Re: Personal Conjugation based on Closeness

Emaelivpeith HS Teoh:
>> At what point do the Ebisdeians[1] draw the line?
>                       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>*cringe*
>
>[snip] And mind you, "Ebisedi" is a plural noun... the correct
>singular form is "Bisedi". Please, no "ebisedians". :-)
I'm very sorry, didn't mean to make you cringe.  :/  I'll watch myself next
time.  :P

>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.  :)  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.

>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...

>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!  My "numbered suffixes" do this job in Asha'ille.

>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? 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.

>        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?

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


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).

>Here, all pronouns are intimate. 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.  :)

>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.  :)  If the
fourth-closest person to you is just about as close as the third-closest,
you may very well count that extra person into your aejhel.  The
acquaintance and everyone-else rings are explicitly open-ended.  And don't
forget that you can be fairly strongly connected to your best friend's
friend but only through the second-degree connections, thus openning up
your network even more.  Sorry if I wasn't clear on that.

>> >Another context is when the intimate pronoun is used as a term of
>> >adoration: _co'mi. co'mi._ "my dear, my dear". Strictly speaking, _co'mi_
>> >is a pronoun; but it'd be very odd to translate this as "you, you" ---
>> >totally different connotations in English!
>>
>> This is like my |ejh|, ne?
>
>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.


--
AA


Bia Sharidim*
============
|agíl|  /A"gil/  "other", from |gir| "more"
|áshav| /"ASAv/  "to tell", from *alh "to" and "shav" "to speak"

* This is more for my own records than your enlightenment, but I won't stop
you from reading it.  :P

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