Re: CHAT: (no subject)

Pablo writes:
>
>Which person gets marked for evocative, the speaker or
>the hearer in another plane of existence? Could you
>post some examples of each case?
The hearer -- just as in Vocative case in Greek or Latin.  Talislanta,
the world for which I'm constructing this

There's an example on the website
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/3714/index.html

By the way, does anyone know of a free web page provider that doesn't
have popup ads or anything similarly hideous?  I hate going to Geocities
pages and enduring people's popups, and while it's possible to get
around them by adding some code to the pages, that code gets munged up
when I try to use Netscape Composer and auto-upload documents.

>[snip]
>>  Abfiative
>>                                 The original form of a
>>                                 transformation (=Talislan "from" in
>>                                 the sentence "he changed from a
>>                                 prince into an exomorph")
>>  Adfiative
>>                                 The final form of a transformation
>>                                 (=Talislan "to" in the above
>>                                 sentence)
>
>Really cool stuff.
Thanks.  I got the idea for these while working on a master's thesis on
Ovid's Metamorphoses, and meditating on the way change was expressed
semantically.  I thought it interesting that Latin, Greek, and English
all agree in using "from" and "into" or their equivalents to desginate
the initial and final forms in a metamorphosis -- a spatial metaphor.  I
thought it would be interesting if this usage of "from" and "to" had its
own case, and so I put it into this language. If you go to the web page
you'll see that the abfiative and adfiative are very similar to the
ablative and adlative.

>Lots of ideas! Just not to repeat what others said,
>I'd propose: nouns (and adjectives) with inflections
>that tell you if they are really what they seem, or
>a bad thing in disguise, or a good thing that just looks
>awful because it's been transformed, or you don't know,
>etc. For example:
>
>QST = you ask yourself if this is really true
>HOR = different from what is meant in a horrible way
>NAM = not as much as it seems
>AFR = you're afraid of this
>
>(You're walking with Xyz and see a tall ivory castle beyond)
>
>You: What a beautiful castle.QST!
>
>Xyz: It's Morgana's home.HOR. She lives there with her
>     servants.HOR. She's a really beautiful.QST lady.QST.
>
>You: I did hear she's beautiful.NAM. Will we meet her.AFR?
>
>
>I don't know if this is mystic, or magic, but it has a
>certain schizoid flavour that seems appropriate for "dark"
>fantasy.
I'm going to think hard about this.  I don't think I can mark nouns that
way, because...

Well, Talislanta, while in many ways it is very very alien, in other
ways it is full of allusions and puns and references to Earth.  Little
things like two nations who are opposed in all ways being called Aaman
and Zandir -- Of course!  They're opposed in all ways so their names
come from opposite ends of the alphabet!  That sort of thing.  Tal also
has a good share of words that look as if they came from Greek or Latin,
such as the name "Archaen" itself, or the fearsome "Neurovore" or
"Exomorph," monsters you don't want to run into...  That kind of thing.

I wanted Archaen to become the "Greek/Latin" source for those words, and
so I wanted a lot of its words and the general flavor of its grammar to
be ripped off from Greek and Latin, though not in any systematic way.
Ripped off and modified to be more "magical."  And also simplified,
because I don't want to burden fellow Talislanta players with several
different conjugations of nouns when I don't have to, or irregular
plurals, or anything like that.

So if I was merely as an exercise in conlanging going to design a
"highly magical" language, I wouldn't make it look like Greek/Latin, I'd
give it its own original form.  I wouldn't rip off Greek/Latin syntax,
I'd design it from scratch and be open to all kinds of weird ideas.  And
I'd give it the irregularity that I feel comfortable with in a natural
language.

But given the circumstances, I'm a bit constrained.  I don't know of a
good way to harmonize these "degrees of reality/suspicion" with the case
system I've already come up with, so I don't think I can use them for
nouns.

but I might well be able to work them into the verbal system, as moods
or aspects or something like that.... not a matter of whether things are
as they seem, but whether situations are as they seem.  I'll see what I
can do with that.  Thanks for the input!

Ed




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