On 5/24/06, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:
> It's interesting to watch the "war of the words"
> developing on the Kalusa free-for-all site!
>
> Some are offering stict CV words and some are using
> consonant clusters. There are a lot of reduplicating
> words emerging, and a lot of people voting them up or
> down. Some are using short words and others are
> offering longer, more comoplicated words. Which will
> prevail?
I've generally been trying to avoid using phonemes
or clusters that others haven't already used.
> Some are compounding words to create new words and
> others are insisting on using particles with the root
> words for derivation. Some are attaching suffixes
> while others are attaching particles with a hyphen,
> and still others setting the particles apart from the
> root word.
> It's almost as if there are two "dialects" of Kalusa
> developing that I've been thinking of as "Slavic
> Kalusa" and "polynesian Kalusa". The two seem quite
> alien to each other, and the words don't seem to mesh
> together in a single sentence.
I vaguely see what you mean, but can you be
more specific? The isolating and agglutinating
trends are in conflict, as is a priori coinage vs.
borrowing from Indo-European.
> By this weekend I hope to have a new page with the
> first 100 standardized and graded sentences that will
> allow visitors to offer alternate translations and
> vote on the various versions. Once that happens it
> will be interesting to watch the battles over what the
> "true" translation of such common, yet currently hotly
> contested words and "man", "father", and "mother" will
> be. Which "man/woman" faction will prevail, the
> "ezikize/kalemaze" faction or the "andru/adesa"
> faction?
When I noticed that there were two words for "man"
in the corpus, I added a sentence that used both
of them in different senses; it looks like it has had
some influence, but now somone has added another
sentence that makes another distinction between
the two words glossed as 'man' in early sentences.
Also, there are at least three words for "woman":
kalemaze, adesa, and guniko/guniku (the last
seems to mean either "old woman" or "grandmother").
> Will "da" become the definite article that some are
> trying to make it as in "Ma vito da palu", (I see the
> cat.) or will it be reserved for the meaning "the one
> which is..." as in "Ma vito da ruba" (I see the red
> one.)?
All the "vito" sentences with a ranking of >=100
have "SUBJ vito es OBJ". "vito" seems to want its object
marked with "es".
> Will "kia" be reserved for linking adjectives to
> nouns, or will it be used as the possesive link as
> well? The partilce "a" is trying to become exclusively
> the possesive connector as in "palua a ma" as opposed
> to "palu kia ma", but "kia" as the possesive is
> putting up a good fight. Which will win out?
All the handful of "a" sentences currently have CQ rankings
below 50.
There are 330 sentences in the corpus as of now.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry