and it works basically like SVO word order), but
>
> What do you do with experiencer-verb-focus or agent-verb-focus or
> force-verb-patient sentences, etc.?  Is there any way for those
> arguments to have the preposition elided if they're in a default position relative to
> the verb, or do
> they always have to have a preposition marking them?
There's no explicit verb focusing. Topicality / definiteness /
emphasis can be indicated by varying the phrase order. I toyed with
the idea of having a default order for a larger number of theta-roles
that would allow for eliding prepositions, but I decided that made it
too complex. So, in the current system, only agent and patient can
have prepositions elided, and everything else *must* be marked with a
preposition. Parsing goes like this:

1. Check if there are any un-determined (unmarked) arguments. If so,
continue. If not, you're done.
2. Check to see if there's already a determined agent. If so, then the
unmarked argument is determined to be the patient. If not, then the
first unmarked argument is determined to be the patient. Go back to
step one.

Incidentally, this allows for multiple patients in a single clause.
So, instead of saying "I ate breakfast and lunch and dinner", you can
say "I ate breakfast lunch dinner", where "I ate" is assumed to apply
to each patient separately. Means the same thing, but avoids using
conjunctions, and you could even do something like "breakfast I-AG ate
lunch dinner" to move the different patients around to different
positions. And there's probably at least one case where that would be
useful, probably involving poetry.

You can have multiple agents or multiple anything-elses, too, but then
all of them must be marked- no eliding the agent preposition if there
are multiple agents. This doesn't leave patient as a default unmarked
form, though, because you can still use the patient marker in order to
invert agent/patient order with an unmarked agent.

>> I'm a bit iffy on analyzing the agent/patient markers as prepositions
>> rather than a separate class of particles, but they do behave in the
>> same way as definitely-prepositional words which also assign theta
>> roles.
>
> In gzb I have a morphological distinction between spacetime postpositions
> and abstract postpositions; most of the latter encode theta roles, and
> the set is open-ended.  (The spacetime postpositions also encode
> the theta roles "path" and "location" in various ways, most of them
> highly specific.)
Interesting. I might consider doing something like that.

>> Perhaps it would be useful to make a distinction between adverbial
>> prepositional phrases and adjectival prepositional phrases (I'm not
>> doing that here, because Gogido has no distinction between adverbs and
>> adjectives, but it could be a neat feature for some other language).
>
> I think Larry Sulky made that distinction in his Konya and/or Ilomi, with
I shall have to look those up, then.

> an inflection or derivation of the prepositions.  He thought it would help
> resolve ambiguity to always mark whether a prepositional phrase
> applies to its immediate preceding noun, or to the verb wherever
> it might be.  Similarly, it might make sense to have a way to
> mark whether a given prepositional phrase applies to the immediately
> preceding noun or to some other earlier noun...?
I can think of lots of places where that might be useful. But it could
get very complicated with multiple nesting levels.
I came up with a completely unambiguous system that replaces
adpositions with another class of verbs, but it quickly becomes hard
to follow with several nesting levels.

> I'm not sure how
> often real ambiguity as opposed to theoretical would result without
> such marking; e.g. in "she killed him with the gun in the library",
> "in the library" could theoretically apply to "gun" but obviously, from the
> pragmatics  of the situation, applies to "killed".
>
>> There's no grammatical number, gender, or case, and tense is optional
>> (marked with tense/aspect particles).
>
> What about valency, evidentiality and mood?
Valency is unmarked. You can apply any number or type of arguments to
any verb, although what that *means* may be rather opaque in many
cases.
Evidentiality at the moment is unmarked, and likely to stay that way
in order to keep the grammar small. There are modal particles for
marking conditional and imperative.

>> *On the subject of theta-role marking, I had another idea for sentence
>> structure which I don't think I've seen before, and I wonder what
>> langs, if any, employ it. The idea is to have the theta-role
>> assignment order be integrated into the meaning of every verb. Or,
>
> Sounds  like Lojban, maybe Loglan as well.  I'm not sure, but I
> think it's one of the aspects of the language that make it particularly
> hard to learn, memorizing the purely word-order based argument
> structure of each predicate word.  (So I hear from some people
> who've tried to learn it; I haven't seriously tried.)   See here:
Huh. Interesting. I've done the occasional cursory looking-over of
Lojban related stuff, but never absorbed that bit.

-l.

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