archives of the CONLANG mailing list ------------------------------------ Date: 5 Oct 92 15:22:00 EST From: "UMPAC::GILSON" Subject: Why Esperantists and other conlangers cannot communicate Many times when I find myself in argument with Esperantists, it seems as if we are so far from understanding each other that we might as well be talking in different languages. I have tryed to analyze the reason for this inability to understand each other, and I think I have figured it out. I think the main reason for this inability is that we are working from different pictures of where we are. I feel that Solresol, Volapuk, Esperanto, and even later languages such as Ido and Novial are way-stations in a process of development. We are still in need of development of a world interlanguage, and Esperanto was an experimental proposal. With experience, many of us have come to the conclusion that we still have some way to go in determining what a world interlanguage ought to be. Rick Harrison, Rick Morneau, and I all have our ideas, which differ in some respects, and it may be very hard or impossible to suit all our separate ideas as to which way to go, but at least I feal I understand them be- cause there is mutual agreement that the task at hand is to _develop_ a language for the world. The Esperantists, by and large (perhaps not all of them, but I would venture the overwhelming majority) feel that the development phase is over and that all that needs to be done is to spread the word. I am not sure when they felt it reached the end of the development phase, but certainly it was before 1907. As a result of this _fundamental_ disagreement, I think that communication between (on the one hand) Rick H, Rick M, and me, and (on the other hand) Don Harlow, Ron Hale-Evans, and Pierre Savoie is virtually nonex- istent. We are really not talking about the same thing, which is why the Espe- ranto adherents have mentioned that "most Esperantists are not interested in conlangs." The task before us, the conlang-interested people, is to achieve a situation whereby the five billion people of this world who have no knowledge of _any_ conlang will perceive the advantages of a world interlanguage. When we look at these five billion, the question of whether 50,000 or 2,000,000 people speak Esperanto is insignificant. The fact is, that to 3 or 4 significant digits, the numbers of people who need to be convinced to learn Novial and of those who need to be convinced to learn Esperanto are equal. In this sense, Esperanto is as much of a failure as any other conlang you may name, from Langue Bleue to Wede. The Esperantists' attitude is that we don't need any improvements; we only need to show people what they can do with Esperanto." My attitude is that if Esperanto is only _slightly_ easier to learn for English speakers than, say, Spanish, the fact that all those hundreds of millions of speakers of Spanish exist means that the payoff for learning Spanish is great enough to be worth the somewhat greater effort. Unless you come up with a language that is _really_ easy to learn, to read, and to use, you are not going to make a major dent in those many people who speak _no_ world interlanguage. (Granted, many of those 5 billion people are illiterate Third-Worlders whose only concern is filling their empty stomachs. But even if we reduce our total to 5% of that number, my arguments all are quite valid. 2,000,000 is an insignificant fraction, less than 1%, of 250,000,000, and I think that 2,000,000 is quite an inflated figure when we note that nobody except the one person who the World Almanac chooses to quote comes up with a figure anywhere _near_ that total.) One strange point to me is that Esperantists seem to think that conscious changes to Esperanto cannot be made because, to them, it is a language like Spanish or Japanese which "belongs to its speakers." Well, every Esperanto- speaker in the world (except for a small number that I think NO Esperantist would claim exceeds 100 people) is a 2nd language speaker. Esperanto is no more their primary language than German is mine. Esperanto is not spread from parent to children and playmate to playmate like the natural languages, and it was created by an individual and is modified by individuals and small groups, unlike natural languages. So the Esperantists' arguments are based on false analogies. Only a language with native speakers and geographically compact communities where a child can grow up speaking that language and no other can be discussed in these terms. To my knowledge, the only conlang that has reached that stage is Modern Israeli Hebrew, and calling that a conlang is a stretch that some will not accept because it is so thoroughly based on Biblical and Medieval Hebrew that it does not have the autonomy of most conlangs. Perhaps these comments will help spread some light. Date: Tue, 6 Oct 92 09:46:59 EST From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) Subject: Why Esperantists... In "Why Esperantists..." GILSON%UMPAC (been hunting for a name in that message, but couldn't find one) tackles the much-tackled question of what makes, or rather, could make, a conlang successful. I quite liked his closing remark: "To my knowledge, the only conlang that has reached that stage is Modern Israeli Hebrew, and calling that a conlang is a stretch that some will not accept because it is so thoroughly based on Biblical and Medieval Hebrew that it does not have the autonomy of most conlangs." After all, isn't Esperanto also thoroughly based on European languages, even to the point of having the accusative express movement towards? I discovered the famous "Klingon Dictionary" last week-end in a bookshop in... Bendigo of all places (Bendigo is an ex gold-mining town, 2 hours' drive from Melbourne, with just 62,000 inhabitants). Imagine that Klingon had not been designed with "phonetic brutality" in mind. That would make it easier to pronounce. Imagine that its one difficult feature (verb prefixes expressing both subject and object) had never been invented. Finally, imagine that the Star Trek fad had been nurtured with Klingon Clubs and 10-minutes TV tutorials in Clipped Klingon in the time-slots of Astroboy, Goldorak, Bugs Bunny et al. We would soon have a whole generation of Klingon speakers wherever Star Trek was shown on TV. In fact, I found that Klingon had the makings of a good conlang. It can be analyzed as a monosyllabic language (prefixes and suffixes are only such because they are written so, and because of a word- stress rule that is quite dispensable). A word is of the form CV(C)(C), with CVCC quite rare (I only found -rgh, -y', and -w' as final CC), and CVC most common. No word starts with a vowel. As a consequence, continuous speech is readily segmented into its constituent words, a common conlang requirement that turned into such a mess in Lojban. And I'm sure that the designer did not even try to implement that feature in Klingon! Not that I necessarily advocate Klingon as the international language, but I have a feeling that the birth of, for once, a truly international language has just been miscarried. Date: Fri, 9 Oct 92 08:01:29 -0700 From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt) Subject: sexist words I had a politically incorrect thought the other day...it has long been popular to suppose that the fact that e.g. in English "man" means both "male" and "human" indicates a sexist bias, implying that "male" is the primary meaning and "human" secondary...that "human" implies "male" and that therefore females are not human. But perhaps "human" is the primary meaning, and "male" is secondary. From that point of view males get the second rate treatment of not having a unique distinguishing term..."man" is then actually androgynous, whereas terms like "woman" mean both human and female. This point of view probably isn't particularly defensible, I just thought it was an interesting intellectual exercise to consider the opposite of conventional wisdom. Doug Date: 14 Oct 92 03:13:26 EDT From: shared account <71174.2735@CompuServe.COM> Subject: remarkable claims I have just received a brochure from Ron Clark and Wendy Ashby about their language project Glosa. Some of the claims in this brochure are quite remarkable; I'd like to know what you folks think about these statements: ``Glosa has no grammar. 20+ little words out of the 1000 do all the work of Tense, Number, Comparison etc.'' ``Any Glosa word can be used as any part of speech, as in chinese & english.'' Glosa ``leads to clearer thinking.'' ======================================================================== Rick Harrison peora!jwt!bbs-hrick 71174.2735@compuserve.com Date: Thu, 15 Oct 92 16:58:36 EST From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) Subject: Glosa Rick Harrison would like what we folks think of: ``Glosa has no grammar. 20+ little words out of the 1000 do all the work of Tense, Number, Comparison etc.'' ``Any Glosa word can be used as any part of speech, as in chinese & english.'' Glosa ``leads to clearer thinking.'' First, me folk think Ricky lucky fellow. Me no receive Glosa brochure. First claim: a. "Glosa has no grammar". That must mean no morphology, in other terms, that Glosa words are uninflectable. Not much surprise there. b. The 20+ little words. Not too surprising. New-Hebridean Pidgin English probably has fewer than 20 grammatical particles (never counted them). Second claim. "Any Glosa word can be used as any part of speech". Possible, but I doubt it's true of all words. If it were, that would be something quite new and interesting. Suppose Glosa has a word "of" expressing possession. "Of", used as a noun might mean "possession", as an adjective, perhaps it would mean "possessive", as a verb "to own" or something to that effect, as a... hm... conjunction? yes, as a conjunction, just "of". The trouble is, if I can imagine what the word "house" would mean as a verb or an adjective, "house" as a grammatical particle has me nonplussed. I suspect that the "20+ little words" cannot be used as any part of speech, so more's the pity. At any rate that means that Glosa, if it has no "grammar", has a very well-defined and strict syntax. Third claim. "Glosa ``leads to clearer thinking.''". The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Learn Glosa and try thinking about, say, "Epimenides, a Cretan, says that all Cretans are liars" and other sundry pieces of cleverness (If you elect me for president, I promise to break all my electoral promises, including this one), or try translating the taxation laws into Glosa. Date: Thu, 15 Oct 92 08:21:23 MDT From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) Subject: Re: remarkable claims Rick Harrison writes: > I have just received a brochure from Ron Clark and Wendy Ashby > about their language project Glosa. Some of the claims in this > brochure are quite remarkable; I'd like to know what you folks > think about these statements: > > ``Glosa has no grammar. 20+ little words out of the 1000 do all > the work of Tense, Number, Comparison etc.'' If it doesn't have a grammar, then it isn't a language. Since a grammar is simply the definition or "specification" of a language, all languages have grammars. As Jacques Guy points out, the Glossites are probably confusing grammar with inflectional morphology. Much more likely, though, is that they simply don't know what they're talking about. It sure would be nice if language designers would learn something about language before they try to shove another linguistic abortion down our throats. > > ``Any Glosa word can be used as any part of speech, as in chinese > & english.'' > This is true of neither English nor Chinese. I never realized that the Glossites where publishing such rubbish. > Glosa ``leads to clearer thinking.'' > For Glossites, this is obviously true, since they have nowhere to go but up. Yah, I'm in a bad mood today. Regards, Rick -- *=*= Disclaimer: The INEL does not speak for me and vice versa =*=* = Rick Morneau Idaho National Engineering Laboratory = * mnu@inel.gov Idaho Falls, Idaho 83415, USA * =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= NeXT Mail accepted here! *=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 16:12:58 +0100 From: matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi (Matthew Faupel) Subject: remarkable claims RM: If it doesn't have a grammar, then it isn't a language. Since a RM: grammar is simply the definition or "specification" of a language, RM: all languages have grammars. As Jacques Guy points out, the Glossites RM: are probably confusing grammar with inflectional morphology. Much RM: more likely, though, is that they simply don't know what they're RM: talking about. They do know what they're talking about, or at least they do know that Glosa does have a grammar as I mentioned this point in a letter I wrote to them to comment on their new handout. Their explanation was that they were using the word "grammar" in the non-linguists' sense of what you learn at school as french "grammar", i.e. flexions of tense, mood, number and so on. They realised that this was, strictly speaking, an incorrect use of "grammar" but since they were aiming their leaflet at people who had been put off learning languages by the complexity of natural languages rather than at professional linguists they felt justified in their use. I still dislike using "grammar" in this fashion, but I can see their point. A more serious deficiency in relation to Glosa grammar is that although it exists, as far as I can tell it is only taught by example; there is no strict setting down of the rules for constructing and parsing Glosa. I also suspect that it too often defaults to the "obvious" forms of construction used in English. RM: Yah, I'm in a bad mood today. Subjunctively speaking? Matthew ---* Amnesiac the Wizard *------------------* matthew@uk.tele.nokia.fi *--- Opinions expressed here are not those of my company. | NB. ntl02 is EN They're not even my own; I plagiarised the lot of them! | TEE EL ZERO TWO ---* matthew@ntl02.decnet.nokia.fi *------------------* Matthew Faupel *--- From: riddle@is.rice.edu (Prentiss Riddle) Subject: Re: remarkable claims Date: Thu, 15 Oct 92 11:08:29 CDT > From matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi Thu Oct 15 10:20:28 1992 > > They realised that this was, strictly speaking, an incorrect use of > "grammar" but since they were aiming their leaflet at people who had been > put off learning languages by the complexity of natural languages rather > than at professional linguists they felt justified in their use. Or viewed less charitably, they are knowingly engaging in false advertising. -- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle@rice.edu -- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer. Date: 19 Oct 92 23:41:05 EDT From: shared account <71174.2735@CompuServe.COM> Subject: glossopoeia automated Here's a little program written in Microsoft QuickBasic that randomly assembles consonants and vowels into 2000 unique words; then it outputs them to a file compatible with the Universal Language Dictionary project. In this way, you can have your PC create an _a_priori_ vocabulary for you. (You still have to design the grammar yourself.) It takes about 15 minutes to run on a 12 MHz machine because its method of checking for reduplicated words is not very sophisticated. You can customize the "look and feel" of the resulting vocabulary by tinkering with the lists of consonants and vowels in the DATA statements at the end of the program. For example, the program as it is only creates 2-syllable words; if you would also like to have some 3-syllable words, add strings like "aka" and "iti" to the fourth and final DATA line. I hereby place this program in the public domain. Enjoy. ------------ cut here ------------ '* random a priori vocabulary generator CLS RANDOMIZE TIMER OPTION BASE 1 DIM c1$(20), v1$(20), c2$(20), v2$(20) DIM w(2001) AS STRING * 10 a = 1: b = 1: c = 1: d = 1 FirstFill: READ x$: IF x$ = "whoa" THEN GOTO SecondFill c1$(a) = x$: a = a + 1: GOTO FirstFill SecondFill: READ x$: IF x$ = "whoa" THEN GOTO ThirdFill v1$(b) = x$: b = b + 1: GOTO SecondFill ThirdFill: READ x$: IF x$ = "whoa" THEN GOTO FourthFill c2$(c) = x$: c = c + 1: GOTO ThirdFill FourthFill: READ x$: IF x$ = "whoa" THEN GOTO Prep v2$(d) = x$: d = d + 1: GOTO FourthFill Prep: a = a - 1: b = b - 1: c = c - 1: d = d - 1 wrdcnt = 1 Main: GOSUB CreateWord match = 0 FOR L = 1 TO wrdcnt IF wd$ = RTRIM$(w(L)) THEN match = 1: L = wrdcnt + 1 NEXT IF match = 1 THEN GOTO Main w(wrdcnt) = wd$ wrdcnt = wrdcnt + 1 IF wrdcnt < 2000 THEN GOTO Main ELSE GOTO Wrap Wrap: CLS : BEEP INPUT "name for output file"; fspec$ INPUT "three-character language tag"; tag$ OPEN fspec$ FOR OUTPUT AS #1 PRINT #1, "* name_of_language: " PRINT #1, "* name_of_reporter: " PRINT #1, "* language_tag: "; tag$ PRINT #1, " " FOR L = 1 TO wrdcnt H$ = HEX$(L) IF LEN(H$) = 1 THEN H$ = "00" + H$ IF LEN(H$) = 2 THEN H$ = "0" + H$ Z$ = H$ + ": " + RTRIM$(w(L)) PRINT #1, Z$ NEXT CLOSE END CreateWord: w = 1 + INT(RND(1) * a) x = 1 + INT(RND(1) * b) y = 1 + INT(RND(1) * c) z = 1 + INT(RND(1) * d) wd$ = c1$(w) + v1$(x) + c2$(y) + v2$(z) LOCATE 10, 10: PRINT wrdcnt; TAB(20); wd$; " "; RETURN DATA p, t, k, s, l, m, n, f, h, gl, kw, sw, whoa DATA a, e, i, o, u, whoa DATA b, d, g, z, l, m, n, v, j, mb, nd, ng, nj, nz, whoa DATA a, e, i, o, u, whoa '* ======================================================================== '* Rick Harrison peora!jwt!bbs-hrick 71174.2735@compuserve.com Date: Tue, 20 Oct 92 07:17:13 -0700 From: chalmers@violet.berkeley.edu (John H. Chalmers Jr.) Subject: UFO language Does anyone have any information about a group called THE STAR FELLOWSHIP based in Surrey, England? I saw a reference to it in the book "Quest for the Unknown, UFO: The Continuing Enigma" published in 1991 by the Reader's Digest Press Association, ISBN 0-89577-397-X. The SF is described as being based on the philosophy of George Adamski a famous 1950's era contactee. My principle interest in this group is a glossary of a language called "Solexmal" which is claimed to be "the apparent interlingua of the Solar System" and is distributed by the organization. Many years ago I saw a book containing samples of this language at a UFO conference in Escondido, California. My recollection is that it has an agglutinative, quasi-logographic script. The book was called "Other Tongues, Other Flesh." I also remember seeing a chart with labels such as "Sector 'Blaau' " and "Orb of 'Contri'"; those words in single quotes may be from Solexmal. I'd like to get a look at this presumably artificial language again, so I'd appreciate an address for SF. I would cross post this message to sci.lang except that I am unable to receive it at the the moment. I would appreciate it very much if any one would do it for me and relay any significant responses. -- John From: riddle@is.rice.edu (Prentiss Riddle) Subject: Re: glossopoeia automated Date: Tue, 20 Oct 92 17:51:13 CDT > From 71174.2735@compuserve.com Tue Oct 20 00:40:32 1992 > > Here's a little program... In this way, you can have your PC create an > _a_priori_ vocabulary for you. (You still have to design the grammar > yourself.) It would be amusing to see this sort of thing expanded in complexity by a couple of orders of magnitude: imagine a program which *would* design the grammar for you! Yet Another Conlang Compiler, anyone? I could even see it with a GUI interface: this slider to choose a point on the agglutinative/isolative scale, that dial to select the mix of a priori/a posteriori features, an array of phoneme toggles, a set of widgets to select the percentage of vocabulary elements to be borrowed from each of the major world language families, and of course the all-important SVO/OVS/SOV switch. Then once the grammar was generated, you could feed it to an AI poetry program to have it churn out the new language's Kalevala or Krestomatio! I'm not sure what the point of this fantasy is, but it does in a way seem like the logical conclusion of the "conlangs for conlangs' sake" branch of our hobby. :-) -- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle@rice.edu -- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer. Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1992 09:10:25 +1000 From: Robin F Gaskell Subject: Re: Remarkable Claims Hello Conlangers, I wish to comment at a number of levels, so will break up my contribution in:o a few parts. *****Comments on the Clark/Ashby Claims***** a) ``Glosa has no grammar. 20+ little words out of the 1000 do all ) the work of Tense, Number, Comparison etc.'' ) b) ``Any Glosa word can be used as any part of speech, as in chinese ) & english.'' ) c) Glosa ``leads to clearer thinking.'' (a) "Glosa has no grammar. 20+ little words do all the work ... " . The Glosa authors should NEVER say their language has `no grammar,' because, apart from being wrong, it upsets language professionals. . If they said it has `no formal grammar' it would be correct, though not very informative. . I find the twenty odd small particles very useful, and quite satisfactory, in practice. . While Rick Harrison claims these particles are "flexions," this is not so, in reality. . Jacques Guy would like temporal adverbs for tense rather than anterior particles. Why? . There are parallels with English ... mu kursi they run mu fu kursi they will run mu pa kursi they did run mu pra kursi they had run mu nu pa kursi they have just run Note: the syntax in both languages is almost identical, and the action word (kursi/run) does not change. This similarity is a result of convergent evolution, and not because the Glosa authors are English. . Glosa works, so it must have a grammar: using the grammar is intuitive; but defining it is a little trickier. (b) "Any Glosa word can be used as any part of speech ... " . Basically true, because this is the way the language was planned. . Rick Morneau, in his essay on morphology, states that an auxiliary language, to be successful, must have Part-Of-Speech markers ... and Glosa does not. We will have to wait for the results of comparative testing to see where the truth lies. 9 Q= the whole auxiliary language concept ... which especially worried Rick Harrison. . I say, simply, that ^^any concept/word can be used to function as any part of speech, WITHIN REASON.^^ . The 20+ particles are not actually concept/words. Jacques Guy thought this was a waste of words that might otherwise have had a more substantial meaning; they do, in fact, permit a lot of efficiency in the use of the use of the remaining 980 concept/words. . Some words stand for concepts that would not be apt to function as all parts of speech; people with sufficient intelligence to write or speak would use such words `within reason.' . Words are made to function outside their reasonable usage by: * poets expressing the inexpressible, * creative writers capturing a new meaning, and * linguists testing a language to destruction. (c) Glosa "leads to clearer thinking." . I'll have to say this is true, but so subjective it is almost impossible to prove. . The crime committed by the authors was in making a statement that can be attacked on philosophical grounds - without any need to refer to the actual facts. . Before using Glosa, a person needs to put the mind into i.e. to think. On the other hand, many people use their native language without first running the ideas, they express, through the mind. . My experience leads me to prefer to write directly in Glosa, rather than to translate from English. This is because English is often full of messy usage or `colourful' indirect language. . If Glosa is a "concept language," then using it can cause us to ask ourselves, "What is it I am really trying to say?" . There are two costs of using Glosa: a person needs to think about what they are going to say; and, before speaking, they must observe the needs of syntax. [More about `the rules of syntax' in the following part.] Robin ___________________________________________________________________________ Robin Gaskell NSW Agent for Glosa robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1992 09:13:22 +1000 From: Robin F Gaskell Subject: Further Claims for Glosa Hello Conlangers, I decided to offer even more claims about Glosa - hoping that this extra information, not included in the small popular leaflet, would clarify the situation a little. *****Further Claims About Glosa***** ``Words do not change for reasons of grammar.'' . This rules out agreements and the formal grammar of terminal inflections. . Glosa's concept/words do not acquire Rick Morneau's Part-Of-Speech markers. . While a particular concept/word looks and sounds the same, whatever its function, its actual role in a sentence is determined by syntax. ``Glosa is a Concept Language'' . Words represent concepts, or ideas, rather than concrete things or actual events. . At the pedestrian level, the Glosa concept/words readily handle concretes. . Being designed for international auxiliary use, Glosa works better when the correct concept/words are used, rather than idioms and metaphors; such non-literals usually carry a national language connotation. . While some people have described Chinese as a concept language, this seems an unpopular idea on Conlang; unfortunately, I am not going to learn Chinese to find the truth of the matter. . The concept language idea seems to have relevance, also, in the area of A.I. and Expert Systems. However, it has been stated on Conlang, by others, that all languages are equally good - or bad - for A.I. purposes. ``A word is modified by its precedent.'' . This is generally true for English, as well ... except for adverbs. . In a Glosa noun phrase, the first word is a determinant, and the final word is the main concept. Concept/words, between the two, modify the main concept. e.g. An audi u fo sono voka paleo bruno kanis. He hears a very loudly barking old brown dog. . With verb phrases, the start is often a tense particle, with auxiliary amplifiers and modifiers between this and the major action concept. e.g. Fe ne pa pote celero akti id. She could not have quickly done it. . This is the main rule of Glosa's syntax, and the only grammatical rule to have been formalised, so far. ``Glosa has syntax-based grammar.'' . The 'No Grammar" statement should be replaced by this one. . English has a bastard grammar: half formal, and half syntax-based. Glosa takes this trend to its conclusion, eliminating all of the grammatical forms. . Jacques Guy and Rick Harrison wondered if Glosa's meaning was given by its word order: it is. . Is Rick Morneau's "Syntax" essay the the best we have to guide us to formulation of an idealised syntax grammar? . Do any of you in Conlang know o3 anyone who has written down the "rules of syntax" for a no-formal-grammar language? . The logic of Glosa's syntax is closely related to the innate linguistic ability, the compositional ability and 'the language of thought.' . When Clarke and Ashby recieve funding, they will find time to record Glosa's syntactic grammar. . Users of Glosa currently rely on their "inherent linguistic ability" to create and understand sentences. . Glosa is `English-like' because English relies heavily on its syntax to give the language meaning: this is simply a case of convergent evolution. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% An Appeal for Moderation Though I know this is a hard argument to put across, and one which will be rejected by the majority of Conlangers, I feel it is necessary to say ... that the Glosa team are not trying to appeal to academics. = In the decade since the first dictionary was published, in 1981, there has been no serious interest shown in their work by professional language researche9s. = The authors are working full-time on the promotion of their social invention, and have adjusted their promotional strategy to the group that has shown a response: the common citicen. = I know that Clarke and Ashby could present their work in a form that is open to more rigorous scrutiny; but, in light of the negligible response shown by paid language workers, so far, it is understandable that they have not given this a high priority. = While researching the language situation, the Glosa authors have exercised their academic skills; however, in developing Glosa, I would say they relied much more heavily on their creative abilities ... in looking at Glosa, I ask you to use yours. Robin ___________________________________________________________________________ Robin Gaskell NSW Agent for Glosa robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au Date: Thu, 22 Oct 92 07:14:33 MDT From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) Subject: Re: Further Claims for Glosa Robin Gaskell writes: > > Is Rick Morneau's "Syntax" essay the the best we have to guide us > to formulation of an idealised syntax grammar? Of course not. Have you ever heard of "linguistics"? It is the formal study of language. You'll learn much more studying linguistics than you will from my little essay. I highly recommend that you study what is already known about language before you try to design one of your own. By the way, your expression "syntax grammar" is linguistic gibberish. Regards, Rick -- *=*= Disclaimer: The INEL does not speak for me and vice versa =*=* = Rick Morneau Idaho National Engineering Laboratory = * mnu@inel.gov Idaho Falls, Idaho 83415, USA * =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= NeXT Mail accepted here! *=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=  From: riddle@is.rice.edu (Prentiss Riddle) Subject: Re: Remarkable Claims Date: Thu, 22 Oct 92 8:51:33 CDT > From: Robin F Gaskell > > . There are parallels with English ... > Note: the syntax in both languages is almost identical, and the > action word (kursi/run) does not change. This similarity is a > result of convergent evolution, and not because the Glosa authors > are English. This, itself, is an interesting claim. I'd say that if the authors of language X are native speakers of language Y, and the syntax in X and Y is almost identical, the circumstantial evidence suggests that Y had more than a little influence on X. Are there any substantial ways in which Glosa is *not* syntactically similar to English? Did the Glosa authors document the "convergent evolution" which led them away from and then back to an English-like syntax? Note that Glosa's English-like syntax shouldn't necessarily be anything to be ashamed of. In IAL terms, English's syntax is (for the most part) one of its strong points, and a conlang designer could do worse than come up with a sort of Basic English cloaked in Greco-Latin roots. > . Glosa works, so it must have a grammar: using the grammar is intuitive; > but defining it is a little trickier. This coupled with the preceding point raises the question: intuitive to whom? English speakers? Or all of homo sapiens? Has Glosa been field-tested yet by any large numbers of non-English speakers? -- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle@rice.edu -- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer. Date: Thu, 22 Oct 92 15:57:55 +0100 From: maxwell@ltb.bso.nl To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Comments and questions on Robin's recent postings: > The Glosa authors should NEVER say their language has `no grammar,' > because, apart from being wrong, it upsets language professionals. > . If they said it has `no formal grammar' it would be correct, though > not very informative. What you say about this later on makes clear that what you mean by 'formal grammar' is not what linguists, logicians, etc. mean by 'formal grammar', so your new definition would upset them as well. This term for them means a set of rules in quasimathematical notation which express the structural relationships between the units of the language. > . I find the twenty odd small particles very useful, and quite > satisfactory, in practice. > . While Rick Harrison claims these particles are "flexions," this is > not so, in reality. This is another terminological issue. I agree with you that they are not flexions, although they express concepts commonly expressed by flexions in other languages. > . Jacques Guy would like temporal adverbs for tense rather than > anterior particles. Why? Presumably because the tense particles would then be unnecessary - a few things less to learn. > Note: the syntax in both languages is almost identical, and the > action word (kursi/run) does not change. This similarity is a > result of convergent evolution, and not because the Glosa authors > are English. What do you mean by 'convergent evolution'? > . Glosa works, so it must have a grammar: using the grammar is intuitive; > but defining it is a little trickier. Do you think that speakers of unrelated languages would have the same intuitions on how to use it? > (b) "Any Glosa word can be used as any part of speech ... " > . Basically true, because this is the way the language was planned. > . Rick Morneau, in his essay on morphology, states that an auxiliary > language, to be successful, must have Part-Of-Speech markers ... and > Glosa does not. We will have to wait for the results of comparative > testing to see where the truth lies. It would be nice to design some tests for issues like this, but perhaps we first of all have to pin down the questions a little more clearly. Perhaps Rick's claim is that a language with part-of-speech markers has considerably less syntactic ambiguity, for example. I would agree with this, but then the question arises whether speakers of languages like Glosa without POS markers have more total ambiguity, once factors like context have been considered. > . I say, simply, that ^^any concept/word can be used to function as > any part of speech, WITHIN REASON.^^ > . The 20+ particles are not actually concept/words. and accordingly cannot function as any part of speech? Jacques Guy > thought this was a waste of words that might otherwise have had a > more substantial meaning; they do, in fact, permit a lot of > efficiency in the use of the use of the remaining 980 concept/words. I have a vague intuition that this might be true, but would like to see some clear evidence. > . Some words stand for concepts that would not be apt to function as all > parts of speech; people with sufficient intelligence to write or > speak would use such words `within reason.' > . Words are made to function outside their reasonable usage by: > * poets expressing the inexpressible, > * creative writers capturing a new meaning, and > * linguists testing a language to destruction. Surely you don't want to say that such people lack "sufficient intelligence"? Perhaps the point is that such special usages take us beyond the primary purpose of language - communication - and for this reason can afford to be exceptional. > > (c) Glosa "leads to clearer thinking." > . I'll have to say this is true, but so subjective it is almost > impossible to prove. Perhaps it can be translated into more something more specific and objectively testable. > . Before using Glosa, a person needs to put the mind into i.e. to > think. On the other hand, many people use their native language > without first running the ideas, they express, through the mind. Are you suggesting that it is actually impossible to write in Glossa without thinking? > . My experience leads me to prefer to write directly in Glosa, rather > than to translate from English. This is because English is often > full of messy usage or `colourful' indirect language. In my opinion, noone can be considered a fluent user of a language until he/she is capable of writing in it without translating it from another one. Your habit of writing directly in Glossa is only normal for a fluent user. > . If Glosa is a "concept language," then using it can cause us to ask > ourselves, "What is it I am really trying to say?" Being a concept language doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility of messy usage and colorful indirect language, does it? Isn't it necessary to think about what one is trying to say in any case? > . There are two costs of using Glosa: a person needs to think about > what they are going to say; and, before speaking, they must observe > the needs of syntax. It seems to me that these things must be true of any language. >. Being designed for international auxiliary use, Glosa works better > when the correct concept/words are used, rather than idioms and > metaphors; > such non-literals usually carry a national language connotation. ie if a speaker uses such expression in Glosa, s/he is borrowing from his/her mother tongue rather than speaking good Glosa? >. While some people have described Chinese as a concept language, this > seems an unpopular idea on Conlang; I think what was unpopular about this idea was the concurrent suggestion that Chinese has no grammar. If you now say that Glossa has a grammar, then there is no problem with the view that Chinese also has a grammar. If Glosa is a concept language, then Chinese probably is too, because they both have no inflections and some little words to indicate the relationships between the big ones. Otherwise speakers of both languages use only their intuitions, common sense, etc. to determine the interrelationships between these concepts. Actually, every language is to some extent a concept language (at least in this sense), but it appears that the reliance on speakers' intuitions to judge the relationships between these concepts is heavier in Chinese and Glosa than in Esperanto, German or Russian, for example. . The concept language idea seems to have relevance, also, in the area of A.I. and Expert Systems. However, it has been stated on Conlang, by others, that all languages are equally good - or bad - for A.I. purposes. > I don't remember this. I thought there was a long argument about the supposed qualities of Lojban for this purpose, with discussion of some fairly specific properties. ``A word is modified by its precedent.'' . This is generally true for English, as well ... except for adverbs. . In a Glosa noun phrase, the first word is a determinant, and the final word is the main concept. Concept/words, between the two, modify the main concept. e.g. An audi u fo sono voka paleo bruno kanis. He hears a very loudly barking old brown dog. But in both English and Glosa a relative clause *follows* the noun it modifies, ie just the opposite order: the language - that you learned >. With verb phrases, the start is often a tense particle, with > auxiliary amplifiers and modifiers between this and the major > action concept. > e.g. Fe ne pa pote celero akti id. > She could not have quickly done it. >. This is the main rule of Glosa's syntax, and the only grammatical > rule to have been formalised, so far. ie the only rule that has been stated explicitly, though informally. > Do any of you in Conlang know o3 anyone who has written down the > "rules of syntax" for a no-formal-grammar language? There are many different conceivable sets of such rules, and some of them are probably manifested in the world's languages. Linguists are busy trying to determine what these rules are by examining these languages and deducing the rules. > The logic of Glosa's syntax is closely related to the innate > linguistic ability, the compositional ability and 'the language of > thought.' What makes you think so? > When Clarke and Ashby recieve funding, they will find time to record Glosa's syntactic grammar. As Rick M. just suggested, it might help for them to have some training in linguistics first. > Users of Glosa currently rely on their "inherent linguistic ability" to create and understand sentences. ie they are using the rules of their own language to create and understand sentences in Glosa? > Glosa is `English-like' because English relies heavily on its syntax to give the language meaning: this is simply a case of convergent evolution. So is English syntax also "closely related to the innate linguistic ability...?" Why should you assume this for English and Glosa rather than other languages with no changes in word form, such as Chinese and Vietnamese, whose syntax is nevertheless somewhat different? Dan Maxwell@ltb.bso.nl Date: Fri, 23 Oct 92 13:30:24 EST From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) Subject: Glosa and other things (This is going to be painful. The printer has been down, and I have to read the various messages on the subject in multiple windows. Hideous clutter on my huge Sun screen). (Note inserted later: this certainly did not end as I expected. Perhaps one can design a functional language in which any word can be any part of speech after all. First, go to your friendly all-night shop and replenish the napalm tank of your flamethrower. Then, read on!) Poor Glosa is being strafed into a sieve, but why? Sure, I am not enthused -- give me clipped Klingon any time -- but the interesting thing is to be made to think and learn. Why is it there is so much dislike of Glosa? I picked this: ``A word is modified by its precedent.'' . This is generally true for English, as well ... except for adverbs. . In a Glosa noun phrase, the first word is a determinant, and the final word is the main concept. Concept/words, between the two, modify the main concept. e.g. An audi u fo sono voka paleo bruno kanis. He hears a very loudly barking old brown dog. . With verb phrases, the start is often a tense particle, with auxiliary amplifiers and modifiers between this and the major action concept. e.g. Fe ne pa pote celero akti id. She could not have quickly done it. . This is the main rule of Glosa's syntax, and the only grammatical rule to have been formalised, so far. That is perfectly reasonable, isn't it? Any disagree? Perhaps me. "Determinant precedes determined". This is a new thought, by the way, it had never occurred to me before, hence the value of babbling about conlangs. Take this noun phrase: "brown dogs" You say, and everybody will concur, that "brown" determines "dogs". But I have decided to be a pain in the neck and I choose to interpret "brown dogs" as "of all the brown things, those which are dogs". "Dogs" is now the determinant. Oh yes, I know, it doesn't hold elegantly in English because English morphology (adjective cannot take a plural marker) makes that interpretation just about impossible to account for, even awkwardly. But think of a language without any flexions. There is something more to observe: that is proof positive that in English nouns cannot be used as adjectives and vice versa. "Brown" as an adjective is "brown object", as a noun its is "the/a colour brown". If "brown" functioned indifferently as noun or adjective it would mean "brown thing(s)", and the colour brown would be glossed as of . I am still wondering how one would express "I like brown" in such a language. Not "I like the common property of brown things". That seems a strange liking. Forces you to think about what we really mean by "I like brown". Probably "I like brown light". Think of Van Gogh. He liked yellow. He'd have been happy with lilies in a white vase bathed in a yellow light, I venture to guess. Next on "determinant precedes determined". Is that a good idea at all? Isn't expressing anything at all better done by gradually circumscribing and refining what you mean to say? "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain". The main topic seems to me to be either Spain or the rain. It seems natural to start with a title that announces it, a headline of sorts. SPAIN! ... where the rain falls mainly on the plain. THE RAIN! ... which in Spain falls mainly on the plain. Aren't "where the rain..." and "which in Spain..." the logical determinants of "Spain" and "The rain" respectively? Wouldn't it be a nice conlang that also had them as *syntactic* determinants? I mean, in which syntax would map onto what I called here "logic"? That means a language in which determinant follows determined. Let me try and imagine such a language, off the top of my head again. "Brown dogs", in that language, is indifferently or . The relationship is the intersection of two sets. "The brown dog" is the intersection of three sets: {dogs} {brown things} {one particular thing referred to}. Makes for rather free word order, doesn't it? "Gentlemen prefer blondes" now. Two sets: {gentlemen} and {blondes}, but the relationship is no longer an intersection. To boot, it's no longer commutative, so the relative order of and is no longer free. So it's got to be or . It seems to me now that the intersection relation ought to be expressed by a word too. Pick a word, any word, "ki" will do. "Brown dog(s)" --> bruno ki kanis, kanis ki bruno "Old brown dog(s)" --> bruno ki kanis ki paleo, paleo ki kanis ki bruno, etc... Wait a minute... this leads to a general syntax: ... with operand and operator alternating regularly. So... a word, any word, could be made to function either as operand or operator without ambiguity. Eureka? I doubt it, it would be too good. I feel that somewhere down the line relative clauses are going to stuff up this beautifully simple syntax and grammar if I'm not very, very careful. And perhaps even if I'm very, very careful. Enough for the now. Flame on, please. Date: Fri, 23 Oct 92 16:38:22 EST From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) Subject: Glosa again, more to the point It's Friday after-weekly-lunch afternoon, 14:30 local time, and I don't feel like doing anything to Telecom's 600 megabytes of customer data files, lest I stuff them up. I don't feel like playing Civilization or Nethack either. I've opened up two windows with Robin Gaskell's two messages in them (thank God for 17 in. screens and short-sightedness), and am writing comments on the right half of the screen. I honestly don't know -- hmpf, let's say I dimly suspect -- what Rick Morneau (note 1) finds so distateful about Glosa. I suspect (dimly) because Glosa is basically English. There is one aspect of Glosa I like, from what I've seen of it: the lexicon. I mean, I just know what "paleo bruno kanis" means, even though I don't know any Glosa. The idea of using preferentially Greek and Latin roots found out of scientific terms, and therefore that ought to be fairly international, strikes me as quite clever, AND well implemented. Robin Gaskell wonders why I would like temporal adverbs for tense rather than particles. Because I've been suckled at the udders of tenseless languages such as Chinese and all those Austronesian languages (and that includes Balinese, as well as the strange things of the New Hebrides). Oh sure, the first two languages I was taught at school were English and Latin, then Spanish and Ancient Greek, and I had taught myself Russian, Portuguese and Italian in the meantime. So I was very, very curious about the claims that Chinese had no tenses, no declensions, no nothing. That nouns were not inflected for case or number, verbs not conjugated for tense, person, or mood. That's why I studied Chinese after I'd finished high school, and... surprise of surprises! Chinese did very nicely, thank you, without any of our Indo-European languages' mess of singular, plural, present, past, future, what have you, and was not ambiguous. Methinks tense particles are a waste of good morphemes. Further, they make the expressing of timeless statements such as "cows eat grass" ambiguous and opaque. It's true that "using the [Glosa] grammar is intuitive", but only of English speakers and speakers of SVO and determinant-before- determined languages. In other words, speakers of Germanic languages mostly. Chinese speakers will be puzzled by tense particles (not too much), and more by relative clauses which, I surmise, follow the antecedent in Glosa as they do in English, French, any European language I can think of. In Chinese, as in Japanese, Korean, Burmese, Tibetan and others, the relative clause *precedes* the noun which it determines. Logical, since in those languages the adjective precedes the noun and the adverb the verb. "Any Glosa word can be used as any part of speech ... " . Basically true, because this is the way the language was planned. . Rick Morneau, in his essay on morphology, states that an auxiliary language, to be successful, must have Part-Of-Speech markers ... and Glosa does not. We will have to wait for the results of comparative testing to see where the truth lies. I tend to agree somehow with that "basically true", and to disagree otherhow (yes, of course I know that word doesn't exist. I just made it up). "Fe", for instance, I gather is a pronoun. I can see how it could be used as a determinant to express the female sex: fe kanis for instance. Or even as an adverb: mi fe kursi "I run like a woman", and I guess I am stretching it here beyond what the designers of Glosa would be willing to put their stamp of approval on. Beyond that, viz fe as a conjunction... well... no I suppose. Yes, that is moderated by "within reason". However, it is only a brain flip away that we could make English conjunctions into nouns. Just consider: "The 'either-or' of the matter is that..." I believe that you have understood what I meant: "The 'crux' of the matter is that...", "The dilemma is that...". We have the same in French: "Le pourquoi du comment" (the why of the how), and in this saying: "un tiens vaut mieux que deux tu l'auras", lit. "one have is better than two you will have" (a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush). It's the other way around that is hardly productive, even though, in French armyspeak you have "ne'gatif" and "affirmatif" (adjectives) for "yes" and "no", and that might be getting close to it. But the point is, those coaxings of words into parts of speech which they were not intended for forces a reinterpretation of their meanings which is not entirely predictable at all. "Within reason" should be "within common usage". That, I am afraid, is very, very culture and time specific. ``Glosa is a Concept Language'' . Words represent concepts, or ideas, rather than concrete things or actual events. . At the pedestrian level, the Glosa concept/words readily handle concretes. A way I can reconcile those two statements is thinking of Lojban, in which the word for a concrete object X is really a verb "to be X" and the phrase "le X" is meant as "that which is X", just as "le klama" is "the comer". I have not much to pick about that, even though the idea, to me, reeks of Pythagoras. I will complain, however, that it is not properly implemented. Take: An audi ku fo sono voka paleo bruno kanis. (He hears a very loudly barking old brown dog) In this particular sentence, "kanis" does not express a Platonic dog, but one, particular, noisesome, physical, concrete dog. Definitely not a concept. The only morpheme which my little eye spies and which could express that is "ku". I do not know what "ku" is supposed to mean, but I figure out that fo = forte = very, sono = sound, voka = voice = call, paleo = old, bruno = brown, kanis = dog, audi = hear, an = aner/andros = he, and by default, I was left with "ku". Well, if that is so, the position of "ku" grates on me. Should be right before "kanis". As it stands, "ku fo sono voka paleo bruno kanis" is a simple-substitution cipher of the English, only at word level. The word-order of that noun phrase, on the other hand, implies a hierarchy of modifiers which is entirely arbitrary. What do I mean by that? In English you say "the other two people" whilst in French we say "les deux autres personnes" (the two other people -- "les autres deux personnes" is incomprehensible). Notes 1. Morneau! Got it right this time. I have been stubbornly writing "Murneau", stopping just short of Murnau of Nosferatu fame. To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Re: Glosa and other things Date: Fri, 23 Oct 92 19:20:42 +0100 From: And Rosta Jacques: > Take this noun phrase: > "brown dogs" > You say, and everybody will concur, that "brown" determines "dogs". > But I have decided to be a pain in the neck and I choose to interpret > "brown dogs" as "of all the brown things, those which are dogs". "Dogs" > is now the determinant. Oh yes, I know, it doesn't hold elegantly in > English because English morphology (adjective cannot take a plural > marker) makes that interpretation just about impossible to account > for, even awkwardly. But think of a language without any flexions. > > There is something more to observe: that is proof positive that in > English nouns cannot be used as adjectives and vice versa. "Brown" > as an adjective is "brown object", as a noun its is "the/a colour > brown". If "brown" functioned indifferently as noun or adjective > it would mean "brown thing(s)", and the colour brown would be glossed > as of . I am still wondering > how one would express "I like brown" in such a language. Not "I like > the common property of brown things". That seems a strange liking. > Forces you to think about what we really mean by "I like brown". > Probably "I like brown light". Think of Van Gogh. He liked yellow. > He'd have been happy with lilies in a white vase bathed in a yellow > light, I venture to guess. > "Brown dogs", in that language, is indifferently > or . The relationship is the intersection of > two sets. "The brown dog" is the intersection of three sets: {dogs} > {brown things} {one particular thing referred to}. Makes for rather > free word order, doesn't it? English is similar to this: She likes boys. She likes virgins. She likes boy virgins. [cf. Jacques's "dog ki brown(-thing)"] She likes virgin boys. [cf. Jacques's "brown(-thing) ki dog"] She likes virginity. [cf. "He liked yellow"] > Next on "determinant precedes determined". Is that a good idea at > all? Isn't expressing anything at all better done by gradually > circumscribing and refining what you mean to say? John Sowa (1984) _Conceptual structures_ (Addison Wesley) discusses the semantic processing advantages of both consistently head-first and head-last languages. --- And. Date: Sat, 31 Oct 92 07:06:35 -0800 From: chalmers@violet.berkeley.edu (John H. Chalmers Jr.) To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: SF conlangs Other authors who have at least provided glossaries of artlangs in their novels are Frank Herbert in "Dune," though his language(s) borrow(s) heavily from Arabic, Urdu?, English, etc., and ERB. Edgar Rice Burroughs provided a glossary of Martian which was appended to some of the Mars books. Unfortunately only one verb -- sak, to jump, and a relatively few nouns other than proper names are given. The Martian language appears to be agglutinative, as the following set of military-political terms suggests: dwar (low ranking officer), padwar (lieutenant?), odwar (colonel?), jedwar (general?) , teedwar (a staff officer, major?); than (soldier, fighting man), gorthan (assassin), panthan (mercenary); Jed (king or prince), Jeddak (emperor), Jeddara (empress). In general, number terms are prefixed -- pi, tanpi, teepi (coins), and compounded as in "Tor-Dur-Bar" or 4 million 8, a character in "The Synthetic Men of Mars." Proper names show evidence of inflection and/or derivation; the son of Tardos Mors is Mors Kajac, and Thuvan Dihn's daughter is named Thuvia. The son of John Carter and Dejah Thoris (the daughter of Mors Kajac) is called Carthoris, but this name is explained as a blend. Names of planets end in -oom as does the land of the symbiotic khaldanes and rykors). The planetary names, as I recall, not having my references here in San Diego, are Cosoom (Venus), Jasoom (earth), Barsoom (Mars), and Sasoom (Jupiter). The KH&R live in Bantoom, and John Carter, the major hero, becomes a Prince of the city-empire of Helium, a word whose ending may differ only orthographically from the above. Barsoom (Mars) is allegedly from the name of an Armenian friend of Burroughs. Although Burroughs taught Latin and/or Greek in his youth, he was apparently not very sophisticated linguistically. His Barsoomian names often do have a latinate sound: Tars Tarkas, Exum, Helium, Duhor, Panar, Pankor, Dor, Morbus, etc., though many times they do not, e.g., Ptarth, Phundahl, Zodanga, etc. Because of uncertainties in English orthography and inconsistencies, it is difficult to deduce the "correct" pronunciation of these words. This has made it difficult to write a program to generate more words with the same look and feel to use as the basis of a Barsoom-inspired artlang. BTW, The rules of Jetan or Barsoomian chess is given as an appendix to "The Chessmen of Mars." It is a playable game. In Burroughs's Venus series, a few examples of the Amtorian language are given. An "angan" is a bird man; the plural is voo klangan where voo means the and kl- is the pluralizing prefix. Voo Klambad is "the psychologists." I'm afraid I have forgotten the words for street and of. In any case, the word order and syntax is exactly the same as in English for the phrase "The Street of the Psychologists," save for the kl- plural prefix. The agent noun is also prefix by a prefix - an anotar is an airplane. The Tarzan, Moon, and center of the earth (Pellucidar) series offer few words other than place and proper names. The Mythopoeic Society's Tolklang journal Parma Eldalamberon also discusses the "Old Solar " language of C. S. Lewis, found in his novels "Out of the Silent Planet," "Perelandra," and "That Hideous Strength." OS shows has a complex plural morphology of its nouns -- hross, hressni ( intelligent otter-like creatures), sorn, seroni (another intelligent species). I don't think there are too many more examples extant, however, but one should examine the journal and the books to see. There is another S&S epic book series with a glossary, this time about a leper-hero, but the names of both the author and the books escape me. A good general source up the mid 1970's is Walter Meyers's book, "Aliens and Linguists, " published, I think, by the University of Georgia. The book is about linguistics and conlangs in SF and Fantasy and won an award when it was first published. The book also references earlier studies on conlangs in imaginary voyages (Swift, etc.) and early fantasies. L. Sprague DeCamp, who is also a published amateur linguist, is careful to work out consistent morphological and phonological systems for the languages in his SF books but, alas, seldom gives more than proper names and few nouns. In the Viagens Interplanetarias stories; Atvinyk is a pseudo-Welsh, Gozashtandou and Durou are dialects of ps-Persian. The successors to the Kwalwm Empire speak a rather slavonic sounding language and the dinosaurian Osirans have an appropiately sibilant tongue, etc. While there are rather few examples, there may be enough material to make up more words with the same sound and feel if anyone cares to. -- John From shoulson Sat Oct 31 20:37:25 1992 EST To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: SF conlangs With the recent remarks on the slightly-mentioned conlangs in literature, I am reminded of one I haven't seen pointed out here: Lapine, from Richard Adams' (right author?) _Watership Down_. By the end of the book, you wind up with a lexicon of some dozens of words, I believe. Not too bad, even though many are proper names. I've seen editions which actually have a glossary in the back. The words are simple enough, and there are maybe two or three complete sentences. I can remember at least one without trying to find my copy: "Hoi, hoi, u embleer hrair / M'saion(?) ule(?) hraka vair." Bear in mind, it's from memory. It's supposed to be a bawdy song, meaning "Hoi, hoi, the stinking Thousand [of enemies of Rabbitkind] / We meet them even when we stop to pass our droppings." Words I recall: "Frith"=="Sun," regarded as a deity by rabbits. "ni-frith"=="noon". "Inl'e" (accent over e)=="moon", "fu Inl'e"=="after moonrise". "thlay"=="fur", seen in names: "Thlayli"=="Fur-head", a rabbit with a lot of fur on his head, usually called "Bigwig". "hrair"=="thousand", actually any number over four, the largest number the rabbits can count. Also used to refer to the enemies of rabbits, also called "elil". "-roo"==diminutive suffix. "Hlao"=="depression in the ground", a name of a rabbit, Pipkin. "rah"=="lord". "embleer"=="stinking", the scent of a fox, in particular. "hraka"=="droppings" (these last two have confirmation outside of the song above). I'll try to find my book. A great linguistic insight it isn't, but it adds a little flavor to an otherwise still excellent bit of fiction. ~mark P.S. To the person who asked about our goals: Don't think we just sit around and talk about science-fiction languages; we deal with just about any constructed languages we can think of, including such concerns as you have. More on that another time... From: hrick%genesis.uucp@gte.com (Rick Harrison) Subject: world language problem deja vu Date: Sun, 1 Nov 92 03:17:28 Ewan Boyd raises the issue of the "world language problem." Since Ewan and others are new to this list, and perhaps we could all benefit from a refreshing of the collective memory, I present here some very condensed highlights of a previous discussion on this issue. (I've been thinking about editing a "conlang highlights" textfile which might be placed on the PLS and/or CompuServe -- would anyone care to comment as to whether this would be interesting or worthwhile? A lot of rare data has trickled through this list, and perhaps we could avoid repeating old arguments by having a FAQ/archive to send to new list members.) Anyway, it would be interesting to see this discussion pick up where it left off... --- From: cbmvax!uunet!peg.apc.org!rgaskell (Robin F. Gaskell) Date: Mon, 3 Feb 92 08:35:34 PST > Before doing this, I would mention that I am an activist > in favour of Human Language Reform on this planet, also that my > studies into this suggest that adoption of an International > Auxiliary Language is the only cost-effective option that can > bring global communication to all ... even the impoverished Third > World peasant. --- Date: Fri, 7 Feb 92 17:49:42 -0500 From: cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab (Bob LeChevalier) An argument for 'Reform' has to first of all convince people that something is broken. (reform to repair defect ...) This is far from universally agreed. The weakness of the United Nations shows that most countries and people don't accept giving up a modicum of national sovereignty in search of 'One World'. Ones choice of language is the most personal expression of sovereignty for both individuals and nations. Then there is cost-effective: "cost-effective in cost to ... (whom) and effective for ... (what)". You will have a hard time convincing an impoverished Third World peasant that he should spend his rupnu on learning a language no one speaks rather than seed for farm, or medicine for his sick child. And remember - most of these people cannot read and write their native language. To a large business? - it is most cost-effective for them to target an existing profitable customer base and try to build off of that, molding the customer as much as the product for mutual adaptability. Euroclone languages have the best chance among conlangs for this reason, because 'United Europe' is a market that with careful salesmanship, could be led to adopt something that is economically advantageous to all - but note that the much simpler metric reform took 200 years to become nearly universal enough to force British and American companies to switch. Most businesses don't think beyond the next quarter, and most governments beyond the next election (the 5-year plan having 'bit the dust'). If you talk about an auxiliary language, you have to ask how fluent people will be expected to get in that language. If they aren't born to the language and don't use it day-to-day in their everyday lives (most unlikely for your impoverished Third World Peasant), they will never acquire or maintain fluency. And if you don't set fluency as your goal state (i.e. have a value for the 'effective for ...' place that requires fluency for all speakers), then it can reasonably be argued that computer translation will reach the state of crude-but-usable translation into all economically relevant languages much quicker than all speakers of those languages can be taught to fluently speak any language, even a conlang. For the typical >consumer<, it is far easier to learn to read and understand a conlang that is a simplified natural language like Basic English, or the computer-translation-generated equivalent. This then gives advantage to a language that is most effective for a smaller number of people to learn to speak/write for input into computer translation - an "effective for .." value that entirely changes design goals and constraints on your conlang. --- Date: 08 Feb 92 14:05:50 EST From: Don Harlow A conlang, any conlang that can be learned by the autodidact, will be financially more useful to that impoverished peasant than the computer translations you mention, since it will be more accessible to him/her. Incidentally, in my experience many Third World peasants are linguistically more accomplished than most First World academics. In addition to their own local language and maybe one or two neighboring languages, they will usually have some competence in one or more regional or national interlanguages, and -- quite often -- will at least be able to make a stab at speaking one of the "languages of wider dissemination" (English or French, usually). Of course, a Nigerian who speaks Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba, but not English, will generally be relegated by Westerners to the status of an impoverished and illiterate Third World peasant, without any linguistic competence whatsoever, in the same way that our almanacs group even the most sophisticated African religions under the common rubric "primitive animism"... --- Date: Tue, 11 Feb 92 18:15:56 -0500 From: cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab (Bob LeChevalier) Take any given text of significant length. Which is faster and cheaper - to translate it by computer into crude forms of 50 different languages, or to translate it into Esperanto and teach all of those people to read, and in particular to read Esperanto (as opposed to learning their own language in print). I think the answer is much closer to a tossup than you might think, and in 20 years, when crude machine translation will be relatively trivial for almost any language, the cost of translation will be less than the cost of teaching Esperanto. --- Date: 12 Feb 92 01:49:55 EST From: Don Harlow Bob, I'm not talking about translating "Gone With the Wind" into Esperanto versus translating it into fifty different languages -- you can translate it (via computer or any other way) into all the world's 5,000 languages, if you see fit to do so, and I will cheer you on. I'm talking about the ability to engage in international give-and-take. Totally aside from the fact that computer translation just puts another layer between you and your opposite number -- and I think it will be longer than 20 years before that interface will really be trustworthy -- that technical capability is just not available to those people in the third world, and is not likely to be in the foreseeable future, in this world in which the rich get richer and the poor get shafted. In other words, I'm talking about discourse, not about the one-way flow of information that you're describing -- we have enough of that today, anyway. Please also note the word "autodidact" -- the cost of TEACHING Esperanto or any other conlang does not enter into this argument, since no teaching is done. --- Date: Thu, 13 Feb 92 11:31:21 PST From: cbmvax!uunet!netcom.netcom.com!doug (Doug Merritt) Cultures are dying out, ... and although perhaps it *would* be nice in some ways for all of mankind to be one big happy family, with a single culture and a single language, you can't ignore the downside to this. It would be as if all libraries had just one big encyclopedia but no other books, as if all other books in the world had been burned. We know *far* too little about how languages and cultures work. The diversity helps us to understand by way of comparison. Every language and culture that dies deprives us of another opportunity to understand things that may be very important. And it deprives us of an opportunity to visit an exotic people and struggle to learn how *they* communicate, how *they* look at the world, what *they* think is important. The more we learn about genetics, the more we discover that diversity of a gene pool is extremely important to a species. It may well be the same with languages and cultures, for all we know. If a species consists of nothing but near-clones, as with the world's cheetah population (because something killed off all but about 100 individuals some thousands of years ago, destroying the diversity of their gene pool), then any little disease that happens along can destroy 50% of the population, or sometimes even more...100% could die. You really just can't know how much you'll lose as a side effect of losing the world's indigenous cultures and languages. --- From: cbmvax!uunet!peg.apc.org!rgaskell (Robin F. Gaskell) Date: Sun, 23 Feb 92 16:31:05 PST Cost-effectiveness This is a measure of the cost of installing a system designed to bring global communication / compared with the quality and extensiveness of the communication achieved. If we spread a million multilingual translating computers around the world, this would be a partial (if hypothetical) solution to the problem: its high cost and low coverage would give such a proposal a low rating for cost-effectiveness. On the other hand, if we agree that the educational system of each nation print instructional materials for their students to acquire an 'easy to learn and easy to use' alternative language, then the total cost would be minimised while the coverage would be maximised: such a solution would be rated as highly cost- effective. --- Date: Mon, 2 Nov 92 06:49:20 -0800 From: chalmers@violet.berkeley.edu (John H. Chalmers Jr.) To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Solex-mal I almost found the book with the alleged solar interlanguage, Solex-Mal, last Saturday afternoon in a philosophical book shop and lending library in Escondido, CA. Alas, the only copy had been stolen from the stacks and the owner was unaware of the contemporary English group and its pamphlet. The author of "Other Tongues, Other Flesh" is George Hunt Williamson and the book was published in 1953 by the Amherst Press, Amherst WI. This is probably Ray Palmer's publishing company. A glossary in another Williamson book, "The Flying Saucers Speak" described Solex-Mal as the original language of the planets of the Solar System and said it had a symbolic and graphic script. Typical words are "Masar," Mars, "Solas," the sun, "Saras," the earth(?). I'll keep y'all posted if I turn up anything of (con)linguistic interest. Although it is more than a little off the main topic of conlang, my next avocational linguistic project is to re-find the "Mantongue Alphabet," one of the famous "Shaver Mystery" articles. The Shaver Mystery was another of Ray Palmer's tricks though UFO'logy was his greatest. He was also an SF fan and writer. The Shaver Mystery was the paranoid fantasy of a welder named Richard Shaver. He had delusions about underground caverns inhabited by evil beings called "Dero's" who flew UFO's, fought with lasers, etc. The MA is basically a word game in which one discovers the "real meaning" of words by assigning meanings to their sounds. If "animal" corresponds to the letter A, "power" to P and "Energy" to E, the English word "ape" means "animal of powerful energy." While the MA is obviously a parlor game, it is also claimed that one can use it guess the meanings of foreign words with more than chance accuracy. If true, I suspect the effect would be due to cognates and phonesthetics. It is said that it worked better with the Romance languages than the Germanic, so perhaps the large number of Latin and Romance loanwords in English is the explanation. A further claim is made that modern English is the original human language. It sounds as if fans of Solex-mal and the Shaver Mystery read different Palmer publications. If I track this curiosity down, I'll post it as some of you may have fun with it. -- John Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1992 00:18:35 -0500 From: eboyd@unixg.ubc.ca (Ewan Boyd) Subject: Organizing our resources? Hello everyone. Thank you Rick (Harrison) for helping me to get a good feel for the conlang forum.by publishing a summary and you latest list. Thank all the rest of you for your interesting comments. I'll try to address them individually later I have some questions:-- How many letters a day can I expect to receive? Hopefully less than at startup. Could the forum be classified into SUB INTEREST GROUPS such as development of an AWARENESS CAMPAIGN This could include the gathering of interesting facts and/or incidents, newsworthy anecdotes on past/present (or future?) language barrier problems that could be released to the media. A SPECIFICATION DEVELOPMENT GROUP composed of- Linguists and others who might make a contribution, such as Elocutionists, Speech Pathologists, Audiologists, Reading Therapists, Sight specialists, Specification Writers, Teaching Specialists, others? OTHER GROUPS, as required. I gave a brief note on my background. Can we learn more about each other so we can break into useful working groups? Possibly run a questionnaire and include data on interests, skills, knowledge, etc. How many of us are there? HERE ARE SOME RESPONSES TO COMMENTS RECEIVED Thanks again for your effort. DWOLFF@res-c4.prime.com (what is your first name? and other details?) >I generally agree with this. I'm not sure about a mandatory language course -- mandatory courses tend to make kids dislike a subject -- but I think it should be available to all. DWOLFF, I will defer to education experts on this. But how many kids in the early grades will choose it as an elective? Reading. writing and math are not elective. (edb) > To DEVELOP A MASTER PLAN and set goals to complete the project in the most > effective manner and shortest possible time? I think these would be good, and I am currently doing my little part to achieve these. The Esperanto movement has many dedicated volunteers, and does some campaigns to educate people, but it's seriously handicapped by the following items. (Note that none of these are related to Esperanto.) Is this true? What do all the others who have not adopted Esperanto as the 21st Century solution have to say? The fact that Esperanto has not only survived but expanded to be the best known of existing artificial languages is certainly in its favour. I would like to hear more from people who, having no vested interest in any other existing language, are more likely to give an unbiased opinion. What are our choices? 1) English is certainly being used more and more as electronic networks expand, but it is not the best long term solution. It is hard and expensive to learn and it is not neutral, having been imposed by dominant nations, it is resented as putting all other world citizens at a disadvantage. 2) Existing contrived languages, with Esperanto the best known contender. What are the good and bad characteristics of each? I don't know if unbiased studies have been attempted. 3) Contrived languages that have not yet been produced. In this case it might be better to not use the term "language" because it has so many meanings and is so enmeshed with culture. What we need is a sound/sight global intercultural communications system. That is too cumbersome, but we need something better than language. This is something for a marketing/PR team to work on. Other viable options? If we can sell the best out of group "2" with provisions to update to meet the specifications written for group "3" we might save a lot of time and money. What has been written in the way of a specification? > (1) No money. Here we need to recruit volunteers with fund raising expertise. I am not one, but have had some exposure and am taking a one day seminar on large scale fund raising on Wednesday. > (2) No time. As long as we have to depend entirely on volunteers, this will slow us down. However during start up planning maybe we can recruit retired people with not only time, , but experience in a variety of the required skills. What better way could they leave a gift for their descendants.? If we can get people like Marty Knowlton, founder Elder Hostel & "The Gatekeepers to the Future" enthusiastic about this project we might make some real progress. At the moment I don't believe we are ready. We need agreement on a total plan. and a "sales kit" > (3) No expertise. We're improving our publicity efforts; we need a lot of fundraising expertise; we need better leadership training in the local groups. > international language faces, in a way, a much more difficult goal: I certainly agree here. > (4) We're trying to teach people a language. Is this one of the reasons that Esperanto hasn't succeeded to date? To much energy being spent on trying to teach existing generations instead of concentrating on publicising the existing situation and the goal of introducing a solution into the school systems? > All in all, I think Esperanto's done pretty well. It's gone from one person to around two million, in about 100 years, without any major financial or government backing. I agree that the Esperanto movement has made a major contribution. but I have a lot more to learn before I would endorse Esperanto as the solution That's all I have time for to-night. More later. In peace Ewan Date: Tue, 3 Nov 92 08:23:43 -0500 From: ross@buphy.bu.edu (John B Ross) Subject: Re: Organizing our resources Ewan Boyd (eboyd@unixg.ubc.ca) asks: >How many letters a day can I expect to receive? Hopefully less than at >startup. > >Could the forum be classified into SUB INTEREST GROUPS such >as development of an AWARENESS CAMPAIGN This could include the >gathering of interesting facts and/or incidents, newsworthy >anecdotes on past/present (or future?) language barrier problems that >could be released to the media. I'm afraid your first question is pretty much answered by the second. With subinterest groups the bulk of email could be potentially be a drawback to many of us who don't have unlimited diskspace :-(. IMHO, conlang was founded with the intention of disseminating info on various projects and encouraging 'healthy' debate on either of them. It was not supposed to have an agenda per se, such as the development of a world interlanguage, but rather be a clearinghouse for info on conlang prjects for us language junkies. As many of you well know, I've discouraged _extended_ flame-wars between adherents of Language X and their opponents because it conflicted with a congenial atmosphere of info exchange. Many of you may criticize me for stifling important debate on language fundamentals; I saw such debates as causing nothing but bad feelings among either party, as well as giving the other subscribers a bad impression of both parties and their language proposals. The reason I bring all this up is that I feel conlang would be riddled with endless debates among partisans of different language projects if we had subinterest groups devoted to finding a viable interlanguage. Our bandwidth would be jammed with arguments back and forth, and would disenfranchise those of us who would like to hear about other projects from time to time. Does this mean that we should consider a _separate_ forum for such debates? I for one _do not_ consider myself the moderator (=overlord) of this list. I add and delete names from the master list of subscribers and, for the most part, assume a passive role. I have interceded in drawn-out debates as the 'overlord' and people have relented, but my intention has _never_ been to fashion conlang into my own private 'sweet and light' entertainment channel. I would like to see whether the general consensus on this list is in favor of having subinterest groups as they are outlined by Mr Boyd. If the votes are there, then we should go for it. But all I ask is that we keep in mind the initially good-intentioned debates on interlanguages past and present: they end up leaving everyone disgusted and angry, especially with such a bright and eclectic group as we have on conlang. -- JR Date: Tue, 3 Nov 92 16:26:12 +0100 From: Lars Henrik Mathiesen To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: conlang vs. world language projects. As I stated recently, I am one of those who take an extremely dim view of the chances of getting a conlang accepted as an IAL. But I think the discussion of conlangs as IALs is very appropriate for this list --- *as long as that discussion touches on the linguistic properties of the languages themselves* (linguistic taken in the widest sense). But I submit that the general politics and logistics of getting an IAL (which does not even have to be a conlang) accepted is outside the scope of conlang, and that if people want to discuss the subject, they should perhaps find somewhere else to do it, or some way of marking their articles for easy skipping. I am well aware that there are others on this list whose interests are mainly in IALs, and for whom discussions of artlangs and research langs may be unwelcome distractions. (I sometimes get the impression that they even feel them to be deliberate obstructions.) Perhaps it is time to create an auxlang list? Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) Date: 03 Nov 92 21:30:19 EST From: Rick Harrison <71174.2735@CompuServe.COM> To: conlang Subject: data on conlang "Alwato" available If you've ever been curious about Stephen P Andrews' language "Alwato," which is mentioned but not described in the introduction to Dyer's "lingualumina," in Stojan's Bibliografio and elsewhere... a reprint of one of Andrews' books is still in print, is quite affordable and is interesting if you like "philosophical" languages. Here's the data: author: Andrews, Stephen P. editor: Stern, Madeleine B. title: Primary synopsis of Universology & Alwato. The new scientific universal language pbdate: Oct 1971 ISBN: 0-87730-007-0 price: 12.50 US dollars pblshr: M & S Press (Weston, Massachusetts) descrp: hardcover, 7 inches tall, 224+ pages ======================================================================== Rick Harrison peora!jwt!bbs-hrick 71174.2735@compuserve.com ``Time salts all wounds.'' - Bob Black To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Re: IAL phonemic array Date: Mon, 09 Nov 92 10:23:25 +0000 From: And Rosta Rick H: > Last winter someone posted > a message here saying that he would only be attracted to conlangs > which included some exotic phonemes not used in the languages he already > knows; perhaps he is off in some attic now designing a langauge that > includes a bilabial trill, a dental click and some implosives... This person - whose message I do not remember - might like to know that Sta has a bilabial trill and a dental click. It used to have implosives, but I dropped them, finding that except as the only segments in onsets of stressed syllables in careful speech, I could not distinguish them from voiced plosives and (in the case of the nasal implosives) from nasal plosives. --- And Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1992 13:11:16 +0000 To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu From: jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk (Richard Kennaway) Subject: Re: IAL phonemic array And writes: >This person - whose message I do not remember - might like to know >that Sta has a bilabial trill and a dental click. It used to have >implosives, but I dropped them, finding that except as the only >segments in onsets of stressed syllables in careful speech, I >could not distinguish them from voiced plosives and (in the case >of the nasal implosives) from nasal plosives. Nasal plosives -- yeucchhh! So does Sta really have raspberries, chattering of teeth, and sneezes, and used to have sniffs? Does it also include tracheal fricatives and bilabial ejectives? :-) -- ____ Richard Kennaway \ /__ School of Information Systems Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \/ / University of East Anglia uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K. From: And Rosta Subject: Re: IAL phonemic array Date: Mon, 09 Nov 92 20:55:23 +0000 Richard K writes: > So does Sta really have raspberries, chattering of teeth, and sneezes, and > used to have sniffs? Does it also include tracheal fricatives and bilabial > ejectives? > :-) In my enthusiasm for this topic, I ignore Richard's smiley & actually reply: It does have glottalic bilabial ejectives, but not velaric bilabial ejectives (raspberries), (or is a raspberry a velaric bilabial trill?). I considered raspberries, but, as with implosives, I found them only feasible in restricted positions in careful speech. The closest it (or any language) has to a tracheal fricative is [h]. As for sniffs, there are no ingressive sniffs, but, as in some natural languages, /hm/, /hn/ and /hN/ (N = [g~]) are possible syllable onsets. Phonetically, the onsets are nareal fricatives. As with other languages, chattering of teeth does not play a phonological role. For these reason "bidental" sounds have received little attention from linguists, though I believe Pike's (1948?) _Phonetics_ discusses 'percussives' - a class of phonetic segments that comprises the chattering of teeth. Finally, we come to sneezes. I feel that requiring the speaker of Sta to sneeze in order to communicate effectively is not practicable, but nevertheless a syllable acoustically similar to a sneeze is quite feasible: /t'SU~/ (/t'/ = [t'], /S/ = 'palatoalveolar' [S], /U/ = [y~]). In actual fact, what you have here is indeed the Sta word for "sneeze" (e.g. _t'SU~ u li_, "I sneeze", cf. English _I achoo_). --- _A_n_d. Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 12:00:37 +0000 From: jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk (Richard Kennaway) Subject: Re: IAL phonemic array Come to think of it, why should the sounds of a language be restricted to those made with the vocal tract? Tarsal clicks? Pedal fricatives? Oesophageal plosives? Unimanual claps? One could even incorporate musical or other instruments, to extend the range of possible sounds. -- ____ Richard Kennaway \ /__ School of Information Systems Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \/ / University of East Anglia uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K. Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 13:22 CST From: STEPHEN TICE Subject: Re: IAL phonemic array { RE: IAL phonemic array, 10-Nov } jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk (Richard Kennaway) | |Tarsal clicks? Pedal fricatives? Oesophageal plosives? Unimanual claps? Labial slurps! <...Sorry. :-> Sonic signalling seems a a bit constrained as well -- phonetically. And if this were a NeXT, I'd enclose finger-spelling to demonstrate. Does anyone know if the IAL set has been translated into American Sign Language? There is perhaps another level of abstraction to consider since the auditory and motor cortex likely overlap in a common region where the coin in trade is phonemic. I should review my notes on aphasia studies, but even cursory examination of more common maladies such as dylsexia suggests that a neuro-phonetic topology exists. The generalized structure of such a topology would in fact define the default set of phonetic symbols, (which IAL only faintly mimics no doubt). Now as to this one-hand-clapping phoneme Richard... may I suggest the symbol is _mu_. -- Stephen ps. If anyone can point to literature on the neuro-architecture of phonetics please do let me know. This is a particular fascination of mine, and I'd dearly love to trade notes. From: cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan@uunet.UU.NET (John Cowan) Subject: Re: IAL phonemic array Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 11:54:54 -0500 (EST) And Rosta writes: > [Sta] does have glottalic bilabial ejectives, but not velaric bilabial > ejectives (raspberries), (or is a raspberry a velaric bilabial trill?). In my dialect, the word "razzberry" (a spelling I prefer to the bogusly botanical alternative) refers primarily to a labio-lingual trill, and only secondarily to bilabial trills of any sort. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. From shoulson Wed Nov 11 11:44:58 EST 1992 To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Poliespo Well, I found the material Nick sent me about Poliespo. Started scanning over it again last night. It's worse than I remember it (though the linguistic work per se is a little better than I remember). I promised myself I'd get to show you the orthography (the romified orthography) for this. I'll try to explain what the characters look like. Hang on: a, a-hat, a-with-a-slash-through-it, slashed-a-hat, b, b-breve, c, c-hat, d, e, e-hat, f, g, g-hat, h, h-hat, i, i-breve, i-breve-followed-by-colon, i-breve-with-an-acute-accent, i-hat, i-hat-followed-by-colon, i-hat-accented, j, j-hat, k, k-breve, l, m, m-breve, n, n-breve, o, o-hat, p, p-overstruck-with-w, s, s-hat, t, t-hat, t-overstruck-with-v, u, u-hat, u-breve, v, z, z-hat, z-breve, q, q-with-acute-accent, q-hat, q-hat-with-acute-accent, w, w-with-acute-accent, w-hat, w-hat-with-acute-accent, x, x-with-acute-accent, y, 2, 2-with-accent. I wouldn't kid you about something like this. See below for notes on the acute accents. The i's-with-colons mean double length, used in something like two affixes (as in Cherokee, apparently). Elsewhere length is unimportant. Nineteen(!) vowels (this from a pamphlet that has the gall to say, a few paragraphs later (translated from Esperanto): IN ESPERANTO AND IN CHEROKEE, BUT NOT IN ENGLISH (THE LARGEST EUROPEAN LANGUAGE), THE NORMAL 5-VOWEL PATTERN WITH ONE OR TWO SMALL MODIFICATIONS IS USED. (Part of a list of similarities between E-o and Cherokee, indicating the wonderful rightness of Poliespo or something)). Vowels are: a,e,i,o,u as in Esperanto. a-hat, e-hat, o-hat, and u-hat (NOT i-hat), are the same but nasalized. slashed-a is \ae, as in American "ash", with a hat it's nasalized. i-breve is [I] as in "ship", i-hat is nasalized i-breve (not i!). q is the sound in "girl", etc. with a hat it's nasalized. w is the sound in "awful", "law" (pardon me for not using IPA, but I'm not going to trust *his* analysis, and I'm not going to trust mine, and I'd probably misrepresent anyway. So cope with the na"ive explanation by example), w-hat is nasalized. x is schwa, its nasal form is written 2 (so chosen because 2 resembles the author's hand-drawn symbol of the profile of a nose). Consonants as in E-o, unfamiliar ones: b-breve, k-breve, m-breve, n-breve are as their E-o equivalents, but (near as I can understand) pre-aspirated (or just aspirated?) with a *nasal* h. t-hat is voiceless th, t-overstruck-with-v is voiced th. p-overstruck-with-w is "pw" as one consonant (labialized p?). z-hat is "kts" as one consonant, z-breve is voiced analogue (gdz). y is "^hy" (esperanto ^h) pronounced as one consonant (palalized ^h?). Glottal stops, sometimes required, are not generally written. And I don't think the tones(!) are either, though the tonal system and its significance are hard to make out. Then again, I didn't try very hard. Wait, my mistake. The acute accents are used to indicate stransition from tone 2 to tone 3 (rising). Something is also said about a fourth tone, and maybe a first, but it's not always easy to tell when he's talking about Cherokee, Poliespo, or the myriad versions and incarnations of the intermediate and related languages he's developed. Also talks of the "Arabic Poliespo alphabet", so named because it uses more Arabic numerals, nothing to do with that language's orthography per se. Uses other symbols for hard-to-get Poliespo symbols: z-hat --> 3, t-hat --> 4, a-hat --> 5, t-overstruck-with-v --> 6, slashed-a --> 7, p-overstruck-with-w --> 8, slashed-a-hat --> 9, z-breve --> %, i-breve --> ), i-breve-accent --> (, i-hat --> ], i-hat-accent --> [, w-hat --> $, w-hat-accent --> &, x-hat --> !, 2-accent --> 1/2, q-accent --> =, q-hat --> +, q-hat-accent --> #. He makes a point to say that the symbols were chosen to resemble what they represent in some fashion. To him, maybe. Notes that getting the pronunciation shouldn't be too tough; it was developed from his accent, which he says is similar to fairly standard central/south/western US, so all you have to do is see some Hollywood movies or get English tapes from America, until the first Poliespo teaching cassette comes out. How convenient can you get? I should note that he doesn't get into phonology until well into the paper, so you're sort of lost in the orthography earlier. If you think the phonology is rough, you don't want to think about the morphology and grammar. The language of discourse, for the most part, is reasonably correct Esperanto, but it's cramped and hard to read, and you have to watch out for his frequent abbreviations, which he uses as Esperanto roots with no marking, and at least one neologism, "pi", which he uses as a gender-neutral, sentience-neutral third-person-singular pronoun. There seem to be conjugational affixes to indicate both subject and object (cf. Okrand's Klingon, which, after all, took the idea from Native American languages), and apparently a dual in second person. The affixes have different forms depending on whether they precede consonants or vowels (allomorphy! Run! Hide!). If I read the table aright (probability about 60%), there are 65 combinations of subj/obj taken into consideration, with two sets of beforeC/beforeV versions for each. Not sure how many are distinct. Probably most. Words wind up being pretty damn large. There seem to be agglitinative constructions for temporal and spatial tenses (rather fine-grained, I think, for some), some evidential markers (attested/not attested by speaker...), hmmm, do I see distinction between living and non-living subjects/objects in grammar? I think so, at least in some cases (I'm skimming tables with little understanding, so take with a grain of salt). I think there are "try-to-X" contructions, as well as more complex ones. Positive side to the paper: It includes a table of the Sequoyah Syllabary (which he peridically uses here and there when discussing Cherokee). If you trust what he has to say, that could be a useful addition to a lingvomaniac's collection. Um, lessee... What else can I say, without actually going much into this mess? I suspect I've already said more than enough. Hey, as the paper says, "POLIESPO IS YOUR GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY TO ACQUIRE AN IROQUOIAN SPIRIT". Lucky me. He's got plans for a few organizations as well, and Nick sent me some of their one-page flyers as well. And you know? If person A recruits person B, A automatically receives, credited to A's account, 20% of the membership dues of B, and 20% of the money paid to the organization by B during B's lifetime. But I magnanimously waive my rights to your dough under that policy if any of you decides to join up. Sounds like a pyramid scheme to me... Organizations I see: The "Monda Esperanto-Organiza^jo" (World Esperanto Organization)... "Monda Poliespo-Organiza^jo" (World Poliespo Organization)... "Monda Homaranisma Eklezio" (World Humanitarian Church)... and the "Unui^gintaj Nacioj de A^utonomiaj Popoloj" (United Nations of Autonomous Peoples). Each has its own little agenda, which I'll not get into here. OK, I've gone on long enough... ~mark Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1992 05:03:10 +1100 From: Jason Johnston Subject: IAL phonemic inventory, inter alia Dear Conlangers: Recently we have been treated to an exuberant set of suggestions about possible phoneme segments for an IAL, including bilabial trills, dental percussives and anal spirants, not to mention unimanual clapping. But seriously, how does one draw the line at sounds that are just impractical for an IAL? Rick Harrison has pointed out that purely aesthetic preferences are unreliable, and Jacques Guy has noted correctly that a limitation to sounds which are easy for _everybody_ in the world would result in an extremely impoverished phonemic inventory (if not, in fact, total silence). It would also result in very long words if lexical ambiguity is to be avoided. So something more than the minimum is required. However I can't agree totally with Rick when he suggests "looking at the phonemes of the languages which have the most speakers, and selecting those sounds which are common to most of those languages". What language has how many speakers is a rather accidental phenomenon, reflecting economic power, political influence, social prestige, reproductive fecundity and many other factors, none of them linguistic. In fact the three most spoken languages in the world (Mandarin, English and Spanish in that order, as I understand it) all have inventories containing quite a few relatively "difficult" and unusual sounds, which I for one would _not_ want to see in a proposed IAL: take the (ugh!) vowel system of English, the dental fricatives of English and Spanish, the velar fricatives of Spanish, the phonemic tones, round front vowels and syllabic sibilants of Mandarin, etc. All the major world languages are far more difficult to pronounce than Volap"uk, and look at the flak that got. Yes, I realise that Rick's proposal is to include only those sounds that occur in "most" of the major languages, but the problem is that if your sample includes only a few of these major languages, you will be back to the problem of a very restricted phoneme inventory; while if your sample includes many of them, you are likely to include a fair number of seriously difficult sounds. My proposal, a variation on Rick's, is that the inventory should encompass phonemes that are considered phonologically _unmarked_. I realise that phonologists do not agree on a definition of markedness, but yet they seem by and large to come up with the same classifications for particular sounds, and these classifications tend by and large to agree with research on the order or acquisition in children, the common errors of foreign learners, the loss of distinctions in various sorts of aphasia, etc. From this very large body of work we can get a pretty clear picture of which sounds are unmarked (and therefore should be easy for the learner even if his/her native language doesn't contain them). The most unmarked phonemes would be these: a i u p t k m n s l A second rank of slightly more marked, but still generally manageable phonemes would be: e o b d g f h y w A third rank of dubious but possible phonemes would be: v z r ^c ^s (the last two are the English and ) (The point about r/l is not so much the phonetic identity of the segments but their distinctness.) So much for inventory. The other important aspect of phonology is phonotactics, specifically syllable structure. A minimalist proposal would allow only (C)V syllables, but a proposal based on relative unmarkedness would probably allow CVC and possibly CGV(C), where G represents a glide (r/l/y/w). It would disallow structures like the pt- and ks- of Glosa _ptero_ and _xeno_, and the sts- of Esperanto _scias_. It would also disallow the final -rt of Glosa _mort_, as in Robin Gaskell's recent posting of Glosa texts, and the -Cs of most (all?) Volap"uk plurals. Another important question for an IAL designer is morphology: what categories to include and how to express them. Mandarin, for instance, has (essentially - I know there are borderline cases) virtually no morphology apart from compounding (which also does the job of most derivational morphology in European languages), whereas Spanish has a great deal of purely inflectional morphology, including much that reflects purely "grammatical" categories like gender and conjugational class. Seriously proposed interlanguages vary widely: from Esperanto which has a great deal of both derivational and inflectional morphology (which however is totally "regular" formally) to Glosa which appears to have neither, but rather a very productive compounding facility (eg, as I gather, _X-pe_, 'person who Xs', _X-me_, 'machine for Xing'). My position is this: a certain number of compulsory inflectional categories are useful (in imposing a common conceptual grid on the world, in reducing unintended ambiguities, in imparting useful information without drawing too much attention to it, etc); on the other hand there is much to be said for the major parts of speech (particularly nouns, verbs and adjectives) being invariable (in particular, for the purpose of borrowing vocabulary from a wide range of different languages: so you can borrow _intifada_, _koan_, _boomerang_, _safari_ etc without having to add distorting endings to them). The solution? Encode your inflectional categories in the "determiner" of nouns and the "auxiliary" of verbs. Let a small class of function words be compact and efficient indicators of plurality, pastness, and whatever other inflectional categories you wish to support, and leave the major content words alone. There are many precedents for this: in spoken French, the determiner of noun phrases is usually the only indicator of number, for instance (cf singular _le livre_, _ce livre_, _mon livre_ with plural _les livres_, _ces livres_, _mes livres_, where the _s_ on _livres_ is purely orthographic). Concretizing somewhat, we could imagine a set of determiners (of a "Romance" type, purely for illustration) as follows: Sg Pl la li 'definite' da di 'partitive' na _ 'indefinite' ma mi 'my' ta ti 'that/those' Similar lists could be drawn up for verbal auxiliaries, to encode whatever inflectional categories one thought important enough. The point is that these paradigms of minor word classes could be as elaborate as desired, without disturbing the principle that major word classes (the infinitely borrowable and expandable ones) comprise invariable "atoms" of meaning. The minor word classes could, if desired, show great internal regularity (as do those in my hypothetical example above); but they need not, and the burden on potential learners would still be very slight. This seems a reasonable compromise to me. As for syntax, there has been some discussion of this recently (and the associated issue of computer tractability), but that's a complicated enough subject to demand a separate posting... These are just thoughts thrown into the discussion. Singes are welcome, but flames are not. ----- Jason Johnston. From: And Rosta Subject: Rick M's crosslinguistic phoneme study Date: Thu, 19 Nov 92 20:25:55 +0000 One problem with crosslinguistic phoneme studies such as those of Rick Morneau and of Ian Maddieson's (1984) _Patterns of sounds_ is that they focus on phonemes & not on the phones that can realize them. So if a language has a phoneme that can be realized by [f], [p] or [b], and the conventional graphical representation of this phoneme is /p/, this language gets classified as having /p/ but lacking /f/ and /b/, which is obviously a gross distortion of the real facts. As a more familiar example, consider English and French: English /p/ is realized as [ph] and Eng. /b/ is realized as [p] or [b], whereas French /p/ is [p] (and maybe also [ph]) and French /b/ is realized as [b]. Again, saying that English and French both have /p/ & /b/ distorts the true picture. So, while I consider Rick M's work an excellent foundation for research into developing an optimal IAL (not that I personally necessarily have much interest in such a goal), it should be viewed as a first step that can be much improved on, albeit only by an enormous amount of independent research, since, as I noted above, the deficiencies I ascribe to Rick's paper are also prevalent - ubiquitous even - in the linguistics literature. --- And. Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1992 17:42:01 +0000 From: jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk (Richard Kennaway) Subject: Anybody there? "HELLO?!" "Hello?!" "Hello?" "hello?" "hello" "hell . . ." "ANYBODY THERE?!" "Anybody there?!" "anybody there?" "anybody . . ." It's several weeks since I received anything from conlang. On the off-chance that someone may be reading, here's some info about an interesting book: "Opperlandse taal- en letterkunde" by Battus (pseudonym of the Dutch logician Barst-Corsius). I haven't actually seen the book, but it's full of oddities and curiosities of the Dutch language. It is (naturally) written in Dutch. The title means "Opperlands language and literature". "Opperlands" is a pun, being the opposite of "Nederlands", the Dutch word for Dutch. -- ____ Richard Kennaway \ _/__ School of Information Systems Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \X / University of East Anglia uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K. Handy words and phrases for travellers, no.44: Opperlands kraaieeiooiuieaaier One who fondles the udders of a sheep which was hatched from a crow's egg. Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 20:39 GMT +0100 From: J%org Knappen Subject: neu-inglish Yes, conlang was passive for some time. Maybe, because discussion became somewhat over-serious. Here is a little project to have fun with: Language reform of english Since my mother tongue is not english, I have difficulties in recognising international words when pronounced by native speakers of english. Therefore, one aim of the reform will be a _pronounciation reform:_ Internationale words should be pronounced internationally Second, it is hard to guess, how a written word is pronounced. Therefore, a _spelling reform_ shall bring us more clarity. At this occasion, some other defects of english (like interdental fricatives) should be cured. Name of the project: Neu-inglish (pron: /nju'iNlIS/ ) * Pronounciation: Single vowels are pronounced like a in bar, e in get, i in fish, o in god, and u in bush. y should be pronounced like i (in fish). au like present ow in cow (which of course will be written kau !-) eu like present ew in new (aha, therefore neu-inglish) * Spelling of english (non-international) words: Since the groups ee, ea, oo, oa rarely occur in international words, they can stay. But note: ea should always be pronouced like in lead (the metall) never like in lead (the verb) which should be respellt `leed'. I which is pronounced /aI/ should become ij (like in dutch, this is the lest severe replacement for several reasons [ordering, recognisability, etc.]). ij lijk neu-inglish! Eu too? * Th shall be no longer eused. Replacements: T in international words (Tema, Termometer) D for voiced th in english words (De, weder, derfor) F for voiceless th in english words (fink, fenk eu.) * The sound IR or UR shall be written \"or or \oe{}r (De swedish cognate of first is f\"orste). Vocabulary: Maybe wee should leave vocabulary selection to de f"orst eusers of neuinglish. Wee'll make a corpus den, and select all dose words which reech a certain score to be de base of de official vocabulary of neu-english. An academie shall be faunded (of course wee are de members :-) and decide ion de addition of neu words to dis base. Political action: F"orst of all, neu-inglish shall bee de official language of de conlang mailing list. Dis will demonstrate dat neu-inglish w"orks. Den, "orge eur congresspeeple to make neuinglish de official language of the USA. BBC and VOA shall broadcast onli in neu-inglish. Speeking of the old dijalect shall bee prosecuted bij law. Have fun wid neu-inglish! Eurs, J"org Knappen. From shoulson Mon Dec 14 14:16:51 EST 1992 To: KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.KPH.Uni-Mainz.de CC: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Hee... Nice proposal, J"org... One thing, though. You write: > a in bar, e in get, i in fish, o in god, and u in bush. In my idiolect anyway (and I'm far from unique in this), "bar" and "god" have pretty much the same vowel. How do you want them separated exactly? ~mark Date: Wed, 16 Dec 92 07:33:41 -0800 From: chalmers@violet.berkeley.edu (John H. Chalmers Jr.) Subject: Neu-Inglish J"org: In my "dialect-free" Central to Northwest US idiolect of American English, dew, new, knew, tune, etc. all lack the palatalization before the u-sound. Few is one of the few words that still has it. Hence, I prefer Nu-Inglish to Nyu-Inglish Also the "o" in "on" and the "a" in "father" are very similar in my speech. One could pronounce the "short o" as it is in awe, tau, awful, etc., but unfortunately, it is very easy to append a w-glide to this vowel and it sounds ghastly, like the dialect of New Jersey, which has a diphthong so far back in the throat that non-native speakers tend to gag trying to pronounce it. Alternatively, one might use a short non-diphthongized "o" as in French "mot," but this is a rather rare sound in English. It is systemic problems like these that make any spelling reform difficult for English (or Nu-Inglish). -- John Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 15:42:38 +0000 From: jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk (Richard Kennaway) Subject: Re: neu-english Mark Shoulson writes: >maxwell@ltb.bso.nl writes: > >>Jo"rg asks abaut words wid an open o. Ij happen to bee a speeker who does make >>a cleer distinction between the vowels in "god" and "bar", but ij fink dat >>de neutralijzation mentioned by Mark is very common. It is eeven possible dat >>dere are no pairs of words which would demonstrate dis distinction for >>all speekers. > >Let's see... how about "psalm" and "lore"? Work for me, I think, but "for >all speekers" is a mighty big bill to fill, in whatever spelling. Not for me. In my speech, "psalm" and "bar" have the same vowel, but "lore" and "god" don't. Here are some more examples. Words on the same line have the same vowel, words on different lines don't. bar, psalm, mass, grass, far, craft lore, oar, fore, show, foe, roe god, odd, pod, bob, log, rock And I'll include examples of a related but also different vowel: man, sand, crass, fat, hag, and -- ____ Richard Kennaway \ _/__ School of Information Systems Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \X / University of East Anglia uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K. Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 12:40:00 PST From: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com Subject: Re: I'm *without* primitive concepts Richard Kennaway writes: > Do atomic concepts exist in any useful sense? Does what is seen >as "atomic" vary from one culture to another, or one language to another? ... >Loglan avoided this problem by granting a primitive word to every concept >found with sufficient frequency in the major languages of the world, and >explicitly eschewing any attempt to find universal semantic primitives. I >do not see how to improve on this approach. Without wanting to plug Loglan, which I don't much like, I would like to second Kennaway's pragmatic views on semantic primitives. The search for universal semantic primitives has been an unholy grail in linguistics, computer translation, and artificial intelligence (knowledge representation). This is a linguistic LaBrea Tar Pit. When it comes right down to details, you can't get anyone to agree about such things, which suggests strongly that there is no basis for agreement. Look at the experience of Generative Semantics, Yorick Wilks' lisp-based semantic primitives, Conceptual Dependency, etc. Languages divide up the world in different ways, and that seems to extend all the way down to primitives. Rather than arguing for some kind of self-evident or logically derivable set of primitives, the tractable approach is simply to define what you take the primitives to be in your conlang. Then define how you can legally combine those primitives to express more complex notions. The best analogy comes from mathematics: first define the primitive axioms and then rules that build on them. As necessary, go back and add to the axioms. In English, "kill," "murder," "assassinate," "execute," etc. are all primitives. Any attempt to break them down to something more primitive results in a pale and partial paraphrase. It can still be very USEFUL, in many applications like computer understanding and question answering, to say that all the English "kill" words imply something like "cause to be dead" or "cause to die" in a semantic metalanguage. That's a useful one-way deduction or definition. Wilks' system had such a pragmatic approach. But to say that "kill" or other transitives are "really" based on a causative construction is to try to impose the primitives of your metalanguage on your subject language. As has been pointed out, your metalanguage may even want to distinguish variations of "die," and it could conceivably distinguish the following: dying from disease dying from old age dying from poison dying from accidental injuries dying from intentional violence dying while on a religious pilgrimage Your metalanguage might group these into one category meaning something like "die from natural causes" and another meaning something like "die from injury or accident," or it could make even more distinctions. Other groups might overlap or cut across various of these boundaries. The point is, each language must define what its primitives are--there are no obvious ways to cut up the real world of experience. Another wonderful example concerns the ways that different peoples divide up the color spectrum. In a rainbow, there are no inherent lines or bands--rather there is a smooth gradation of light-radiation frequency from one end to the other, covering the humanly visible spectrum. People with normal vision all around the world see the same frequencies, and we can all distinguish gradations of color to the same degree. But different cultures actually perceive different bands in the spectrum, reflecting the major color words in their language. In Scottish Gaelic, for example, one term covers roughly what English covers with blue and green. Blues and greens are therefore perceived by these speakers as subtle variations of the same general color, just as English speakers distinguish variations inside "red" or "yellow." Here again, the real world doesn't tell you how to divide up the spectrum--each language has to define its own color primitives. In Esperanto, "bon(a)" (good) is defined as a primitive, and its opposite "malbon(a)" (bad) is built on it. You could just as easily and legitimately go the other way. Or define two primitives. As a subtle lexical joke in Klingon, Okrand chooses "par" as a verb root meaning "to dislike." For "to like", you form its opposite, parHa', implying perhaps that disliking is the more primitive or likely relationship. Why not? In a conlang, I would still argue for choosing rather low-level primitives and making maximum use of affixes like the Esperanto mal-, ne-, -igi, and -ig^i. It keeps down the vocabulary and so reduces the brute-force memorization. But note that you ultimately have to CHOOSE your primitives, deciding and defining what their semantic scope is to be. Do your choosing thoughtfully but unapologetically-- It is ultimately a matter of taste and practicality. If you wallow too long in the tarpits, arguing over which primitives are "real," your bones will eventually be discovered along with those of the other semantic-reduction mastodons. Ken Beesley beesley.parc@xerox.com Date: Fri, 18 Dec 92 10:06:17 EST From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) Subject: The Pub Not Without Beer I don't think "without" can be a primitive, or atomic, concept. Consider: "without beer" == "beer is absent" Now take "beer". 1. If absence is a primitive, then the principle of economy makes me say that "beer" is not a primitive, for "beer" implies the existence of beer, which is its absence negated. The primitive, then, is something like "no-beer" or "beerless", and our "beer" is rather something like ... "unbeerlessness"? If the universe were empty, or mostly empty, with just a thing or two in it, yes, I suppose that absence might be a rather useful primitive concept. 2. If existence/presence is a primitive, then "beer" is something like "there/it is beer" (another hangover from Austronesian languages. They make extensive use of such sentence. "it has legs" is "its legs", and "it has no legs" is "its legs, it is not"). 3. If both existence and absence are primitives, then "not" isn't. Consequently, for beer, we need two words, or primitive notions: beer and no-beer. Ditto for pub. Not very economical on the grey stuff, having to store so much. So even though "beer" and "no-beer" are both primitives, a language is likely to have one of the two words for them derived from the other. What with? Why, with an affix I suppose. And what does that affix remind you of? I don't about you, but it reminds me of a negation, and I would reanalyze this wondrous language as having "negate" as a primitive after all, and so back to 1 and 2 above. As for the Klingon example, "love" being "unhate", well, I'd say let's not fall into the Esperanto "mal-" trap. To me, "love" is no more the opposite of "hate" than "green" is that of "red", but if you insist, I shall insist that "red" is "malgreen", "white" "malblack", etc. Or, to take a less extreme example: would you say that "to die" is the opposite of "to be born"? Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1992 20:26 GMT +0100 From: J%org Knappen Subject: oldinglish -- neuinglish What are traits of old english to be reformed for neu-inglish ? It seems, dad de speekers of oldinglish do not see eni traits to be reformed. Is dis tru? Hauever, heer are sam fings which ij don't lijk to see in neuinglish: De auxilliary verbs cannot be put into all tenses. Whij not? Ij fink it shud be possible to say: I will can do dis. Dere is anodder illogical fing wid de auxilliaries: May I do this? -- No, you mustn't. (1) Must I do this? -- No you needn't. (2) Whij need we change de verb in de process of negation? Neuinglish shud be regular in dis case. For (2) need looks lijk e good choice, for (1) ij,m finking abaut en analog of zh"ormen `d"urfen', p"orhaps `derf' or `d"orf'? --jk Date: 22 Dec 92 12:50:00 EST From: "UMPAC::GILSON" Subject: Consequences of free conversion Free interconversion between parts of speech leads to some interesting con- sequences. If (as in my earlier message) we can convert any noun to a verb meaning "be a N" and likewise for adjectives, we can have sentences like the following (-i is adjective ending, -e is noun ending, -ar is verb ending): Li kase grandar = the house is big. Li kase verdar = the house is green. Li grandi kase verdar = the big house is green. Li verdi kase grandar = the green house is big. Li grande kasar = The big thing is a house. Li grandi verde kasar = the big green thing is a house. Note that we _never_ need a copula in this scheme. (Some languages get away with eliminating the copula by allowing verbless sentences. This scheme is less of an _ad_hoc_ system, in that every sentence still has a verb. As a result, also, we do not need a copula to carry tense, as, say, Russian does; there is always a verb to do that.) I'm interested in seeing if anyone can see a flaw in this structure. Note that I am not saying we do not need suffixes to create other derivations than the ones provided for here, but only that we can eliminate the copula. If "dokar" means "teach," "doke" is "teacher" but we might have forms like "dokate"="student" and "dokure"="course" as well. One problem that occurs to me, but has a number of different solutions, has to do with quantifiable adjectives. "Grandar" above was used for "to be big," but we need to be able to say both "to be as big as..." and "to be bigger than..." One of these (but not both) could be the meaning of "grandar" used transitively, or we could forbid the transitive use of such words and insist on derivation: Alternative 1: X grandar Y = X is bigger than Y. X ekwar Y grandu = X equals Y in bigness (X is as big as Y) (here -u = adverb). Alternative 2: X grandar Y = X is as big as Y. X eksedar Y grandu = X exceeds Y in bigness. Alternative 3: [X grandar Y: not permitted] X ekwigrandar Y = X is as big as Y. X plugrandar Y = X is bigger than Y. {X mingrandar Y = X is not as big as Y.} There are hybrids possible of these -- one could ban transitive use of the word "grandar" as in 3 but provide verbs like "ekwar" and "eksedar" of 1 and 2, for example, or one culld use the prefixing derivations of 3 instead of the special verb of 1 or 2. Comments? From shoulson Tue Dec 22 13:17:33 EST 1992 Subject: Consequences of free conversion Just a minor point to raise with respect to Bruce's contention that free interchange between parts of speech can eliminate the need for a copula... A while back, I was asked how to say "Mara was the guard when the prisoner escaped" in Klingon, which sorta lacks a copula also (it uses pronouns as verbs in certain situations to mean a copula). My answer translated as "While Mara was guarding, the prisoner escaped." The person who asked the question said that the translation wasn't quite what the original said, but accepted my answer. I still maintain that the "distinction" between the original and my translation rests mostly in English usage, and the only real difference is in emphasis ("*Mara* was the guard...") which can be shown in other ways. That is, in this sentence anyway, I'm agreeing with Bruce. I'm just bringing it up for others to poke with, and to point out that at least one person didn't think so, at first glance. ~mark Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 19:55:34 -0800 From: D Anton Sherwood Subject: nu-inglish J%org says: > It seems, dad de speekers of oldinglish do not see eni traits to be > reformed. Is dis tru? I would reform pronunciation, so that "photograph, photographer, photography" sound related. But I think the result might not be English. > De auxilliary verbs cannot be put into all tenses. Whij not? Ij fink it > shud be possible to say: I will can do dis. I agree. > Dere is anodder illogical fing wid de auxilliaries: > May I do this? -- No, you mustn't. (1) "No, you may not" is equally valid. > Must I do this? -- No you needn't. (2) I agree it's funny. But the more colloquial "Do I have to?" "You don't have to" is symmetrical. (I've never figured out how to express non-obligation unambiguously in French; the negative of "devoir" expresses a duty not to do something.) Anton Sherwood dasher@well.sf.ca.us +1 415 267 0685 1800 Market St #207, San Francisco 94102 USA From: maxwell@ltb.bso.nl Subject: interconversion Date: Wed, 23 Dec 92 10:50:09 MET X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Bruce says that interconversion between parts of speech leads to some interesting consequences. I agree, but what he suggests has been used already, at least in Esperanto, probably Ido and perhaps also Lojban and Vorlin, though I leave comments on these languages to those who know them better than I do. -- There appear to be a few minor differences between what Bruce suggests and the system in Esperanto, though the basic idea is the same, and Esperantists use property in arguing for the flexibility of their language. Here is a summary of thius sort of thing in Esperanto. La domo grandas/estas granda =the house is big. La domo verdas/estas verda=the house is green. La granda domo verdas/estas verda=the big house is green. La verda domo grandas/estas granda=the green house is big. La grandaj^o domas/estas domo=the big this is a house. La granda verdaj^o domas/estas domo=the big green thing is a house. One difference here is that in Esperanto you can use the copula or a suffix, though use of the copula is more common, especially when the predicate is a noun, as in the last two sentences. The last two sentences make use of the suffix "aj^"(concreteness) to translate "thing". This is the clearest way to express this, but if you omit this suffix, using only the adjective, La granda la granda verda This could have the same meaning, depending on the context, but is in my opinion more commonly used to mean The big one (in contrast to say the small one) The big green one (in contrast to the the big red one or the little green one) insofar as there is a difference between these and the final two of the first set. You can use the noun ending: la grando la granda verdo But this could in some contexts be taken to mean bigness big greenness The second of these does seem unlikely, except in certain types of abstract constructions, but you get the idea of the contrasts that can be made here, if you want to make them. Actually, these notions are more likely to be expressed as "grandeco" and "verdeco", using "ec" to indicate this kind of abstraction. Actually none of this is actually in conflict with what Bruce suggests, but Esperanto, having been around longer than Bruce's suggestion, has naturally gone a little bit further in the distinctions it makes and the options it permits. From shoulson Wed Dec 30 10:47:39 EST 1992 To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: More consequences of POS conversion I was thinking a little more about Bruce's proposal regarding free interchange between parts of speech, and compared it with Lojban/Loglan (which tries to do the same thing as much as possible), and the effects seen there. One thing that eliminating the copula in favor of verbing everything would entail would be the loss of the definite article. This may be no big deal (Rick H. put it very well in an early essay on vorlin that practically no language with definite articles has any clear rules for how to use them). To see this, consider the sentence "I am a doctor." Bruce would recast this making "doctor" a verb. Using his suggestions ("-i" is adjective ending, "-e" is noun ending", and "-ar" is verb ending) and made-up vocabulary, we might get something like "ye doktorar." But how can I say "I am the doctor," with the definite article? Would we find ourselves putting articles onto verbs? Maybe, but I suspect that would come closer to the verbless sentences of Hebrew/Russian/Welsh/etc. than Bruce would like to see (I thought he was trying to make sentences with true verbs, not just equations of nouns). And what of adjectives? Bruce analyzed sentences about "The house is big" and the like, but what about "That is a big house," (or "The building is a big house," if you don't like pronouns)? "The house is big", said Bruce, was "(Li) kase grandar" (as noted above, I think this language can't have the "Li" article). For "That is a big house", would we do "Te kasar e grandar" (That houses and bigs)? Possibly. Probably even. But some might argue that that changes the meaning a bit, making it too symmetrical. Similar problems happen with relative clauses. "He/she is a/the person whom I dislike." Well... "He/she is a person" would go into, say, "ge homar" (He/she "persons"). "Person whom I dislike" might be "home ko ye hetar ke" (using relative-correlative style relative clauses: Person who-is-such-that I dislike said-one). But can you attach relative clauses like that to verbs? Possibly; it seems to be an artifact of the grammar and the logical structure of Loglan and Lojban that you cannot in those languages, but it may be reasonable in another. So "ge homar ko ye hetar ke"? Hmmm... It seems strange to have relative clauses on a verb. A better method seems to be the same as the one used for adjectives (which are really a special case of relative clauses, for the most part): "ge homar e ye hetar ge." Just some more things to think about.... ~mark P.S. Bruce, are these getting through to you? I get a lot of bounce messages from your site. For that matter, I get a lot of bounced messages from a lot of places on the list, but I'm more concerned about your receipt of these messages, since they respond to your points.