Re: Degree in Ithkuil vs. S7

Henrik Theiling wrote:
>>>
John Quijada <jq_ithkuil@...> writes:
> By the way, as long as we're discussing coincidental similarities
> between S7 and Ithkuil, I've been corresponding privately with list-
> member Jonathan Knibb about his Telona language (now temporarily
> called T4), and he has noted several surprising similarities between
> S7 and T4 as well.
Ah, I'd be interested.  I think I talked with him about similarities
between telona and S2.  Some features are in both S2 and S7.
<<<

I'm flattered you remember.  Referring to the table on your
introduction page, the major features T4 and S7 share seem to be:

- a-priori: not derived from any other language
- only one open lexical class, called full words or substantives
- primarily head-first / primarily head-marking
- agglutinating [maybe - still in flux in T4]
- underspecified by default / extremely precise on demand
- some of the substantives exist in a reduced form: the core form
  generalises the meaning [this is still in embryo in T4]
- only valence and degree infixes are grammar-only [in T4, valence
  only, and the choice of valence is limited to 0 or 1]

I apologise that I haven't yet had an opportunity to review the S7
pages as fully as I would like to.  Soon, I hope.

For your interest, the following are the major design principles of T4
grammar as I see them:

- single open class, monomorphemic
- every word refers to an entity as well as describing it
- a word in citation form may refer to any number of its potential
  referents at any time, but not to less than 'one' referent (defined
  as part of the lexical description of each word)
- strict binary branching syntax
- strictly head-first
- an utterance consists of a single phrase, and is interpreted as the
  assertion of the existence of at least one referent of that phrase
- the assertion of a sentence entails the assertion of the truth of
  each of its subphrases, when these are interpreted as sentences in
  their own right.

There is a very out-of-date summary of T4 at
http://knibb.free.fr/main.html, but this is probably more hindrance
than help at this stage given how much the
language has changed in the last eight months. :)

Henrik continued:
>>>
> I believe that the more one gives thought to designing an "engelang"
> (as Jörg calls them), convergent design principles emerge from
> separate authors, so that interesting similarities arise.  It makes
> one begin to wonder whether there are some hidden universal design
> principles even in non-natlang conlangs!
Maybe.  But maybe it's simply the mere number of languages that have
been discussed and the number of features a language have that can all
coincide.  Up to now, all languages I saw where totally different at
closer look. ;-)
<<<

Amen to that!

Jonathan.

[reply to jonathan underscore knibb at hotmail dot com]
--
'O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages...'
Auden/Britten, 'Hymn to St. Cecilia'

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