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

From:Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...>
Date:Wednesday, April 23, 2003, 22:37
>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. _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus