Re: your conlang

Hi,

On Mon, 5 Oct 1998, Orjan Johansen wrote:

> On Sun, 4 Oct 1998, R. Skrintha wrote:
>
> > As to Hambhukringki, it relies on certain symmetries in semantic space. It
> > generalizes usual actions and meanings into their symmetric supersets
> > along more than one axis (space/time/internal-space).
>
> No internal-time?
Acutally, yes: but the term is used to refer not to a seperate degree of
freedom, which is the thing listed above, but the manner in which symmetry
in the temporal axis is broken.

"Internal-space" is a term borrowed from gauge (math: fiber-bundle)
theories in Physics. In classical electromagnetism for example, gauge
transformations, since they leave the physical fields unchanged, are like
displacements in an internal space (along a fiber) governed by connection
coefficients. Analogously, in the conlang,  movement along the
"internal-space" does not affect the 'outer' features of an expression:
the clause-roles, aspects, deixis, pragmatics, etc. It refers to the space
of 'symmetricized qualities'. Altho i refered to it as an axis, it is
really an infinite dimensional space (in the sense that different
qualities are "orthogonal" to each other).

To make a short story long:

An action like 'take' and 'put' are viewed as the same 'object' in which
the time-symmetry has been broken in different ways. The lexical entry for
either action is basically a set of sequential snapshots, as it were, that
depict a grasping at one end attached to a transportion string:

      <grasp....transport>

The above string has no preferred direction intrinsic to it: i.e, it is
time-symmetric. In actual speech, the symmetry is broken by introducing an
internal time direction: by deciding which sequence of choosing the
snapshots moves forward in time. If the sequence is such that:

        grasp----->transport

the action refers to a 'taking'. On the other hand if the sequence is:

        grasp<----transport

this is really the same as:

        transport---->ungrasp

in other words, it means a 'putting'. The crucial point here is that the
symmetry breaking morpheme is non-local (thus in H'kringki we have
'morphological non-locality' as against Lin's phonological non-locality):
that is, the symmetry breaking is coded into the morphology not of the
word/object whose symmetry is being broken, but of another word/object
bound to it according to certain grammatical rules.

Regards,
skrintha