Re: Accusative, Dative, ?

> > Decided by its demiurge, yes.  Arbitrarily decided by its demiurge, no.
> >  You call me a "rare perfectionist" on your conlang page and then you go on
> >  to call my choice of objects arbitrary.  I must say I find your lack of
> > faith
> >  disturbing (inside joke :).
>
> Perfection is "per-factio" not "per-natura". We say in French "le mieux est
> l'ennemi du bien" ;-)
Well, Aroven certainly isn't perfect at the moment, in fact it's in a state of
chaos due to this -- seemingly endless -- revision.  Every time I think I'm
just about done (I don't mean entirely done with the language, which I never
intend to be, I just mean finally bringing the major phonological upheavals
to a rest) I find something new that just *has* to be done.  For instance for
these last two months I've been working at eliminating end vowel clusters;
roots still may be CCVVCC or even CCVVCCC but I've been working to engineer
the disappearance of naked roots in the language -- a word with an end vowel
cluster (except at the end of a word) is either mutated or capped off with
one -VC suffix or another.  One and a half years this revision has been
rolling along and I've finally stopped trying to predict where the language
is going to end up, or when it's going to get there!


> My point is that i gave up considering the maps of roles of the verbs of my
> conlang as universal ones. So i told Daniel to find his own maps rather than
> picking them from a book. Transformative or lative maps are just easy starts
> to figure out a whole system of roles (voices and cases).
Exactly right!  That's why I usually refer to my objects by the generic
1st, 2nd and 3rd rather than accusative, dative, "jurative" (the advantage
of these being that the names are more memorable -- good for teaching the
language, as opposed to theorizing about it); they don't have universal
meanings, but depend on the definition of the particular word, or in most
cases that of its class.


> The semantic sememe of any word or any morpheme is decided either by natlang
> usage or by a conlanger.
> In other words YOU can decide to make a verb like English "to enter" with
> "house" as a possible 1st object, or a verb like French "entrer dans" with
> same possible actor "maison" used with a prepositional 1st object, or else a
> neologism like "to enter (through) 1st object (into) 2nd object (giving way
> to) 3rd object, etc.". Role-mapping depends on YOUR semantic definition of
> the verb including YOUR ranking of its various possible actors and YOU are
> the only one to decide both.
> I'm quite sure you've made the map and ranked the 10 first objects of each of
> your words. But (i) these maps are all yours and yours only and (ii) some
> lazy conlangers are not willing to map anything beyond subject and 1st object
> and decide to work with prepositions or verbs instead. And another lazier one
> like i am decided to work with the subject only. The result is just the same,
> except i remember better "addressing X" or "using Y's function" than "7th and
> 8th object".
I admit Aroven's object system is one of the more artificial-tasting features
of the language.  But I consider it a necessary evil -- it allows the
unambiguity which the logical demands of the language require, and after all
it works well enough even for humdrum speech :-)


> These are your own processive, transformative, applicative, lative, etc.
> role-mappings. You have "frozen" these schemes and ranked their actors. I
> have isolated each role of each actor of all schemes i could think of and
> given each of them a simplistic verbal definition like "to use", "to be
> located", etc. because you can remember these darn object-rankings but i'm
> zero at figures and abstraction : i need concrete words.
Many of them do have concrete words: their definitions are simple modifications
of the "cases".  A majority of semantic links have no associated case, but
those that do simplify the system a little at any rate.


> >  You do not know the power of the Dark Side.
> >
>
> I am kind of colour-blind so never get down in a dark cellar lest i should
> crunch my head on the opposite wall or never find my way out ;-)
I love dark cellars (and tunnels, and especially caves; perhaps I should have
been born a Dwarf :) 'long as I don't have to worry about knocking someone's
wine bottles all over the ground or anything

> Mathias
Josh