Re: conlang servey

On Thu, Oct 24, 2002 at 08:16:11PM -0700, Heather Rice wrote:
> Language name
Ebisedian.

Strictly speaking, though, it is _ni 3bis33'di d3 3t3mii'_, "the language
of the people". (Pronounced [ni ?@\bi"s@\:di d@\ ?@\t@\"mi:].)

> creator's name
H. S. Teoh.

(That's ["tio], FYI. :-P)

> realative date of creation (just any old number will do)
The initial idea of a conlang (long before I knew about CONLANG) probably
began roughly around 1994 or thereabouts. First serious work in mid-2000
(that's when I discovered CONLANG).

> country
Malaysia.

> and first language of creator
Hokkien.

> purpose of conlang (auxlang, conlang, loglang, . . . ).
Artlang.

> Phonetics:  number of consonants, number of vowels,
> presence of nasalization, tone and how many, where the
> accent generally falls.
27 consonants, 9 vowels. Well, depending on how you count vowels: vowels
may be long/short, nasal/non-nasal.

Language is pitch-accented. There is a grammatical "high" and "low" pitch.
These are realized as a variety of tones depending on where they occur:
high-level, low-level, rising-and-falling, rising, falling; however, they
are still perceived as just high or low by native speakers.

> Morphemes:  presence of allomorphs, mutation,
> assimilation, prefixes, suffixes, infixes,
> suprafixation, dicontinuation, exclusion, total
> fusion, subtraction, reduplication.  Is the conlang
> agglutinating, isolating or fusional?
Allomorphs: Haven't really analysed the language for the presence of
these. (Obviously I didn't plan for it. :-P)

Mutation: most words (esp. nouns) can be turned into suffixes or prefixes
at will. Case inflections are done through "vowel contouring", analogous
to triconsonantal systems except more general. Gender inflections
involve consonant contouring, accent shifts, etc.. Noun number involves
prefixing, accent shift, and vowel length alteration.

Some verb forms feature reduplication. Some verb/noun forms exhibit "vowel
splitting", where a long final vowel is split by a glottal stop as part of
a mutation process.

I wouldn't call the language agglutinating, but lines are blurred with the
compounding mechanism which is heavily used by numerical nouns:
        3kekrejeok0rumobiz3tao'jekre3dei
        3-              plural prefix
        -kekrejeo-      twelfth (ordinal prefix)
        -k0rumo-        colorful
        -biz3tao'-      woman
        -jekre-         9
        -3-             additive infix
        dei'            4
        "13 colorful women in the twelfth place."

> Nouns and such:  subclasses of nouns (common/proper,
> abstract, things that may not be expressed explicitly
> in affixes)
Nouns are just nouns... gender strictly refers to physical gender; so all
non-living things and abstract concepts are neuter nouns. Interestingly,
terms for body parts are inflected for the gender of the person (so there
is a different word for a man's face and a woman's face, for example).

> presence of cases and how many and what
> kind,
Five cases, originative, receptive, instrumental, conveyant, locative. The
case system is quite different from any natlang that I know of. It has no
notion of subject/object/agent/trigger, etc., but is completely
symmetrical (active and passive sentences are identical).

> kind of possession (alienable, inalienable, no distinction, etc.)
No direct possessive construct. Possession is indicated by a periphrasis
using a subordinate stative sentence.

> presence of gender, number,
Five genders: masculine, feminine, epicene, neuter, "double".
Three numbers: singular, plural, nullar (0).

> articles,
No articles.

> demostratives,
Demonstratives are classed together with prepositions.
        uro     "this"
        aro     "the other"
        oro     "the next (in a sequence)"

> adjectives,
No adjectives. Adjectives are simply the corresponding abstract noun
juxtaposed with the modified noun, with subordinate noun cases completely
determining their meaning.

> quantatives.
Assuming you mean numbers? There are cardinals and ordinals. The counting
system is based on "triads", where you can count on different scales of
granularity (similar to English "X pairs", "X trios", "X dozens" except
with many different gradations than English has). Quantity is indicated by
prefixing the modified noun onto the number noun. (E.g., "four horses" is
literally "a horsey four".) Ordinal position is indicated by the reverse:
prefixing the number onto the noun: "fourth horse" = "four-horse".

> Are comparatives expressed by affix, word order or both?
No comparatives yet.

> Do pronouns express gender, number, declension?
Pronouns are full nouns, fully inflected for gender, number, and case.
1st person only occurs in the singular. The other pronouns are not divided
based on 2nd or 3rd person, but rather "intimate" or "distant" based on
the speaker's perception of the person. (You could think of it as two sets
of pronouns, one for intimate friends, one for outsiders or for formal
occasions, with no distinction between 2nd and 3rd person.)

>  Are there indefinite pronouns, possessed pronouns?
Not sure if there is a distinction between definite and indefinite
pronouns in the language. Definitely no possessed pronouns.

> Others?  Are prepositions bound, unbound?
Unbound.

>  How many prepositons (approximate).
Indeterminate, as the lexicon is still small and undergoing steady growth.
There are still quite a large number of prepositions planned, that haven't
been realized yet.

>  Presence of clitics.  Is
> derivational morphology mostly by compounding words or
> by affix or both?
Both.

> Verbs and such:
> Are person, number, object expressed with the verb?
Verbs are inflected for domain (physical, introvertive, abstract), focus
(incidental, deliberative, consequential), and aspect (inceptive,
progressive, perfective). No person/number/object marked on verbs (there
is no such thing as "object" in the language anyway :-P).

Verb tense is marked by a separate "temporal noun", usually elided when it
is clear from the context.

> Are there static verbs (to be)?
Definitely not. Static statements are expressed by sentences containing
only nouns. Well, verbs can be turned into participles, which are
basically nouns in the instrumental case. But some stative concepts (such
as identity (to be), adjectival statements (she is tall/the house is red),
etc.) are expressed solely by nouns.

> Is the object incorporated into the person marker (making a
> phonetically different affix like in the Native
> American languages)?
N/A, since there is no concept of object, and the only real "person" is
the 1st person.

> Is transitivity marked for transitive, intransitive, bitransitive or
> other?
There is no concept of transitivity in the language. Every verb has five
"noun slots" corresponding to the five noun cases. Different verbs assign
different semantics to each of these "slots", although the general meaning
of a "slot" is usually consistent across all verbs. Each "slot" has equal
importance in a sentence.

>  Is the person inclusive, exclusive, no distiction?
Hard to say, since the language doesn't really have any true person beyond
the 1st. The 1st person pronouns only have singular forms.

> Kind of gender.
Purely biological. (There's also a whole culture of gender-sensitivity,
but I suppose that's irrelevant here. :-P)

> Are past, present, future expressed?
Only by temporal nouns, which are independent of verbs. Verbs are not
marked for tense. Temporal nouns are usually elided except where needed
for clarity.

> Recent, remote?
No. (Not yet, that is. :-P)

> Is mode express, what kind?
Mode?

Or do you mean "mood"? In the case of verb moods, they aren't marked on
the verb itself, but by the presence of an optative or subjunctive
particle inserted at the head of the sentence. There are 3 optatives and 3
subjunctives.

> Is voice expressed?  What kind?
There is no such thing as voice in the language. Active and passive
equivalents of a sentence come out completely identical, except perhaps
for word order. But then, word order doesn't matter, so there isn't a
difference.

> Manner?  Aspect?  Please list what kinds of manner and aspect the
> conlang expresses in its verbs.
See above.

> Presence of adverbs, pro-drop.
Adverbs are simply instrumental nouns. They do not have their own
category/morphology.

There are "pro-verbs", which refer to a previous sentence.

_kele_ is a reference to what was described in the previous sentence. Eg.:
        le's jh3t3' moo'ju. eb3' kele.
        Go   she    city    I    likewise.
        "She is going (starting to go) to the city. I too."

The pseudo-noun _keli_ converts the previous sentence into a noun. It's a
bit too complicated to explain why this would be needed; but the
originative, _kel0_, can often be used to mean "because". Literally, it
means "this (what is mentioned in the previous sentence) causes ...". The
instrumental _kela_ often has this meaning as well.

> Can nouns, adjectives, adverbs be changed to verbs and vice versa?
Nouns, adverbs, and adjectives are the same class of words. Most verbs
have a corresponding cognate noun, so I suppose you can say they can be
changed to each other. Many particles/adpositions have nominal equivalents
too, so you can convert between word categories quite easily.

Sometimes a verb occurs with a cognate adverb for emphasis, e.g.:
        l3r3a' lee'r3 - "flowingly flow", i.e., describing the dynamic
        motion of a fast-flowing river.

> Presence of adjective, adverbial clauses and relative pronouns.
Adjectives and adverbial clauses are identical to subordinate clauses.
There are no real relative pronouns; but the subordinate clause terminator
particle does act like a relative pronoun.

> Sentences:
> Does the conlang have an ergative or accusative system?
Neither. (See above.) Case roles are semantic rather than syntactic. There
is no distinction between active/passive; every noun case is equally
important.

For example:
        moo'j0 lyy's eb3' manga' loo'ru.
        "From the city, I went on horseback to the countryside."

Any of the four nouns may be dropped:
        moo'j0 lyy's eb3' manga'.
        "From the city, I went out on horseback."

        lyy's eb3' manga' loo'ru.
        "I went on horseback to the countryside."

        lyy's eb3' manga'.
        "I am going (somewhere) on horseback."

        lyy's eb3' loo'ru.
        "I am going to the countryside."

        moo'j0 lyy's loo'ru.
        "From the city, (somebody) went to the countryside."

        lyy's manga'.
        "(Somebody) is going on horseback (to somewhere)."

        lyy's.
        "(Somebody) went (somewhere)."

(This last example caused "Hanuman" Zhang to call Ebisedian an elliptical
language. :-P)

> Word order and is it free or strict?
Free. Except for certain constructs (prepositions, subordinate clause
delimiters, etc.).

> Are adjectives, adverbs and prepositions before or after
> the modified word?
Adjectives must be in a subordinate clause (since they are just plain old
nouns otherwise). Since subordinate clauses always appear before the
modified noun, you can say adjectives precede the modified noun.

Adverbs are simply instrumental nouns; so they can appear anywhere in a
sentence. By convention, however, they tend to precede the verb (but this
is a general observation, not a rule).

> Is the word order changed in a question?
No. Questions are indicated solely by the presence of interrogatives.
There is not even a question mark or other equivalent punctuation in the
native writing, although I usually change the sentence terminator into a
question mark in the orthography, just so it's more readable.

> How many (approximately) conjugations are there?
Precisely 27. (See above.) However, this may not be true for irregular
verbs which may not occur in all possible conjugation forms.

> Other:
> What is the number base for the numeral system (10?
> 12?)?
Hard to say. It's a hybrid of powers of 3. A description of the triad
counting system is a bit too long to include here; consult the reference
grammar at:

(PDF)   http://quickfur.yi.org:8080/~hsteoh/conlang/grammar.pdf
(PS)    http://quickfur.yi.org:8080/~hsteoh/conlang/grammar.ps

> Presence of idioms
Truckloads of idioms. Almost the entire case system is an idiom. :-)

> irregular forms of nouns
The "irregular" nouns turned out to have a common pattern that occurs
often enough that I've decided to call it the "2nd declension". :-) Of
course, there are a few truly irregular forms for some words, but these
are relatively rare.

> and verbs.
There are a few irregular verbs, but even those behave very closely to the
regular ones.

> Is the language syntax very predictable, or are there many exceptions?
Syntax is quite predictable. However, there are also many, many idiomatic
constructs. I'm not sure if you want to call them "exceptions", since much
of the language is built on such idioms.

> How much literature has been produced and what kind (I'm not talking
> about translations, but stuff you wrote yourself).
Not that much, unfortunately. There are small fragments here and there. I
really need to get to work on that. :-)

> Is there a history and dictionary of the conlang?
Not only does the language have a (internal) history and con-culture, it
actually has an entire con-universe to go with it. In fact, it's quite a
latecomer in this con-universe, which came into being long before I even
thought about the language.

In terms of internal history, though, the language is occurs relatively
early, during the Age of the Kingdom, where the lands (landmasses for you
Ferochromon-aware folks) were united under the rule of a monarchy. It is
both the official language of the peoples, and the common trade language,
much like Greek was during New Testament times. Later, after the collapse
of the Kingdom, the language would divide into 3 main families of daughter
langs. (But I haven't done any work on those yet.)

> Script invented?
Yes, however it is currently incomplete. There are actually several
different writing systems for the language; the "official" one is
_sanoki'_ (which is the one I just referred to). The other significant one
is _k0romoki'_, which is based on color patterns instead of pen strokes.
(There is at least one other as-yet unnamed system, which involves
intersecting lines. But I haven't thought very much about that yet.)

> Other conlangs produced by the creator of this one.
So far, none.

> If you could summarize your conlang in a sentence,
> what would you write?
Ebisedian is an inflected, pitch-accented, highly-idiomatic language with
many interesting features, the most prominent of which is its unique
typology, which completely dispenses with active/passive distinctions and
transitivity.

(There are many other interesting features, but I consider this to be the
main contribution, or defining characteristic, of Ebisedian. The others
are just linguistic curiosities.)

> On my servey, I knew I couldn't possibly cover everything that conlangs
> will be, so I included a long notes section.  If you want to provide any
> other information about the conlang, just keep typing!
Mention should be made about different sentence types in Ebisedian. There
are "nominator" sentences, which consist of a single noun or noun-phrase,
and serves as a topic selector. This is similar to titles in English,
except that in Ebisedian they occur much more frequently, and are
liberally sprinkled throughout any given text of significant length. A
favorite construct is a topic-comments sentence group, consisting of a
nominator sentence (topic) followed by one or more sentences with
back-referencing particles referring back to the topic (comments).

There are also "stative" sentences, which consists solely of nouns.
Stative sentences with participles (=gerund in instrumental case) describe
unchanging, continual events; other statives describe adjectival
relationships, equivalences, etc..

Then you have the regular verbal sentences, which strictly speaking only
describes a changing, non-constant state of things. (Verbs in Ebisedian
are strictly non-static.)

Finally, there is a strange class of sentences called the "summaritive"
sentences, which consist almost exclusively of particles, free-floating
adpositions, and "relatives". These are used to "summarize" a passage by
recalling relationships expounded on previously, and usually occur in
philosophical texts to highlight principles that have been shown by
preceding examples. (Unfortunately, I haven't finalized the structure of
these beasts, so I can't give any examples yet.)

On another note, I should mention a bit about the idiomatic meanings of
nominal numbers. The singular noun doesn't really have any idiomatic
meaning. But the plural noun often emphasizes its plurality; so that a
sentence like:
        3bis33'd3 jhi'li.       "People(pl) [are in the] room."
could be better understood as "*Many* people are in the room".

Also, in negative statements, the nullar number is often preferred over
using the sentential negation _my'e_, "it is not so". For example, if you
knock on the wrong door and ask for a person who doesn't live there, the
answer would be "None of <name> is here" rather than "<name> is not here".
This is quite interesting in the language because names are always
prefixed by a "proper name prefix" which inflects for every combination of
gender and number, and the nullar prefix comes *between* the proper name
prefix and the name itself. E.g.
        eka'n3 juli'r.          "Ekani is in the house"
        emy'kan3 juli'r.        "None-of-Ekani is in the house"
                                Literally, "Mr.No-Ekani is in the house."


T

--
I'm still trying to find a pun for "punishment"...

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