Re: Telona on the web at last

As a caveat, I'm 3/4 of the way through packing all the belongings (junk?)
of our home in preparation for a 1400 mile move back to the Pacific
NorthWest. When I'm on here, its between breaks in packing and/or moving
boxes into the storage containers.

>Really?  I must hear more about Nenshat!  Do you have a website?  Is
>it allnoun?  I would be fascinated to hear which problems, and what
>your solutions were.
I really have to watch my keying. That should be Nenshar ["nen.Sar]. My
apology. I also apologize if my XSAMPA usage is incorrect.

I've no website for it as it was just an experiment to see if an assertion,
by Jack Vance in _Languages of Pao_, was viable: an agglutinating language
consisting solely of "objects" [effectively nouns] and their associated
states (he gives only 3 examples in the whole book). I tried to imagine how
such a language might develop, rather than deciding up front all that a
language needed.

I ended up thinking of statements as painting a series of stills (cartoon
panels?) with words rather than with ink. Like your "tane vumer", my
"gamnena ol" ["G\am.nen.a ol] /leg man's active two/ identified an object
(in this case, 2 objects) in motion at the time of the description. I
elected to use an OSV structure.

I wanted to limit the possible states, and chose phonemes to represent the 4
mentioned by Jack Vance

-v      in a state of volition
-r      in a state of readiness
-a      in a state of activity
-u      in a state of usage
-s      1st person
-n      2nd person

plus 5 more

-t       3rd person
-p       in a state of idleness/receptivity
-d       in a state of reference
-g [G\]  in a state of completion
-th [T]  in a state of anticipation
-ch [tS] in a state of conditionality/dependency

After playing with this a bit, I decided that all objects would have a
natural state: animate or inanimate, and chose the prefix /-i/ [I] to
indicate a switch of state. Thus "dap" is a stone but "dapi" ["dap.I] is a
stone in motion.

I elected to use facial expression as a means of creating questions and
negation, graphing these as T and V in written Nenshar.
E.g.
"up dapir shuta" /water-receptive stone-animate-ready hand-his-active/ is
"He drops the stone into the water."
"Vup dapir shuta" = "He drops the stone not into the water."
"up dapir Vshuta" = "He not-drops the stone into the water."
"up dapir Tshuta" = "He drops the stone into the water?"
etc.

I then cheated by adding morphems for temporal referencing to allow me to
indicate sequencing in a series of "stills".
E.g.
"Will you give me the book which you wrote?"
might translate as
"koned nepu shuna akop shuseth konenir Tshusev akal."
["kon.ed "neb.u "Su-na ag\"op "Su-seth "kon.e-nIr "Su-nev ag\-"al]
/book-in-focus pen-in-use hand-your-active time-indefinite-past
hand-my-in-anticipation book-your-in-motion question hand-your-in-volition
time-future/

A recurring problem was abstracts. Would abstracts develop? How might they
develop? Can a real language deal with only concrete objects? (Shades of
Gulliver's travels!).

Then life intervened - I changed jobs, taking one which turned out to be so
horribly mismanaged that people fled (and are still fleeing) from the
project as soon as possible. I ate, worked, slept, became depressed, and
abandoned working on Nenshar, leaving it at the stage of a proto-language.

So, Telona is much more elegant and developed than Nenshar.

>When I wrote DUMMY, I just meant to imply some suitable proform or
Yes. That much I understood.

>anaphor or something.  Actually the pitch accents are not involved in
>the distinction between 'beat + David' and 'X - beat', it's a
>phonological process (planned for section 4...).
I thought that might be the case, but wondered if I'd missed some point.

>[Da:P1D] :))  Then, fila + david > fila aldavid, and te - fila > te
>ivila.  The two operators + and - correspond to two modes of lenition,
>in a rather Tolkienian kind of way.  You only need accents when
>there are three or more words, to show how they're nested.
Ah, c'est ça.

>An utterance is marked as a question by an interrogative pitch contour
>on the accent of the final word.  For yes-no questions, you can simply
>apply this to any old sentence - "He's from England?" - or you can add
>in a "Perhaps...?" or an "...isn't that right?"  Wh-questions are
Tagged questions have the same form as yes-no questions? (Just asking for
clarification, not criticizing).

>similar - for "What are you holding?", you would say "Perhaps you're
>holding something?".  In English these aren't really equivalent, I
>know, but in Telona the proform corresponding to 'something' has a
>hint of 'what?' about it, only rarely being used outside questions.
Okay. Makes sense to my mind.

>Negatives ... ah, that's a rather long topic.  Basically, to negate a
>phrase, you prefix 'not +' ('ka') to it.  However, the effect that has
>is to refer to only the entities that the original phrase didn't refer
>to.  For example, if 'tane' means 'man', then 'ka-thane' means
>'anything that is not a man'.  So, to translate for example 'He isn't
>welcome here.', you would effectively say 'He is anything but welcome
>here.', or 'He is something other than welcome.'
Okay. Functions like the logical NOT in an SQL predicate.

>Does that help?
Immensely. Thanks.

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