Re: New Site: New Language: Tyl-Sjok

Hi!

daniel andreasson <daniel.andreasson@...> writes:
> Henrik Theiling wrote:
> >     stupid.VERB peter.PATIENT
> >     Peter is stupid. (inherently)
> > vs.
> >     Peter.AGENT stupid.VERB.
> >     Peter is stupid. (but he is at least in potential control)
>
> Ha! This is *exactly* like in Rinya!
Really!  Haha! :-)  I like this.

> I have borrowed most of it from Central Pomo. Where did you get
> your influences from?
Actually, I kind of `found out' the above distinction by discussions
with non-linguist friends.  I keep them busy with thinking about `what
if a language' suggestions.  They are not influenced by any theory, so
they think more freely and philosophically.  It would be nice to read
more about agentive languages, though, since I really have no idea how
to decide how to do things in some cases.  Do you have good sources?
Central Pomo sounds like something to look at, I did not do that yet.

The main influences of Tyl-Sjok are: Mandarin Chinese (almost
isolating) and the idea to make a purely isolating, simple language (I
cut it down to *one* grammar rule (of course, with a lot of
corollaries) and *two* kinds of categories).  Another influence were
discussions about agentive languages on this list.  Without, Tyl-Sjok
would have become nominative.

> This is very cool! :)
Yes! :-)

The example with `peculiar' is really good.  If you don't mind, I'll
quickly translate that into Tyl-Sjok (where's my word-generator,
there's no `peculiar' yet...).


Another thing: compared to Rinya, I have less cases in Tyl-Sjok,
namely only two: agentive and patientive.  Both are morphologically
unmarked (->isolating) and only marked by word order.  Other semantic
rules have to be either rendered by additional verbs (e.g. for
locative) or by embedding (in this case for experiencers).  That's why
`I love you' is not rendered with ablative but by a second patient
applied on the embedded structure `to love you'.  So both `you' and
`I' follow `to love'.


**Henrik

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