Re: Personal Conjugation based on Closeness

On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 01:24:46PM -0800, Arthaey Angosii wrote:
> Emaelivpeith HS Teoh:
[snip]
> >is hardly restricted to the 20 people you know; people with familial ties
> >are automatically in the "intimate" category. (Unless they've been
> >disowned or involved in something so dishonorable the family is too
> >embarrassed to acknowledge the relationship.) So the intimate category
> >might also include dojhel, sajhen, and chijhik as well.
>
> Ah, I see.  And the Asha'illen categories hardly limit you to 20 people,
> either.  :)
Yeah, my misunderstanding, sorry. :-)

> The acquaintance |geithe| has an open-ended number, and then most family
> members will be in the second- and third- (or more) degree rings.  For
> example, my mom would be in my aejhel or scadhel, but my grandfather
> would be in her aejhel or scadhel so he's part of my network, _plus_
> he'd definitely be in at least my geithe, so by combining the two he'd
> be considered closer than a straight geithe-connection, but less than
> chisél.  So you can get pretty fine distinctions when they all add up.
Wow. This begins to sound like the approximately 150 different terms
Chinese has for various relatives, which is the source of 50% of the
conversations/arguments at family reunions... *shudder*.

> >Having said that, though, the precise distinction between intimate and
> >distant also depends on the speaker's mood and (possibly changing)
> >opinion of a person.
>
> I meant to comment on this is my first reply.  The connections change over
> time, but more slowly than your usage.  In fact, if a person's ml'shaln
> _doesn't_ change over time, he is considered immature or something
> similarly negative.  :P  This sounds like a good time to devise adjectives
> describing how _long_ a person has held their current position in your
> ml'shaln...
That's an interesting concept. I should coin affixes of endearment to be
attached to the Ebisedian pronouns, so that you can indicate how close a
person is to you when you want to.

> >There are no other pronouns in Ebisedian, so clarification is done using
> >either demonstratives ("this he" vs. "the next he" vs. "another he") or
> >something called "noun association".
>
> Okay, seriously now folks, the creepy similarites between Asha'ille and
> Ebisedian have got to stop!
Muahahaha, the Ebisedi know where you live! :-P

> My "numbered suffixes" do this job in Asha'ille.
Cool. A case of acadewism I guess. I thought it was a pretty original
idea. :-)

> >Noun association is a syntactical tagging mechanism in Ebisedian, where
> >you "tag" a particular noun referent with one of three possible
>
> What are your tags derived from?  Can I choose to use the first and
> third tags only in a sentence with two referents, or must I use the
> first and second tags in order?
Unlike Asha'ille, the associative tags are not directly derived from
numbers[1], so they are not constrained to appear in any particular order.
It's just convention that you use them in the order ki-, cu-, and ro-.
Note, though, that they have come to acquire specialized meanings:
        ki- "the former"
        cu- "the current (or the latter)"
        ro- "the other"

When used with these meanings, you may see them appear out-of-order.

[1] The first three numbers and the three associative tags are derived
from the same set of root words. But other than that, there is no
connection between them.

> In Asha'ille, the suffixes derive from the counting numbers, and you
> must use -sa "1st" before you can use -da "2nd" or -ga "3rd".  This
> means that although which suffix you use is pretty rigidly defined, you
> don't have to mark anybody the first time they show up in the sentence,
> only subsequent times.
Ebisedian is less rigid in this respect. In fact, in normal conversation,
you don't explicitly tag nouns the first time they appear (since most
people won't anticipate which nouns need tagging!), but you use the
former/latter/other meaning and put the tag on the first pronoun that
refers back to that noun.

> >        He was walking with his father and another man, and he told him
> >        that he will visit him again.
> >
> >[snip] In Ebisedian, however, this is completely unambiguous:
>
> I assume that you could willingly introduce ambiguity, though?  Or is the
> speaker obligated to distinguish the people?
The tags are optional. Of course, you'll have to make good use of them if
you want people to understand what you're talking about! :-)

> AFMCL: Mmasaevaerdhi ar tei mlaerdhiml pari'on t'agíl carnen, t'ves
> áshavolarga ne do'éjhkellevardalarsa kes.
>
>
> mmasaev-aerdhi ar tei  ml-aerdhi-ml pari'on t'  agíl  carnen, t'  ves
> walk    SMBD   he with POS-SMBD-POS father  and other man     and same-time
>
> áshav-o-  l-  aerdhi-ga  ne  do'-éjhkellev-aerdhi-da- l-  ar-sa  kes.
> tell SAME OBJ he     3rd OBJ re  visit     he     2nd OBJ he 1st end-same-time
>
Very nice. The tagging looks a lot like Ebisedian's! :-)

> Woosh, with the new, longer conjugations Asha'ille is starting to look
> mildly polysynthetic about the verbs.  :P Note that at the very end I
> use |-ar| to refer to <1>him.  I can do this without insult because I've
> already labeled him as aerdhilun (|-un| being the unnumbered numbered
> suffix) at the beginning of the sentence.  If we had a second sentence
> talking about the same people, I could refer to them all by |-ar|, or
> |-aerdhi|, or any mix I wanted (although if I consistently called the
> father |-ar| and everyone else |-aerdhi|, it might _become_ construed as
> an insult).
Actually, I just realized that I've forgotten to switch to intimate
pronouns between _t3_ and _t3m3_ in the Ebisedian. The narrator would use
distant pronouns to refer to all three men; but presumably between them
they'd use intimate pronouns, at least between father and son. But that's
OK, Ebisedian doesn't distinguish between direct and indirect discourse,
so I can get away on a technicality. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to
it. :-)

> >Here, all pronouns are intimate.
ACKK... I just realized this statement is completely wrong. The pronouns
were all distant, since they were used by the narrator. :-( This is what
happens when intimate and distant pronouns look too much like each other.
:-/

> > Presumably <3>he is related to <1>him and
> ><2>him, or is a close friend of <1>him; so <1>he would not use the distant
> >pronoun on <3>him; however, <2>he might, depending on how <3>he is related
> >to <3>him. ;-)
>
> Hehe, way to tag.  :)
:-)

> >In contrast, the Ebisedi are extremely pedantic and snobbish about
> >referring to people with the right gender at all times. When one is
> >unsure, the epicene must be used, but only as long as the relevant party's
> >gender remains unclear. One is expected to pick up hints and switch
> >pronoun gender as soon as the information becomes available. Failure to do
> >so at the right instant labels one as an ignorant outcast who does not
> >know the rules of society. The rules are rather convoluted and very
> >pedantic; I won't bother expounding it any more than this. :-)
>
> Sounds like a veritable can of worms for the foreigner travelling to the
> land of the Ebisedi.  :)
It's not so bad for foreigners; they are much more forgiving of foreigners
than of one of their own. But of course, foreigners are regarded as
second-class people, so that *could* mean you're already regarded as an
uncivilised outcast without needing to make any gender-related mistakes.
:-)

> >Oh, so the size of each "ring" is not fixed? I thought it was fixed, for
> >some reason.
>
> I mentioned that the 3-5-12 numbers for the inner three rings was canonical
> and not necessarily accurate for each individual.  :)
OK.

[snip]
> >Not sure, here the pronoun is used more like the regular noun that it used
> >to be than a pronoun.
>
> Ah, the it's slightly different.  |ejh| and |-ejh| coexist in the language.
[snip]

Ah, that figures. I confused the two.


T

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Unix was not designed to stop people from doing stupid things, because that
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