Re: Articles in conlangs (was: CHAT translating the Paternoster)

On Wednesday, July 17, 2002, at 12:01 , John Cowan wrote:

> Ray Brown scripsit:
> [snip}
>> writing recently is still getting mangled.   How much longer do we have
>> to
>> suffer this anglocentric mangling of diacritics?
>
> As Irving Berlin didn't quite say:
>
> There's no ASCII but US-ASCII, the only ASCII I know,
> Everything about it is U.S.-based,
> Everything about it's seven-bit.
I know - but 7 bits in this day & age!

> You do that X3.4 wheeler-dealing, when you're feeling retro-fit.
>
> There's no ASCII but US-ASCII, it's Unicode's first half-row,
> Though it is a turkey that we know must die,
> While systems chop off the bits that are high,
It's the systems chopping of the bits that are high which bug me.

> It is the only charset that will always fly,
> ASCII, on with the show!
> ASCII, on with the show!
I like the song  :)

>> Both he and I are using the term 'definite article' in traditional usage.
>
> Of course, but I think that French 'la', unlike English 'the', does not
> license such inferences about "conceptual essence"; it is becoming (if
> not quite uniformly) grammaticalized as a label for NPs.
That you'll have to take up with George Steiner, I was merely reporting.
But someone translating the two sentences into French does have to make a
choice between using the partitive article or the definite article, i.e.
either:
Qu'il y ait de la lumière. Et il y avait de la lumière.
or:
Que la lumière soit.  Et la lumière fut.

In English "Let there be the light" is not a possibility; indeed it sounds
almost ungrammatical.  But "Let there be some light" is possible, but it
unquestionably gives the wrong meaning.  In view of the latter, one might
then, as an anglophone, rule out the first French version.

However, if one compares German, as Steiner points out it is possible to
say:
Es werde das Licht.  Und es ward das Licht.
But this weaker than:
Es werde Licht.  Und es ward Licht.

Yet normally where French uses the partitive article, German will have the
noun
with no article.  A germanophone will have a rather different perception
of the
two French versions above.

Translation is not a trivial task, as I'm sure you'll agree.  Each
language throws
up its particular problems.

>> This, it seems to me, is so often overlooked by IAL makers who blithely
>> give their
>> language a 'definite article' or 'definite' & 'indefinite' articles,
>> without being exactly explicit about their usage.
>
> I agree, and I hold up Loglan/Lojban as a shining example of precise
> definition
> of articles/determiners.
And I think it would behove any auxlanger who wanted to include articles
to take
a peek at these classical loglans.

>> BrSc - whether BrScA or BrScB - will have no articles   :)
>
> Also an excellent choice:
Thanks.

> Voksigid, closely related to the Loglan tradition, has none.
Yep - I downloaded quite a bit stuff about Voksigid a few years back.   it
seems the
project got abandoned before it could be completed.

Ray.

Reply