Re: Just for you, Wiz (Super Long)

This was a quite fun read. Unfortunately, I begin to fear that David Bell
wouldn't classify Tairezazh as lang either - there's quite alot of things I
simply haven't decided on how to express yet.

Shu seno sreiz laist lep sens, ta theiz.
("That he would call it a language, I hope")

                                        Andreas

>From: The Gray Wizard <dbell@...>
>Reply-To: Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>
>To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
>Subject: Re: Just for you, Wiz (Super Long)
>Date: Sat, 5 May 2001 16:13:19 -0400
>
> > From: David Peterson
> >
> > In a message dated 5/4/01 2:05:54 PM, dbell@GRAYWIZARD.NET writes:
> >
> > << " I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this
>proposition
> > which this margin is too narrow to contain"
> > - Pierre de Fermat >>
> >
> >     Did you think I was lying?
>
>No, nor do I have any reason to believe that Fermat was lying either.  I
>think you missed the point.
>
>================================
>
>And now, introducing Tuentimin, a language _sketch_ produced in twenty
>minutes or less.
>
>General Info:
>Agglutinating, but not completely so.  I won't explain in what ways it is
>not fully agglutinating as that would take me longer than twenty minutes.
>The preferred word order is OVS, I haven't figured out what the
>_nonpreferred_ word order might be, nor the effects of pragmatic
>considerations like topic or focus, nor intraphrasal constituent order.
>What about cleft constructions?  Dunno.  So word order is OVS in main
>clauses, but what about prepositional, adjectival, and relative clauses,
>genitives, comparatives, inflected auxiliaries, or questions?  I dunno.  I
>haven't specified whether Tuentimin is dominantly head-marking or
>dependent-marking, but that's just detail.  Tuentimin is an ergative
>language.  Whether it is merely morphologically ergative or syntactically
>ergative as well is... well just another detail.
>
>Phonology:
>Vowels: a e i o u
>Diphthongs: maybe?
>Stops: b p d t c g
>Fricatives: v f dh th s z
>Nasals: m n
>Approximants: w y r l h
>
>Not quite sure why I called this section _Phonology_ since I just listed a
>bunch of letters with no phonetic details, but details are..., well just
>details.
>
>Phonotactics: Syllable structure?  Haven't specified, but I have worked out
>all the other phonotactic details of Tuentimin. I haven't presented them
>here cause the margin is too narrow.  Suffice it to say that that 'nt' is a
>valid consonant cluster.
>
>Stress: If this were a tone language, it would have stress, but since it
>isn't, it doesn't.
>
>Words: Yes, Tuentimin has words and they are all derived from roots.
>Haven't worked out the derivation rules, but you remember that detail
>thing, don't you?
>
>Articles: 'i' is the definite article and 'e' is the indefinite article.
>There probably ought to be all kinds of spatial and temporal deictic
>determiners and demonstratives as well as genitive, interrogative and
>quantifying determiners, but we won't bother with explaining how this is
>accomplished. Not to mention degrees of distance for spatial or temporal
>deictic.  Hey we got 'the' and 'a' covered, what more could you want?.
>
>Nouns: Although I won't specify the distributional properties of nouns in
>Tuentimin, I do have all kinds of suffixes for just about every combination
>of sentient, animate, inanimate, active, passive, verbal, instrumental,
>human, vegetable, mineral,  locative, mass, count, constituent, shoes,
>ships and sealing wax.  A derivative language Thirtimin even has noun
>classes for cabbages and kings.  How all these suffixes interact with the
>root nouns phonologically is anybody's guess.   Whether these noun classes
>are strictly morphological or have syntactic effects like agreement in
>Swahili hasn't been determined.  And what about gender?  Dunno.  And what
>about compounding (noun-noun, noun-verb)?  Are there productive compounding
>rules and what are they?  How about denominalizations (noun -> verb, noun
>-> adj, noun -> adv)? Dunno. And what of predicate nominals expressing
>proper inclusion, equation, attribution, location, existence or possession?
>  Can't say.  Are tense, aspect and mo!
>od restricted for these clauses?  Dunno.
>
>Pronouns:
>         Sing    Plu
>1st     ni      nil
>2nd     yin     ayin
>3rd     tie     tid
>
>No demonstrative, impersonal, reflexive, or reciprocal pronouns, I guess
>you can't express these concepts in Tuentimin.
>
>As you can see, nouns and pronouns form their plurals in -l except when
>they don't.  Nominals ending in a vowel take -l as a pluralizing suffix
>unless the preceding character is also a vowel in which case they take -d
>to form their plural.  If the nominal ends in a consonant that would form a
>ill-formed consonant cluster (I haven't defined what this is yet), then the
>nominal takes a- as a pluralizing prefix.  Tough to remember, but boy is
>this cool.  Is number marking obligatory or optional?  Dunno.
>
>Adjectives and adverbs: Adjectives are formed by adding -ig to any word,
>thus from 'mas'=cement we get 'masig'=?  Well, almost any word.  I haven't
>specified any required sequencing of adjectives, quantifiers or
>demonstratives in multiple adjective phrases so 'brown quick three the
>foxes' is just fine.  How are predicate adjectives formed?  Dunno.  Do
>adjective agree with their heads in number, case or noun class?  Dunno.
>Adjective degree and order of standard, marker and quality?  Haven't gotten
>to that.  What of numbers and other quantifiers? Do numbers agree with
>their heads?  I dunno.  Adverbs are formed by adding -as to words that it
>makes sense to make an adverb from (huh?).  Adverbial degree, sentential
>adverbs, disjuncts and degree modifiers are too complicated and give me a
>headache.  Where do adverbs occur with respect to the verb is undecided.
>
>Case: Cases include Ergative, Absolutive, Dative, Genitive and
>Instrumental.  I won't specify when to use which case, just take your best
>guess.  Semantic roles, syntactic relations?  I dunno.  Tuentimin also uses
>adpositions, but what they are, whether they are pre- or post-nominal and
>how prepositional clauses are formed or whether they govern case hasn't
>been decided.
>
>Verbs: Lots of different suffixes for all combinations of stative, action,
>process, action-process, transitive, intransitive, ditransitives, weather
>verbs, involuntary processes, bodily functions, motion verbs, positional
>verbs, factives, and verbs of cognition, sensation, emotion, utterance and
>manipulation.  Lots of suffixes for tense (past, pres, fut) and voice
>(active,passive, antipassive).  Not sure how the latter affect the
>arguments of the verb or what semantic roles are involved.  Ditto with
>aspect which I conflate with modality just to keep things interesting.  How
>do tense and aspect interact?  Do these affect case marking?  Dunno.  Is
>voice the only valence altering operation?  Can't say.  Is there an
>applicative or middle voice? What about dative shifting?  Dunno. Verbal
>agreement will remain unspecified, but what about noun incorporation?
>Dunno.  How about nominalizations?  Can't say.  What about active and
>passive participles, auxiliaries or gerunds, you ask?  A!
>re causatives lexical, morphological or periphrastic? What about epistemic
>and deontic modalities? Is there an nonfinite verb form and what is role? I
>dunno.  Is there a copula and if so, what is its function?  Is it used to
>form predicate locative?  Dunno.  What of polarity?  How does the language
>control the scope of negation, i.e. negating a proposition vs. negating the
>modality of a proposition?  Dunno.  Are there serial verb constructions,
>and if so, which verbs participate?  Can't say.
>
>Correlatives: Since this is an IAL, we must have the obligatory table of
>regular correlatives.  If your interested, I'll explain these, but this
>email is getting too long.
>
>Relative clauses: Even though I haven't defined a relative pronoun above,
>let's pretend that I did and use it. Take for example the sentence; "I saw
>the rat that was chased by the cat that was bothered by the dog."  This
>would be expressed..., wait...maybe I should try a simpler example.  What
>kinds of relative clauses does Tuentimin have?  Prenominal, postnominal,
>internally headed, correlative?  Dunno.
>
>Clauses: Haven't really thought this category through.  What are the rules
>for clause combination?  What kinds of complement clauses are there
>(subject, object or both)?  How are adverbial clauses formed?  Does the
>position of an adverbial in a sentence affect its semantics?  What about
>conditionals?  How about clause chaining?  If supported, in what direction
>does the dependency go?  What about coordination?  Can you express
>conjunction, disjunction, or exclusion?  If so, how?  I dunno. What about
>interrogatives?  How are they formed?  Where does the question marker
>occur? Dunno.
>
>Boy, at the rate of one language in twenty minutes, I could create 3
>languages an hour or 72 languages a day or 504 languages a week or....
>=============================
>
>Of course, all of the above was written with my tongue firmly imbedded in
>my cheek.  In fact, I rather enjoyed reading David's IAL _sketch_.  It's
>quite interesting.  But, I maintain that it is no more a language than the
>CliffsNotes for "War and Peace" is a novel.  It is, however, a great start.
>  Maybe by the time David's sister is old enough to appreciate it, it
>actually will be a language.
>
>Keep up the good work, David
>
>David
>
>David E. Bell
>The Gray Wizard
>www.graywizard.net
>
>Wisdom begins in wonder.
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