Re: Unilang: the Morphology

At 11:11 am -0400 19/4/01, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
>Okay. I keep swamping the list with threads on this subject; hope it raises
>some interest... :)
>
>In auxlang morphology, there's the question of what we refer to as "case
>inflection". I have hardly ever seen anything but fierce opposition
>to "cases" in auxlang design.
And yet some of the auxlang 'classics' have case endings.  Volapük has four
cases:
      SING.  PLURAL
NOM.  fat     fats
GEN.  fata    fatas
DAT.  fate    fates
ACC.  fati    fatis

Esperanto has two:
       SING.    PLURAL
NOM.   patro    patroj
ACC.   patron   patrojn

Novial also has two:
           SING.   PLURAL
ABSOLUTE  patro    patros
GENETIVE  patron   patrosen

Esperanto, the most successful conIAL to-date, not only declines its nouns,
it also declines its adjectives since they must 'agree' with the noun they
qualify.  Also, while Volapük declines its pronouns very boringly in the
same way as its nouns, as does Novial except for the 1st person pronouns
(sing. me, men; pl.: nus, nusen), Esperanto keeps only the acc. ending &
has irregular plurals for all its personal pronouns.

According to the conventional wisdom in Auxland, Esperanto should be the
least successful of those three languages.  Pity facts upset theory  :)

[snip]

>Well, wouldn't there be a lot less of a headache driving around in the
>city, if we'd remove all the traffic lights? Why have three different
>lights to consider, when we can have zero? Just drive... And while we're at
>it,
No, no - wouldn't work!  That's why if we don't have traffic lights at busy
junctions, we have a roundabout instead (forgotten what roundabouts are
called in the US).  You got to have something, even if it's the simple old
French rule: "Prioritée à droite".

>
>You may disagree, but I think this is comparable.
Yes, you've got to have sopmething.  All natlanguages do!  If we don't have
case endings, we can use clitics as, e.g., Japanese _wa_, _ga_, _ni_, _no_;
or we use strict word-order.

Has a looser word-order than English and allows fronting of focus (not
topic), but relies on "pointer words" to keep the meaning clear.  It
dropped case endings, even in pronouns, centuries ago.

[snip]
>Can syntax do the job?
The answer is obviously "yes" - there are natlangs that to prove that.

>Can prepositions and other similar items do the job?
Yes - take a look a real natlangs used by millions of people every day.
The majority do not use case endings.

>Are those any easier?
Why are they the predominant type in pidgins & creoles?

>Is English preposition-marking that much different, after
>all, from Latin inflection-marking?
Er - isn't it more like Latin preposition-marking?

>Whatever does the job, the job's gotta be done. There's no sense in killing
>the morphology, and then expecting everything to work all the same.
No - no sensible person would expect that.  If you don't have traffic
lights, you've got to have a roundabout or some other system, otherwise no
one will know who gives way to who.  If you have little morphological
affixes, then you have to use syntax and/or words like pre-/post-positions,
clitics etc (particles :)

>As you see, I haven't presented any major scheme for a unilang's
>morphology; I'm too undecided on the matter to have any. Okay, I have some
>unmoulded ideas alright, but I'm kind of asking for the input of fellow
>conlangers here :)
Ok - forget the dogmatics of Auxland, but I would advise taking a good look
at what actually does happen in pidgins and, IMO more importantly, in
creoles.
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At 12:30 pm -0400 19/4/01, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
[snip]
>
>I think 4-5 cases actually is pretty reasonable.
Like Volapük   :)

[snip]
>would be any harder to learn than syntax rules.  Personally, I find syntax
>harder to assimilate, because it deals with the structure of a group of
>words
Yet a language has to have rules of syntax.  Even languages like Latin that
have a fairly free word-order doesn't allow complete freedom; you must.
e.g. know what belongs to different subordinate clauses & what to the main
clause.
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Personally, I've found case-less Welsh easier to get on with than Gaelic
with its four cases.  It seems to me that particles like the Japanese ones
I gave above and the modern English possessive particle, which can attach
itself to whole phrases, do the job just as well as and are more flexible
than case endings, cf.
"That's the guy next door's dog."

Ray.



=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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