Conlang Digest - 3 Oct 2000

> From:    dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
> Subject: Re: Dictionaries of agglutinating languages
>
> Yes. But it does require the user to be aware of the derivational
> history of a word--something which won't always be true. Last year on
> an exam I asked students to parse complex words into their component
> morphs. One of the words was 'actively'. I was very surprised to see
> how many students did not see the root 'act' in the word. They did
> find 'active', but 'act' was, for all intents and purposes, invisible
> to them.
I probably wouldn't have seen it either.  The everyday meaning of 'act' (=
'to perform, imposture') is kind of semantically removed from 'active'...

> From:    Marcus Smith <smithma@...>
> Subject: Korean/Japanese/Chinese (was: Re: FYI re: Greenberg's Universals)
>
> >I'm not sure what's meant by a long-distance anaphor.  How is "I wish
> >John gave myself a present" different from "I wish John gave me a
> >present"?  <hoping for enlightenment>  Do you have a Japanese example I
> >could look at?
>
> I opened up a can of worms for myself, didn't I? :-)
>
> Anaphors in English have to have an antecedent in the same clause.  "I
wish
> John gave myself a present" is weird; "I wish John gave me a present" is
> okay, because a regular pronoun does not need an antecedent (in fact, may
> not have one in the same clause).
I can't say *[I wish John gave me a present.]
[I wish John had given me a present.] might be better...

> From:    =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F6rg?= Rhiemeier <joerg.rhiemeier@...>
> Subject: Re: a grammar sketch...
>
> > I've got two words for ya: pivotless languages! Langs with no
> > sentence alignment or grammatical relations whatsoever. There
> > is just no way of telling if in the sentence 'Dog bites man'
> > it is the man or the dog that is bitten.
>
> So how does such a language *work* then?  Granted, what is subject and
> what is object can often be reconstructed from the context, but there
> are always cases of doubt, and the matter is utterly clumsy anyway.
"bites man dog" > (regular context, dog bites man)
"news! bites man dog" > (special context cue, man bites dog)

Hmm...thar's an idear...

> Another idea: an "anti-active" language.  Active intransitive verbs
> (such as "to laugh") treat their subjects like direct objects,
> while non-active verbs (e.g. "to fall") like transitive subjects:
>
> child-I stone-II throw
>
> child-II laugh
>
> stone-I fall
>
> (I and II are some kinds of cases, for which I haven't invented names
> yet;
> or use head marking instead.)
Hmm, quasi-ergative-ish.  Actually my Hadwan will have started on the road
to ergativity this way, and although I hadn't thought of putting in a
distinction between active/non-active use of I/II, it's an interesting idea
I may need to use...

> From:    Adrian Morgan <morg0072@...>
> Subject: Re: T-Shirt yet again
>
> Padraic Brown wrote:
>
> > For anyone on Egroups, etc. that can't access email addresses, mine
> > is: pbrown@p...
>
> This doesn't actually help :-)
>
> Egroups scans the _whole_ message, and corrupts _every_ string that
> looks like an email address (i.e. that has an '@' sign in the middle).
In life-or-death-situations, that "pbrown%p..." (I corrupted that one) link
can be followed to send an email through the egroups interface.  I suppose
it's a privacy measure to prevent mass spamming, but it is a pain.

> From:    Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
> Subject: Re: THEORY: final features, moras, and roots [was: it's what I
do]
>
> > there's really "desu ka" with an almost silent "u".)
>
> Voiceless to be precise.  I've never heard of it actually being omitted,
> just made voiceless.
>
> But anyway, the question still holds - why is something like _appa_
> written as a-tsu-pa?  And was there always the distinction of size, I
> wonder?  Or was there a period when there'd be ambiguity between
> _atsupa_ and _appa_?
Maybe [wild theory mode on] regular-tsu and the geminate sign were
originally different, similarly-shaped signs but the geminate one got
reanalyzed as a little-tsu?  The hiragana <tsu> is a pretty simple shape...
[wild theory mode off]

I had a question related to something, and I couldn't understand how to
phrase it, something about habitual and simple present in English, so forget
that...

ObConlang:  I have amassed eighty-five zillion IE roots[1] from all over the
web and the real world neo and am churgling away at protohadwan words now,
to the exclusion of all the rocks I should be carving and the shots I should
be filming.  I shall have to find something profound to translate.



    *Muke!
[1] This number was just made up and probably has no relevance to the actual
number of roots I have.  Shoebox says it's less than seven hundred.
--
http://muke.twu.net/