Re: Language Sketch: Gogido

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?


> 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.


> There's no concept of subjects vs. objects. Rather, everything is
> marked for it's theta role.*
Nice.  Voksigid does much the same, & it was a significant influence
on my gzb, which also marks theta roles with a large inventory
of postpositions.   Ithkuil marks scads of theta roles with its case
system.

> 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?

> 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.)

> 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
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'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?  I seem to recall from
a summary someone (Tom Chappell?) posted a while ago of a
cross-linguistic study of verb inflection and derivation that valency
is marked on verbs in more language than any other category,
and mood is marked in more languages than tense or aspect.
Can't remember where evidentiality/validationality stand in
the ranking.  gzb marks all of the above except valency with optional
modifiers; tense, aspect and mood are marked with core particles
or derivational affixes, and evidentiality/validationality/attitudinality
with adverbs derived from root nouns.

> *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:

http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.php?t=28807

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/gzb/gzb.htm

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