Re: Newbie says hi

On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 06:16:51AM +0000, Mat McVeagh wrote:

> OK what is a trigger language? H.S. Teoh also mentioned that phrase.
I'm glad somebody else answered this, as I really wasn't looking forward
to all the typing :)

> >now I'm trying to get a new one off the ground that has only two
> >parts of speech, noun and verb, which pingpong between each other with each
> >derivational affix :)
>
> What I thought would be cool is a system that totally did away with the
> conventional categories and created whole new parts of speech.
Well, in my system, really, what is to say that the two parts are nouns
or verbs?  It's a two-state system, in which one state is eligible to
become a topic, the other state is eligible to become a comment, and each
state can transition to the other state using an appropriate affix.

There is a tendency in language for more static conditions to gravitate to
a different part of speech than more transitory conditions.  There is a
corresponding tendency to call the former "nouns" and the latter "verbs" :)
But what does that really mean, after all?

(Yes, I'm being deliberately simplistic.  Answers proving that there is
actual meaning in different parts of speech beyond the content-free pattern
of their interaction within a system of grammar are welcome :)

One interesting experiment might be to try to create a language in which
static conditions (such as "being a bird") acted the way we are accustomed
to verbs acting, and transitory conditions (such as "flying") acted the way
we are accustomed to nouns acting.  I'm not sure how useful this is,
given that traditional verb-related functions such as tense are more useful
in conjunction with transitory conditions and less so with static
conditions, but it would be neat to try.  ("A flight is birding"?)

> I have encountered these tendencies of Japanese before, and it's the way
> they subsume adjectives into verbs (is it a kind of relative or participial
> clause?)
Do you mean like "tabetai" from "taberu" to eat and "-tai" to want?  I see
that more as the adjective -tai subsuming the verb taberu into itself.  (And
this action is one of the things that gave me the idea for my two-system
language :)

> >Now I'm looking into Mohawk,
>
> Is that where for instance "house" can be put into different tenses - past
> tense house = "ruins" etc.?
I don't know :(  Don't have enough information yet :(

The nouns do all (except for names, like possibly names of kinds of animals)
appear to be forms of verbs.  Whether tense marking is preserved when
forming nouns, I can't answer.  (Anybody got recommendations for books or
articles on Mohawk grammar?)

> I suppose you could use the past tense of
> "parrot" in that Monty Python sketch :)
Heh :)  Reminds me of the Japanese way to say it, which would be to stick
"datta" in front of parrot :)

> >...I was reading a section on chaining languages.
> >They specifically mentioned that some of these languages seemed to have
> >nothing corresponding to a sentence; rather, they naturally organized into
> >simple clauses and paragraph-length chains of clauses.
>
> What and where are these languages? Never heard of that.
Well, the book could answer that better than I, but the book is at home...
I don't know if they were from New Guinea, or Australia and/or New Zealand,
or somewhere else entirely.  I don't *think* they were from Africa or
South America.

As for what they are, they are languages in which they don't have the array
of conjunctions (coordinating or subordinating) that we do; the only ways
they have to string together clauses are by referencing whether the actor
of the new clause is *same* or *different* from the actor in the previous
clause, and sometimes temporal info such as which the action takes place
simultaneously or sequentially with the action in the previous clause.  When
a number of clauses has been strung together, ranging in length from what
we would think of as a complicated sentence to what we would think of as
a paragraph or a page, a final clause appears with a fully-formed verb which
can include information such as verbal agreement with the subject or tense
information.

When I first started to read the section on clause-chaining, I thought
maybe Japanese might count with its "de, de, de, da(tta)" clause structure,
but it doesn't meet the requirements for marking whether a clause has the
same or a different subject from the preceding clause.

> >If nothing else, I bet you end up with a new section in your bookshelf :)
>
> LOL, I'm already needing a new folder within my bookmarks, and another one
> within my email!
Yeah, that too :)

Amanda

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