Re: Subject: Allnoun langs (was: Telona on the web at last)

>I like this idea.  You appear to be associating the idea of movement
>with the idea of animacy - seems reasonable, but is there a fixed
>group of attributes that makes up the concept of 'animate', or does
>'dapi' simply mean 'a stone which is to be considered animate in some
>contextually relevant way'?
The latter. I should have added that the "i" suffix carries a sense that
said object is animated by some other relevant outside object. "dapi" would
be a stone animated by someone or something. "dapa" would be an active stone
(i.e. self animated, at least to the speaker's/writer's perspective.) Hence
- He drops the stone into the water.
- up dapir shuta
- /water-receptive stone-animate-ready hand-his-active/
but
- The stone drops into the water.
- up dapa
- /water-receptive stone-active/

>Also, would you rely on a speaker's intuitions to class a word as
>animate or inanimate, in which case some words might be interpretable
>in either sense?  Or would you attach animacy to each word rather like
>a grammatical gender or noun class, in which case one might expect
>counter-intuitive exceptions to the semantically obvious choice of
>category (das Maedchen, semantically feminine but grammatically neuter
>in German)?
The former was my first inclination but I chose the latter. I was doing, yet
again, my struggle with my artlangs/conlangs being too regular in form and,
thus, unlike natlangs. So, I decided to create two classes: innately
inanimate -e.g. "dap" /stone/ - and innately animate - e.g. "shar" /person/.

This allows me some of the arbitrariness of natlangs: e.g. are words
animate? or inanimate?

>What a marvellous idea!  I have occasionally played with the idea of
>incorporating gesture or facial expression into a conlang ...
>'grammaticalising' gesture as sign languages do, but weaving the
>meaning into the fabric of the spoken language, rather like pitch in a
>tone language, so that it would simultaneously play a conventionalised
>role in phonetic or syntactic disambiguation, and also, on another
>level, operate as it does in spoken discourse in any language.  (But I
>always gave it up as too complex ... and likely to lead to really ugly
>orthographies :))
I did my best to keep Nenshar as simple as possible and to stay within my
original parameters. This is why I elected to have so few states and only
two facial expressions. I stole the usage of /T/ for "question" from ASL -
to make "You go home" into a question in ASL, one raises one's eyesbrows on
the pertinent sign, or part thereof, for emphasis:
- TYou go home? - Are YOU going home?
- You Tgo home? - Are you GOING home?
- You go Thome? - Are you going HOME?

/V/ for "not" is taken from the eyebrows just an ordinary frown. (Not ASL,
wherein a frown is used for who/what/when/where questions.)

>But - how is one to understand 'not-drops' (in 'up dapir Vshuta'), for
>instance? ...
>
>1)  He does something which is other than dropping the S into the W.
>2)  He does something to the S which causes it to go into the W, but
>without dropping it.
>
>Effectively, this is a question of scope, I suppose.
Yes, I agree re: scope. What I had in mind was your #2. Think of it perhaps
as the /ka-/ prefix in Telona, but as the stone and water have already been
mentioned, they set limits on the image.
- up dapir Vshuta. - He not drops the stone into the water.
- Vup dapir shuta. - He drops the stone not into the water.
- up Vdapir shuta. - He drops the not-stone into the water.

>My gut reaction to that is 'Now what are you going to use word order
>for? The sentence you just quoted could almost be written in Telona,
>so closely does it follow my language's principles - and as far as I
Indeed, this is what struck me when I first read your writeup on Telona.

>can tell, its word order is almost entirely free, as long as you keep
>'koned nepu shuna' under 'akop' and 'shuseth konenir Tshusev' under
>'akal'.  Would you use word order, as in Telona, to indicate the
>topic-comment structure of the utterance?  Or could it have other
>functions?
Yes, emphasis/topicizing (sp?) - the most important part of the "still" is
the part last "painted" (yes, there is some overlap here with the
functionality of /T/).

><smile of recognition> Oh yes ... the shades of the Telona abstract
>nouns which I have forbidden to exist still haunt me in sleepless
>hours ... but I plan to fend them off with the flexible yet
>penetrating sword of metonymy - using a concrete noun to imply the
>abstract.
I'd considered tghe same but have so far avoided actually doing it since
Nenshar is neither in use nor in public access.

I'm curious to know what you'd pick for "love".

>Telona doesn't feel the need for abstracts very often, though.  The
An idea I, too, am trying to stay with in Nenshar.

>syntactic kernel of Telona was formed at the time when I was first
>coming to grips with, and developing a profound dislike of, the
>ruthlessly abstractionalificationalising syntax of scientific language
It's our Germanic heritage. :)

>(it frightens me now how easily I parse that pseudo-word).  Telona is
>specifically designed to avoid abstraction as much as possible.
>(Notice how every Telona word refers to something?  It's not
>accidental...)
Ditto with Nenshar - only objects & states.

><blushing>  But Nenshar and Telona, I agree, are alternate
>incarnations of a very similar underlying idea ... or not even an
>idea, but an underlying impulse, a similar aesthetic of elegance.
Yes, the underlying idea/question/impulse is quite similar.

I'm eager to hear more about Telona as you progress.

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