Re: Native Grammatical terms

--- Isidora Zamora <isidora@...> wrote:

> I am gathering opinions on what amount of
> native grammatical terms would be
> present in a conlang which is entirely oral
> (i.e. whose speakers are a
> pre-literate culture.  I, the conlanger,
> obviously have created a
> transcription system for the language.)
I don't know - I suspect it might rely on what
sorts of things they do with their language. If
they play with it and rely on it to pass on a set
scripture (like Sanskrit), they may well have a
highly developped understanding of how language
works, how to compose it and what is and is not
within bounds.

Once they start writing, I might look for a
fairly strict codification of the language.

> The language in question is Índumom
> Tovlaugadóis, also known by its Trehelo
> name, Cwendaso.  In the near future, the
> Trehelo alphabet will be adapted
> (by dropping a lot of characters and inventing
> at least three new ones) for
> use in writing Tovlaugadóis, but, as things
> stand now, the Tovláugad are an
> entirely oral culture.
>
> Now, the Trehelo have a long history of written
> language, long enough that
> the Trehelo alphabet has at least once
> undergone major revision to reflect
> sound changes.  (Or perhaps it's more fair to
> say that the proto-alphabet
> used by the Trehelo and other related peoples
> was revised to reflect
> certain of the sound changes that distinguish
> the Trehelo language from its
> sister languages.)  In any case, Trehelo
> scholars (and printers) are fairly
> linguistically aware - both of modern dialects
> and of diachronic
> change.  They have a good set of grammatical
> terms for describing their
> language and a good sense of what is and isn't
> good grammar in certain
> dialects and time periods, as well as a sense
> for what is and isn't good
> style in composition.
How is their understanding of grammar different
from yours?

The Talarians have a native grammar that is quite
different from the one I wrote to keep track of
things. They understand language as a sort of
barn dance where two groups of participants
follow the calls of the third group, which stands
outside the dance, directing it only.

They understand only nouns, verbs and particles
(as we'd call em); and have no truck for nicities
like conjugation or declension or any of the
nitty gritties we usually think of as essential
to a good grammatical treatise.

> I am wondering how much grammatical terminology
> the Tovlaugad would have,
> being an oral culture.  Language is terribly
> important to them.  They have
> a poetic corpus spanning at least one and a
> half millennia, and this corpus
> is very important to them.  They have basically
> no sense of diachronic phonological change.
That, then, is probably one facet that they will
lack in their grammatical description. In the
same way most English speakers could be elicited
to describe how English works, but would be at a
total loss to say anything about where the words
come from or how they get here.

> As the phonology changes, so does their
> pronounciation of the words in the poetic
> corpus, so they are not aware of
> the change and there is no record of it.
But what about when a change happens that utterly
changes the metrics or rhyme schemes or whatever
is important in their poetry?

> They do have some real sense of
> the phenomenon of diachronic syntactic change,
> since they can easily
> perceive that the older poetic works tend to
> use different syntactic
> constructions than do more recent ones.  (The
> preferred method for
> subordinating a clause in everyday language has
> been entirely replaced over
> the course of the centuries, but the older form
> is retained in formal situations.)
Makes sense. We can see that in English poetry as
well.

Padraic.


=====
la cieurgeourea provoer mal trasfu ast meiyoer ke 'l andrext ben trasfu.


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