CONLANG Digest - 26 Mar 2001

> From:    Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
> Subject: Re: feature name help  (also re: conlang digest 21-22 mar)
>
> _doing_ and _misunderstanding_ are GERUNDS.
>
[schnipf]
>
> Ah, deverbal adjective (with passive meaning: woman _murdered by him_?) -
> sounds more like a GERUNDIVE.
Thank you.  My doubts have DISSOLVED and I am no longer in the DARK.

;)

> From:    Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
> Subject: Re: Hadwan 'gerundive'
>
> And in this use, it looks like an active deverbal noun, thus a "gerund".
> Strangely enough, those two different notions look naturally connected in
your
> derivation.
There *is* some kind of connection that my brain made--like I said, I only
had the 'gerund' use first, not the 'gerundive'.  I was going to try to put
the explanation of how I saw the connection in my message last night, but it
was late and I couldn't find clear words for it.   Now I am wary of
trying...  [And it's still late, anyway]

> It is interesting and makes it even more worth keeping. As for the
> name, I'd go for "gerundive". But that's only personal taste.
I think both will do for now (gerund or gerundive, depending on function)
but I can call it 'gerundive' in the generic.

> > Well, I recognize the proximity to a gerund, although I couldn't really
> > find any reference to gerunds inflecting for person, so I was wondering
if
> > there might be a more descriptive name.
>
> Well, when you say "my understanding" you do nothing else but inflecting a
> gerund for person, even if actually the gerund itself is not inflected, in
> English finite verbs aren't inflected either ("I understand" has the same
> structure as "my understanding", even if the pronouns are not the same).
Okay, this is true.

> From:    Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
> Subject: Re: CHAT: poofs and yanks
>
> Well, the presence of so many USA inhabitants has to do with their
> overrepresentation on the Internet. As for the presence of so many gay
people, a
> fellow Esperantist told me a few days ago that strangely enough 80% of the
> people working at the seat of the UEA (the Universala Esperanta Asocio,
the
> Esperantist association which connects all other Esperantist associations
in the
> world) were gay. Maybe there's really a connection between being gay and
being
> interested in conlangs...
Or possibly linguistics in general.  Who was it that had the 'Gay Linguistic
Cabal' meme?

> From:    Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
> Subject: Re: English plurals and possessives
>
> On the other hand, in a future English I once worked on, where the
> morphological genitive was lost, apostrophe was still used for
> possession.  For example "The boy' hat" = ModEng "The boy's hat", plural
> possession being written the same as today, "The boys' hat".
Hoozitsface still puts that kind of thing in "for goodness' sake" or
(bizarrely) "for conscience' sake", which alarmed me.
(I think it was Strunk and White?)  Seeing apostrophe between e and # is too
much.

What also bugs me is apostrophe in making plurals of letters (like "seven
a's"), by people who know better in other cases.  [I don't like prescriptive
grammar, but I willingly indulge in learn-how-to-spellism.]

> From:    "Tim Judge, Erion Telepalda" <judget@...>
> Subject: Re: CHAT: poofs and yanks
>
> >And Robert makes four.
>
> Hey Tim makes 5!
I join this number, but I'm still open to doubt.

> From:    Shreyas Sampat <nsampat@...>
> Subject: Re: General Question
>
> Hmmm...
> I normally lurk on this list; the conversation is a little technical for
me,
> and the assumed level of knowledge is rather more than what I have.  I can
> only sit back and be amazed.  (That Hadwan deverbal adjective discussion
was
> really quite intriguing.)
Aw, shucks..

> This discussion aboot conlangers being lefthanded, gay, and bearded, and
> this other about L. Gerholz's art gallery, have led me to wonder whether
> those conlangers that don't fit into the first three categories (I'm
> personally left-handed and in serious consideration of being bearded in
the
> future) are writers, painters, or artists of some other non-conlanger
> stripe.  Are they?
Yeah, I do.  I'm technically a graphic design major. (I don't think
animation is its own major yet here, just a separate emphasis.)  However,
being required to it for school has mysteriously limited [my doing] it
anywhere else. (GERUND.)

I suppose if I were a linguistics major I'd have abandoned conlangs and be a
full-fledged artist by now ;p

> ObConlang:
> I had also been wondering about the plausibility of a phonemic "rest", a
> pause where no sound is produced.  (or at least the volume of utterance
> falls sharply)  This popped into my head while I was thinking about my
> newest conlanging project, an as-yet-unnamed tonal sort of thing where
> absolute pitches are ...the term is lexical, I think... and some
inflections
> impose changes in nearby pitch, or general shifts up or down for the
> duration of the sentence.  I figured, with all this musicality, and three
> phonemic vowel lengths, a phonemic rest would be in order as well.
> Comments? Help? Please?
It sounds like a 'new' kind of change.  Usually one expects those "rests"
between lexical items, not within them.

But say it kind of happens in English, where there is usually *some*
difference between, say, "blackbird" (a certain species of bird) and the
phrase "black bird" (any kind of bird, so long as it's black).  However, I
think that's more a difference of stressing than of spacing.

This minds me of an idea that perhaps vowels were not always phonemic, at
least not in IE's family.


     *Muke!