Quoting "B. Garcia" <madyaas@...>:
> Damian had sent his reply to me, when i'm sure it was meant to go to the
> list.
Stupid gmail and its forced Reply-To:. Reposted
Mike Ellis wrote:
>There are a few patterns that show up here and there (words for little
>things tend towards front vowels and words for big things tend to have back
>vowels in them etc etc)
More precisely, this shows a weak correlation of the period of the
second formant (1/F2) with the size of the object. Likewise with the
period of the fundamental (1/F0) in the tonal African language Ewe.
>but they aren't hard rules and they don't stick in a lot of places
You'd be surprised:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa
* http://www.conknet.com/~mmagnus/Str.html
*
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=3Dcache:i75hDalvvQgJ:www.percepp.demon.co.uk/=
soundsmb.htm
* http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/archives/2002/12/11/phonaesthetics/
(caution: possible "cellar door" bias begins halfway down)
Though English has "small" and "big", it also has "little" and "large".
>A suggestion: if you're having difficulty generating an a priori vocabulary
>that sounds right, try an 'a posteriori' language -- start with an existing
>language and then go nuts with sound/grammar changes etc.
Wouldn't I have to worry about offending native speakers of
the existing natlang(s) or creators of the existing conlang(s)
if I include too many identifiable words? I guess one solution
is to take existing words, compound them, and then "erode" them.
>EVERYBODY knows that the word and phrase order of (pick your first language=
)
>is inherently more logical than the rest.
And such an inherent bias is what I'm trying to understand.
A known bias is better than an unknown bias.
Sanghyeon Seo wrote:
>If you don't want euroclones, there's a very easy way to avoid it:
>learn any non-European language!
I've _read about_ other natlangs and their structures, but I've
never tried hard to learn to speak one. Am I the only one who
got cheated by his middle school and high school, whose foreign
language departments taught nothing but IE languages? I guess I
just haven't yet had the dedication to work through "teach yourself
$LANGUAGE" books from the library, especially because they rarely
come with a cassette or CD to compare my pronunciation to.
Stephen Mulraney wrote:
>But
>a better reason for the low number of distinctive vowel phonemes
>might be large array of consonants, which bear more functional
>load in the language.
So if being consonant-rich makes a phonetic system tend to be
vowel-poor (cf. Caucasian languages), then what are the forces
that help a language become consonant-rich?
And about Toki Pona: Don't the complaints about vagueness
apply in theory to any isolating language, which can be as
vague or as specific as the speaker's patience allows for?
Sally Caves wrote:
>This does sound like a twelve step program, doesn't it! :)
If only it took only 12 steps to make a conlang :)
>Many of the
>linguistic scholars of glossolalia were so sure they could identify the
>artificial aspects of that linguistic practice by noting the 1) open
>syllables, 2) reduced phonology, 3) echoism, etc. that we find in Hawaiian,
>for instance. An over regularity of grammar?
Turkish verbs?
>Sounds, rather, like that South American tribe whose name I can't remember=
;
>I have it on the tip of my tongue. Their language was also almost devoid o=
f
>abstractions, and they showed an inability to calculate, as well, i.e., to
>think in abstractions. We even discussed it about a year ago.
Today I was scouring Wikipedia for information on language isolates
on a hunch that they might have more off-the-wall ANADEWisms,
and I read about Pirah=E3 spoken in Brazil. Is this the one?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%FAra-Pirah%E3_language
B. Garcia wrote:
>Your own esthetcics, Damian will be different from mine. You may think
>you don't have any, but they're there. Try not to judge what your
>esthetics should be based upon what others have done with their
>languages.
So in other words, do you claim that people won't b***h at me
because, say, the elf-counterparts in my conworld speak a more
guttural language than the orc-counterparts? You say such a setup
would amuse you, but would it offend others?
>It reminds me of those "Folk explanations" that say "such and such
>ruler/king/chief had a lazy tongue, so everyone began to imitate him".
Something like that is how French _chaire_ =3D "chair" became _chaise_.
>The pirah=E3 is who you're thinking of. I still can't wrap my head
>around not having stories, or histories further back than one's grand
>parents.
Well if you can't remember that far back, then you're not going to
remember how to defeat the creatures that took your grandparents
underground to dine on their flesh :)
--
Damian