R: Re: Degrees of volition in active languages

On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:

>On Sun, Aug 13, 2000 at 12:56:12PM +0200, Mangiat wrote:
>[snip]
>> BTW, I, too, think Greek 'So:krate:s' is ungrammatical. I have never found a
>> Greek proper name without the article. Well, I think Greek uses a lot
>> articles. Indeed I've never studied all its declension patterns, you can
>> work well even if you remember the declension of 'ho, he, tò'.
>
>Yeah, actually, now I recall my Greek professor emphatically saying in
>class, "Use the article with proper names!". Some manuscripts, he said,
>may omit the article, but as a rule, *we* were never supposed to omit the
>article.
>
>As for the Greek article... it's actually quite an awesome thing. It's
>much more flexible than, for example, the English article, especially when
>used as a pseudo-pronoun (which, IIRC, is where it developed from). To
>say something like "the woman who had been taught", you can simply use the
>feminine article with a participle: "he: pepaideumene:". (Literally, "the
>one (feminine) having been taught (perfect ptcple).) Makes for nice,
>compact sentences! :-)
>
>But talking about the history of the Greek article... it used to be the
>personal pronoun, and in some contexts it still retains that meaning. I
>find this quite interesting, esp. related to inventing derived condialects
>from ancestor conlangs. I'd love to know what different ways people have
>come up with when creating a derived conlang. So far, it seems to me that
>the most common method is to just apply a sound change to words, and make
>slight changes to grammar rules. Has anybody actually come up with
>something similar to the pre-classical Greek pronoun becoming the Attic
>Greek article -- i.e., the form of the word stays the same but develops a
>new function?
Sure. The primeval pronoun has become in Talarian a personal pronoun:
tos, cos = he/she (with spacial differentiation in the singular, and
inclusive/exclusive differentiation in the plural); definite artice:
wiros-cos / wiros-tos = the man (with spacial differentiation);
demonstrative pronoun: cos = this, tos = that; temporal and spacial
pronouns: cos = now, here / tos = then, there; and temporal and
spacial adverbs, using the locative case. One thing it's not is a
relative pronoun.

>The conlang I'm working on now is intended to be an old ancestral
>language, mainly for old manuscripts, etc.; I'm just wondering what other
>ways (besides sound change and slight grammatical alterations) people have
>come up with for deriving new conlangs from ancestral ones.
>
>On a related note, I find it interesting that most of the time, languages
>tend to simplify themselves rather than develop new structures, although
>there are always exceptions like the Greek pronoun becoming an article.
>The loss of the dative from classical Greek to modern Greek is one
>example. English apparently also used to be highly inflected, but today
>there are only traces left (such as in who, whom, whose). And even who,
>whom, and whose are starting to collapse into just "who" in colloquial
>English.
>
>My theory is that widespread acceptance of a language usually causes it to
>"degrade" or "simplify", losing a lot of old constructs in the process.
>But I've yet to come up with a plausible explanation for languages
>becoming *more* complex as they evolve.
I assume by this that you mean English has become, in some way,
simplified. Just keep in mind that a simplification in one area
generally means a complication in another area. English verbal
morphology has indeed become simpler; yet we've added loads of
complexity w/r to auxilliaries. Got rid of complex cases only to
become saddled with prepositions.

Padraic.

>T