archives of the CONLANG mailing list ------------------------------------ >From mnu@inel.gov Mon Apr 5 23:04:44 1993 Date: Mon, 5 Apr 93 15:02:45 MDT From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) Message-Id: <9304052102.AA00413@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > Received: by NeXT Mailer (1.63) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Book Recommendation: Meaning-Based Translation Howdy conlangers! I just finished reading the following book, and I highly recommend it to prospective language designers: Meaning-Based Translation: a guide to cross-language equivalence by Mildred L. Larson, University Press of America, 1984 ISBN 0-8191-4300-6 Although the book is about translation techniques, it's loaded with examples that illustrate the vast differences that exist in the semantics of many of the world's languages. If you are working on a language design, and are trying to avoid bias towards your native language, then this book is for you. It is highly readable and no linguistic background is assumed. I got the book via interlibrary loan, but I liked it so much that I just bought a copy for future reference. 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 laibow@brick.purchase.edu Wed Apr 7 01:08:13 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (Marnen Laibow-Koser ) Message-Id: <9304062254.AA21569@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: IAu questions........... To: conlang@diku.dk (conlang) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 93 18:54:28 EDT X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Does anybody know anything about the language IAu (I hope I got the capitalization right)? It sounds fascinating but I have next to no information about it, so _anything_ would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, -- =============================================================================== Marnen E. Laibow-Koser | State University of NY at Purchase | (c) copy- laibow@brick.purchase.edu | "Umu vian aj^on!" | right 1993 =============================================================================== >From hearne@henson.cc.wwu.edu Wed Apr 7 02:19:44 1993 Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1993 17:14:35 -0700 (PDT) From: Jim Hearne Subject: Re: IAu questions........... To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: <9304062254.AA21569@brick.purchase.edu> Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Wed, 7 Apr 1993, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote: > Does anybody know anything about the language IAu (I hope I got the > capitalization right)? It sounds fascinating but I have next to no information > about it, so _anything_ would be greatly appreciated. I think you aUI. The inventor, John Weilgart, published a book about it called aUI : The Language of Space It is published by Cosmic Communication Company, 110 Elm Court, Decorah, Iowa 52101. James Hearne Computer Science Department Western Washington University Bellingham, WA 98225 >From mnu@inel.gov Wed Apr 7 22:09:35 1993 Date: Wed, 7 Apr 93 14:07:34 MDT From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) Message-Id: <9304072007.AA00358@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > Received: by NeXT Mailer (1.63) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Modal Phoneme Inventory Howdy conlangers! A little over a year ago, I posted an essay to conlang-list that showed the phoneme inventories of twenty-five of the world's major languages. Languages were chosen that had large numbers of speakers, such as Chinese, English, Spanish, etc. As a result, languages with relatively few speakers (such as all native languages of North and South America) were not represented at all. Recently, I was perusing the book "Patterns of Sounds" by Ian Maddieson (Cambridge University Press, 1984) which describes a phonological study of 317 languages from all over the world. Languages were selected using a quota rule such that "only one language may be included from each small family grouping". Thus, all languages were essentially given equal weight, regardless of number of speakers. One result of the study showed that a typical or "modal" language contains 21 consonants, as follows (somewhat simplified): p, b t, d "ch" in "church" k, g ? (glottal stop) f s, z "sh" in "ship" m n "ny" in "canyon" "ng" in "sing" w l, r "y" in "yes" h where "r" can be any of several r-sounds, such as trills, flaps, approximants, and fricatives. (The most common r-sound is a voiced trill, closely followed by a voiced flap. The English and Chinese approximants are actually quite rare.) Anyway, I had a few minutes to kill and thought other conlangers might find the above interesting. Besides, this list has been awfully quiet lately. 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 mnu@inel.gov Thu Apr 8 21:24:53 1993 Date: Thu, 8 Apr 93 13:22:53 MDT From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) Message-Id: <9304081922.AA00365@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > Received: by NeXT Mailer (1.63) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Ma I detcennocsid? Ydwoh sregnalnoc! Si siht tsil daed, ro ma I ylerem detcennocsid? Sdrager, 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 WHITTEN@FWVA.SAIC.COM Thu Apr 8 23:23:02 1993 Subject: affixes Date: Thu, 08 Apr 1993 14:05:46 Message-Id: <11840312@MVB.SAIC.COM> From: David Whitten X-Vms-To: MVB::"conlang@diku.dk" To: conlang@diku.dk Since the Conlang group seems to be slow, I figured I'd ask a question to the people who are actually constructing languages. look at the word: ACT It has variations: ACT ACTOR ACTABILITY ACTIVISM ACTUATOR ACTIVE ACTION ACTIONS ACTIVITY ACTUATE ACTIVATE ACTIONABLE ACTIONABLY ACTIVIST ACTUATION ACTABLE ACTING ACTIVELY ACTUAL ACTUATION ACTED ACTS ACTIVENESS ACTUALLY ACTUATES ACUITY ACUMEN ?ACTEE? Now all these variations still don't express the fullness of the word ACT since examples like AN ACT and TO ACT use the same word but are actually different meanings. The question list is: 1) is there a list of all the different 'forms' like the above? the traditional NOUN, VERB, ADVERB, ADJECTIVE seems rather weak 2) Do people that design a language use different endings to represent unambiguously the various forms ? 3) Why don't we have this richness in the English language for words like TALK or WALK ? Okay, I'll sit back and wait for a Maven Missive to explain this... David (whitten@fwva.saic.com) US:(619)535-7764 [I don't speak as a company rep.] >From Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com Fri Apr 9 00:05:18 1993 Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1993 15:04:42 PDT From: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com Subject: Re: Ma I detcennocsid? In-Reply-To: "mnu@inel:gov:Xerox's message of Thu, 8 Apr 1993 13:21:26 PDT" To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <93Apr8.150459pdt.11608@alpha.xerox.com> >>Ydwoh sregnalnoc! I'm still here, listening quietly. Ken Beesley >From Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com Fri Apr 9 02:06:25 1993 Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1993 17:05:38 PDT From: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com Subject: Re: affixes In-Reply-To: "WHITTEN@fwva.saic:com:Xerox's message of Thu, 8 Apr 1993 15:20:53 PDT" To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <93Apr8.170607pdt.11645@alpha.xerox.com> >look at the word: ACT >It has variations: >ACT ACTOR ACTABILITY ACTIVISM >ACTUATOR >ACTIVE ACTION ACTIONS ACTIVITY >ACTUATE >ACTIVATE ACTIONABLE ACTIONABLY ACTIVIST ACTUATION >ACTABLE ACTING ACTIVELY ACTUAL >ACTUATION >ACTED ACTS ACTIVENESS ACTUALLY ACTUATES >ACUITY ACUMEN ?ACTEE? You've got quite a grab-bag here. First let's talk about the word "word," which is too ambiguous to be thrown around in linguistic discussions. Linguists commonly make a distinction between abstract words, like the verb ACT, and forms that you might actually find in speech or in a text, such as "act," "acts," "acting," and "acted." The abstract words are often called "lexemes" or "lemmas." The various manifestations are often called forms or "wordforms." You can quibble over the terminology, but the important thing is to make the distinction. So, "act," "acts," "acting," and "acted" are the wordforms belonging to a verbal lexeme. For any given language, linguists tend to choose one of the wordforms as the "citation form" to use when referring to the whole lemma. In English, we choose the bare form ACT. This citation form is what appears in a dictionary. Linguists also distinguish two types of morphology: inflectional and derivational. Again, you can quibble over the terminology. In English, a verb lexeme has five forms: bare 3ps prespart pastpart past act acts acting acted acted Usually in English there is a syncretism or neutralization of the past and past participle forms (i.e. they look and sound the same). With few exceptions, each English verb lexeme can appear in these five forms. This is a typical verbal PARADIGM for English verbs. Inflectional morphology deals with such paradigms. English noun lexemes tend to have a singular and a plural form. So the lexeme DOG has two wordforms: "dog" and "dogs." Lexemes SHEEP and DEER are idiosyncratic exceptions that do not invalidate the general observation. Mass lexemes like WINE and BREAD cause other problems that I won't get into here. Derivational morphology (or lexeme-formation) has to do with how new lexemes are made out of others. ACT + IVE -> ACTIVE [ACT +IVE] + VATE -> ACTIVATE [ACT + IVE] + ISM -> ACTIVISM etc. Often there is a change in the category, e.g. from a noun to a verb. Unlike inflectional morphology, derivational morphology is often unproductive or semiproductive. The presence and acceptability of a given form (to a native speaker) is often a historical accident. The presence of a nominal lexeme like ACTION makes other reasonable forms like ?ACTIVENESS redundant and less acceptable. Unlike the meanings of the various forms in an inflectional paradigm, the meaning of derived forms is often somewhat unpredictable. To use your examples, the noun lexeme ACT and the verb lexeme ACT are obviously somewhat related, but it is not surprising to feel that the two lexemes have wandered off a bit on their own semantic paths. In agglutinative languages, including constructed languages like Esperanto, the processes of derivational morphology or word formation tend to be far more regular and productive. BTW, your examples ACUITY and ACUMEN have nothing to do with ACT historically. They come to us via old French from the latin ACUS, meaning "needle." The comparison of business acuity to "sharpness" seems to go way back. Ken Beesley >From mnu@inel.gov Fri Apr 9 15:29:46 1993 Date: Fri, 9 Apr 93 07:27:37 MDT From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) Message-Id: <9304091327.AA00156@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > Received: by NeXT Mailer (1.63) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Ma I detcennocsid? >>Ydwoh sregnalnoc! > >I'm still here, listening quietly. > >Ken Beesley > Thanks for the acknowledgement. The list has been so quiet lately, I wasn't sure if it was working. 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 KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE Fri Apr 9 17:50:08 1993 Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1993 14:43 GMT +0100 From: J%org Knappen Subject: Re: affixes To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01GWT7FXKWZ48WY9T0@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> X-Envelope-To: conlang@diku.dk X-Vms-To: VZDMZA::IN%"conlang@diku.dk" Well, germanic languages had this rich word formation too, but english has lost a lot of it. In german, it has survived quite well. binden b"andigen Band, Bande, Bindung, Bund, B"undnis, Binder, Gebinde, B"andiger, (Bandit), (Band^2), Bandage... bindbar, Bindbarkeit Of course there are many prefixed forms, like abbinden, anbinden, aufbinden, einbinden, umbinden, verbinden and forms derived from them Einband, Einbindung, Verband, Verbund, Verbindung... Many of these forms also have latinate names in Linguistics, but I don't have a comprehensive list ready. Yours, J"org Knappen. >From ponds!squink!biljir@dg-rtp.dg.com Sat Apr 10 04:21:41 1993 Date: Fri, 9 Apr 93 07:57:04 EST Message-Id: <9304091257.AA00ej7@squink.UUCP> In-Reply-To: <9304072007.AA00358@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > (from ponds!dg-rtp.UUCP!inel.gov!mnu (Rick Morneau)) (at Wed, 7 Apr 93 22:23:11 +0200) X-Mailer: //\\miga Electronic Mail (AmiElm 1.17) From: squink!biljir (Alan Beale) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Modal Phoneme Inventory Hello , in <9304072007.AA00358@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > on Apr 7 you wrote: > > One result of the study showed that a typical or "modal" language > contains 21 consonants, as follows (somewhat simplified): > > p, b t, d "ch" in "church" k, g ? (glottal stop) > > f s, z "sh" in "ship" > > m n "ny" in "canyon" "ng" in "sing" > > w l, r "y" in "yes" h > > where "r" can be any of several r-sounds, such as trills, flaps, > approximants, and fricatives. (The most common r-sound is a voiced > trill, closely followed by a voiced flap. The English and Chinese > approximants are actually quite rare.) > Yeah, pretty interesting. Tell us about the vowels. -- Alan Beale ponds!squink!biljir@dg-rtp.dg.com "when asked what you do for a living, say you laugh for a living" -- Dylan >From dasher@well.sf.ca.us Mon Apr 12 08:16:11 1993 Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1993 23:15:46 -0700 From: D Anton Sherwood Message-Id: <199304120615.AA23285@well.sf.ca.us> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: sandhi defense Rick M has from time to time posted various interesting thoughts and statistics on phonology. Here's something I don't remember seeing mentioned. Any language that continues to be spoken for centuries will almost certainly have sound shifts. These often introduce irregularities in morphology. Some of the most obscuring distortions result from consonant sandhi, where a cluster consisting of a root consonant and a suffix consonant is assimilated or simplified. An example came up on this list recently. Someone posted a list of forms beginning ACT-, but the related word AGENT was not included. The root was AG; the suffixed AG-T- was assimilated to AC-T-, and AG-ENT suffered an unrelated change, doubly obscuring the connection. Thus I suggest that conlang word-formation avoid bringing consonants into contact. Esperanto has this property in suffixes, but not in prefixes. (Armoring against vowel-harmony would be almost as valuable, but too restrictive.) Anton Sherwood dasher@well.sf.ca.us +1 415 267 0685 1800 Market St #207, San Francisco 94102 USA "Don't forget, your mind only *simulates* logic." -- Glen C. Perkins >From jcj@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU Tue Apr 13 10:26:17 1993 Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1993 18:25:57 +1000 From: Jason Johnston Message-Id: <199304130825.AA24858@extra.ucc.su.OZ.AU> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Moving to NEWSNET If the question of moving to the newsnet is still open, please put me down (though not dogmatically) as against. Maybe I'm missing something about how to use rn, but I find it painful. Also, the level of discussion on sci.lang, if that is anything to go by, is quite frankly depressing; whereas I always look forward to my conlang postings, even in relatively quiet periods such as we are having. Jason Johnston. >From j.guy@trl.oz.au Wed Apr 14 02:20:18 1993 From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9304140020.AA15255@medici.trl.OZ.AU> Subject: Moving to NEWSNET To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 10:20:02 +1000 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL20] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 142 Like Jason Johnston, I am against too. Read a group, any group (unmoderated) on the net, and see why. So, once again, against, unqualifiedly. >From chalmers@violet.berkeley.edu Wed Apr 14 14:29:48 1993 Date: Wed, 14 Apr 93 05:29:43 -0700 From: chalmers@violet.berkeley.edu (John H. Chalmers Jr.) Message-Id: <9304141229.AA02677@violet.berkeley.edu> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: mysterious printed text I was prowling in my language files yesterday and found two double xeroxed pages pages from a book in a language I don't recognize, though possibly it might be BABM. Pages 36-37 are surtitled SDAG KOAME CAJBE'AJCEAC RRAB and pages 70-71 Nouns: Durable Goods (gaxh-hacm) and Nouns: Durable Goods (hacp-pgas). The latter pages are from a conlang-English glossary.The glossary structure make it appear to be a catalanguage The first lines of p 36. are (barring any typos) "stoncbe'eo, iba soyg foqop va. Pi derj kig, siyk qaqop va. Gi bcob, xae mbeg debip mekf, da xae mjek mekpip a mixdodd. Oh cli dodd, r Plato mehipir dbop ed r Socrates, lret kcoz debip mihq." I'd appreciate it if can mark and refile the text properly. -- John >From mnu@inel.gov Wed Apr 14 15:22:30 1993 Date: Wed, 14 Apr 93 07:20:05 MDT From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) Message-Id: <9304141320.AA00175@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > Received: by NeXT Mailer (1.63) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Moving to NEWSNET How about posting an invitation to conlang-list on sci.lang once a month or so? I'd volunteer, but I'm too lazy. 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 thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Wed Apr 14 16:27:29 1993 Date: Wed, 14 Apr 93 16:27:28 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9304141427.AA16734@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: Rick Morneau's message of Wed, 14 Apr 93 16:20:21 +0200 <9304141320.AA00175@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > Subject: Moving to NEWSNET How about posting an invitation to conlang-list on sci.lang once a month or so? I'd volunteer, but I'm too lazy. I don't know. There's a tolklang (JRR Tolkien's languages) mailing list that does so, and the first couple of times they were roundly flamed. But of course, conlangs are a much more worthy pursuit. And for the record, again, I totally oppose netnewsification of this list, for the same reasons as previous posters. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Wed Apr 14 17:28:04 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (Marnen Laibow-Koser ) Message-Id: <9304141526.AA24572@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Re: Moving to NEWSNET To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Wed, 14 Apr 93 11:26:49 EDT In-Reply-To: <9304141427.AA16734@tyr.diku.dk>; from "thorinn@diku.dk" at Apr 14, 93 5:23 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] thorinn@diku.dk says: [...] "> I don't know. There's a tolklang (JRR Tolkien's languages) mailing "> list that does so, and the first couple of times they were roundly "> flamed. But of course, conlangs are a much more worthy pursuit. If you mean a smiley here and I'm just too tired and stupid to figure it out, forget you ever saw this message. But if you mean to knock tolklangs, that seems inappropriate -- and by the way, aren't tolklangs a subset of conlangs? :) One ring to rule them all, -- =============================================================================== marnen/laibow-koser/laibow@brick.purchase.edu/state/university/of/new/york/at/ purchase/box/1649/735/anderson/hill/road/purchase/new/york/10577/united/states/ of/america/practice/random/kindness/and/senseless/acts/of/beauty!/ =============================================================================== >From EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Thu Apr 15 09:07:44 1993 To: conlang@diku.dk From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Subject: Re: Moving to NEWSNET Lines: 15 Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 00:07:32 PDT Message-Id: <9304150007.1.23171@cup.portal.com> X-Origin: The Portal System (TM) laibow@brick.purchase.edu (Marnen Laibow-Koser) writes: >thorinn@diku.dk says: >[...] >"> I don't know. There's a tolklang (JRR Tolkien's languages) mailing >"> list that does so, and the first couple of times they were roundly >"> flamed. But of course, conlangs are a much more worthy pursuit. >If you mean a smiley here and I'm just too tired and stupid to figure it out, >forget you ever saw this message. He does say "Humour not marked" in his signature! Bruce >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Thu Apr 15 14:30:22 1993 Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 14:30:21 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9304151230.AA22833@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: Marnen Laibow-Koser 's message of Wed, 14 Apr 93 18:20:23 +0200 <9304141526.AA24572@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Moving to NEWSNET So, a topic for discussion. Everybody: In the conlang of your dreams, would irony, sarcasm, tongue-in-cheek remarks and other counterfactual material be marked with an obligatory particle, omission punishable by being read at face value? (A construal [is that a word? really?] of my previous remark: If some on this list should think that periodic hype for conlang would be treated more gently than that for tolklang, due to a greater inherent interest and/or worth, I would have them know that I don't agree---but not as a personal judgment of relative value, just that it will be flamed regardless. I think the intended effect is known as sarcasm.) Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) >From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Thu Apr 15 18:33:48 1993 Message-Id: From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: Moving to NEWSNET To: conlang@diku.dk (conlang) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1993 10:46:45 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <9304151230.AA22833@tyr.diku.dk> from "thorinn@diku.dk" at Apr 15, 93 03:43:02 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 832 thorinn@diku.dk writes: > So, a topic for discussion. Everybody: In the conlang of your dreams, > would irony, sarcasm, tongue-in-cheek remarks and other counterfactual > material be marked with an obligatory particle, omission punishable by > being read at face value? Since everything in Lojban is marked by a particle, Lojban naturally has a variety of such particles: "zo'o" marks humor, whereas ".ianai" indicates that the speaker does not believe what s/he is saying (one kind of irony). In general, everything that is carried by "tone of voice" in English and related languages is represented explicitly in Lojban. This is also true of other varieties of Loglan, but Lojban has the most extensive set of such indicators. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From zack@netcom.com Thu Apr 15 20:05:18 1993 Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 11:05:26 -0700 From: zack@netcom.com (Zack T. Smith) Message-Id: <9304151805.AA27959@netcom2.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: irony, sarcasm, tongue-in-cheek remarks thorinn@diku.dk writes: > So, a topic for discussion. Everybody: In the conlang of your dreams, > would irony, sarcasm, tongue-in-cheek remarks and other counterfactual > material be marked with an obligatory particle, omission punishable by > being read at face value? My opinion is that a language should accomplish the task that one designs for it, and that if you want it to provide cultural data such as sarcasm or irony, then you should choose the most efficient and effective means. The underlying issue, I suppose, is whether a form of expression which is clearly supposed to have a specific sort of psychological effect on the hearer should be constrained in any way to meet various other standards. IMHO, it should not. It would be like asking a film director or a painter to forgo the full range of effects that he can produce with his medium simply to meet some marginally related ideal. I expect that many directors and painters have allowed themselves to be so-restricted, since such a restriction implies and can be thought of as an artisitic style, but I would ask, did any such artists accept a restriction not by choice? This issue calls to mind the following question: If Seinfeld or some other comedian were asked to use a language which forced him to pre-note to his audience the imminent arrival of sarcasm or irony, would he use it? I really doubt it. My 5 cents, Zack Smith Zack@netcom.com >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Fri Apr 16 00:23:26 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (Marnen Laibow-Koser ) Message-Id: <9304152222.AA13062@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Sorry To: conlang@diku.dk (conlang) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 18:22:12 EDT X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] I'm sorry for flaming the bit about tolklangs. I was writing under less-than-optimum conditions, having had no sleep the previous night, and I was probably a bit too thin-skinned and stupid. Hope I didn't offend anybody. Sheepishly, -- =============================================================================== marnen/laibow-koser/laibow@brick.purchase.edu/state/university/of/new/york/at/ purchase/box/1649/735/anderson/hill/road/purchase/new/york/10577/united/states/ of/america/practice/random/kindness/and/senseless/acts/of/beauty!/ =============================================================================== >From j.guy@trl.oz.au Fri Apr 16 03:12:58 1993 From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9304160112.AA19711@medici.trl.OZ.AU> Subject: irony, sarcasm, etc. To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1993 11:12:43 +1000 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL20] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1182 I forgot who, about a century ago, proposed to add to our collection of punctuation marks an "irony mark", looking much like a mirror-image of a question mark. If one really wants to mark irony, sarcasm, whatever, it is sufficient to have words for irony/ironic etc and say: "This is ironic..." or "That was ironic" without burdening the language with more particles, grammatical forms, suprasegmental features, or... think of anything outlandish. On a personal note, nothing irks me more than the "canned laughter" that has become so common on TV. So much so that only watched once (yes, just once), John Cleese's "Fawlty Towers". But I bought the book of the scripts. With vengeance in mind, I'd like to see tragedies on TV with "canned sobs and tears". Give us "Oedipus" with canned sobs and tears! How about "MacBeth" with canned shrieks of horror? Wouldn't "Kagemusha" be lovely with canned laughs, chuckles, sobs, tears, wails, shrieks, and panting (the latter during cavalry charges)? And "Waiting for Godot" with canned yawns? Whilst we're at it, if a constructed language is to mark irony or sarcasm explicitly, I insist that it must also mark lies explicitly. >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Fri Apr 16 04:52:16 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (Marnen Laibow-Koser ) Message-Id: <9304160251.AA08081@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Re: irony, sarcasm, etc. To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 22:51:05 EDT In-Reply-To: <9304160112.AA19711@medici.trl.OZ.AU>; from "Jacques Guy" at Apr 16, 93 3:22 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Jacques Guy says: || I forgot who, about a century ago, proposed to add to our || collection of punctuation marks an "irony mark", looking || much like a mirror-image of a question mark. Interesting. Too bad at least one model of computer terminal (viz. the IBM 3151, which I'm using at this moment) uses a reverse question mark to indicate problems in data transmission.....ironic, isn't it (especially when _not_ "getting" irony is a problem in data transmission? :) [...] || Whilst we're at it, if a constructed language is to mark || irony or sarcasm explicitly, I insist that it must also || mark lies explicitly. I'm of two minds here. Part of me agrees with you, but the other part of me doesn't: remember that the goal of any language is (or should be) to get across what the user wants to get across. I think it's important, in a perverse way, for untruth to be as communicable as truth. Granted, if I say (while you're looking at me and see that it isn't true) "I have three eyes *LIE*," it's not significantly different from "I have three eyes," because you can verify the truth or falsehood yourself (am I making sense here?). However, if I have a good reason for wanting you to believe a falsehood or disbelieve a true statement which you cannot verify yourself (and yes, there _are_ such) then I believe that should be possible. If the language marks lies explicitly, then how can I do this? Also, what about when I believe I'm telling the truth? (I probably haven't expressed myself very well here; I'm sorry if I've confused anybody......) -- =============================================================================== /| /| /| | Marnen Laibow-Koser | |/| |/| | | | | | | | | /| /| /| /| /| /| /| /| | State University of | | | | | | /| | | |/| | | |/| | /| | | |/| | | New York at Purchase | | | | | | /| | | | | |/ | | | | /| |/ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | / | | | | | brick.purchase.edu | | | | | | | |/| | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ | =============================================================================== ...practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty... >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Fri Apr 16 12:41:44 1993 Date: Fri, 16 Apr 93 12:41:43 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9304161041.AA03493@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: [lojbab@grebyn.com: Re: Moving to NEWSNET] Lojbab has asked me to forward this, as it was intended for the whole list. I'll save my comments for another article. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 16:36:40 -0400 >From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) To: thorinn@diku.dk Subject: Re: Moving to NEWSNET Omission of such particles in Lojban does result in the material being read at face value. But then Lojban has a good deal more sohisticated set of attitudnal indicators than a mere smiley face, almost enough to be a kind of language of its own. I believe that the appropriate thing to do would be to write a short, tastefull summary, comparable to what appears on the s.c.e FAQ, mentioning TOLKIEN-list, conlang, Lojban List, whatever the Klingon list is, and any others, giving the addresses for each, and the address of the Planned Languages Server, and asking that it be included in the standard sci.lang FAQ, or makingf it an FAQ file of its own. If it is low key, and does not push one language, and stresses linguistics interest, it will probably receive relatively little flames. It should probably be posted every 1-2 months or whenever there is a query about conlangs, and should be kept up to date by a single responsible person (who would presumably ask for people to suggest comments and improvements as part of the post). I think the existing FAQ for sci.lang which is posted too rarely, does not serve the function well simply because it does NOT give such a list of other lists and sources of information on-line but if anything just tells people to read some (possibly hard to find) books on the subject. lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@grebyn.com Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 For information about the artificial language Loglan/Lojban, please provide a paper-mail address to me via mail or phone. We also have limited introductory information available electronically. The LLG is funded solely by your contributions, which are encouraged for the purpose of defraying our costs (for both electronic and paper distribution.) >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Fri Apr 16 12:51:04 1993 Date: Fri, 16 Apr 93 12:51:03 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9304161051.AA03776@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: Logical Language Group's message of Thu, 15 Apr 93 16:36:40 -0400 <9304152036.AA13454@daily.grebyn.com> Subject: Moving to NEWSNET The sci.lang FAQ does not even appear in our local news.answers archive. The s.c.esperanto FAQ does, but it has a bad address for the conlang listserv---I'll write to Mike Urban about it today. None the less, the sci.lang FAQ would be a very nice place to put the blurb. If all else fails, we could volunteer to set up a monthly posting of it. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Fri Apr 16 14:58:29 1993 Date: Fri, 16 Apr 93 14:58:28 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9304161258.AA07863@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: Jacques Guy's message of Fri, 16 Apr 93 03:20:13 +0200 <9304160112.AA19711@medici.trl.OZ.AU> Subject: irony, sarcasm, etc. Somehow, I did not doubt that Lojban has ways of making irony etc. explicit. My question was, do people find it desirable for such markers to be obligatory? The loglan developers, by implication, have found it so, while other respondents have not. (A large segment of the Internet newsreading population would agree with Lojban here.) It is in the nature of irony and sarcasm that it is marked in very subtle ways, if at all. If you mark it explicitly, it is not irony any more, it's just a flat joke. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) >From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Fri Apr 16 16:31:36 1993 Message-Id: From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: irony, sarcasm, etc. To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1993 10:16:11 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <9304161258.AA07863@tyr.diku.dk> from "thorinn@diku.dk" at Apr 16, 93 03:23:31 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1684 thorinn@diku.dk writes: > Somehow, I did not doubt that Lojban has ways of making irony etc. > explicit. My question was, do people find it desirable for such > markers to be obligatory? The loglan developers, by implication, have > found it so, while other respondents have not. Marking irony is not obligatory in Loglan/Lojban; it is simply that unmarked irony may be misunderstood as sincerity. But by the same token, unmarked sincerity may be misunderstood as irony. > (A large segment of the > Internet newsreading population would agree with Lojban here.) > > It is in the nature of irony and sarcasm that it is marked in very > subtle ways, if at all. If you mark it explicitly, it is not irony any > more, it's just a flat joke. The standard theory of the ":-)" is that in (English) speech, irony is marked by a certain tone, which has no representation in (English) prose. Posters who use ":-)" see e-writing as more analogous to a transcription of speech than to normal prose, and compensate for the reduced bandwidth of the medium with additional devices. In this way, ":-)" becomes an (analogue to a) suprasegmental, much like standard uses of "?". Part of the Lojban design requires that the language contain nothing in its speech that is not representable in writing, or vice versa (e.g., there is a spoken "paragraph break" word). Therefore, if Lojban speakers have any way to show irony at all, it must be with a word, since the Lojban writing system represents only words and has no place for suprasegmentals. "In Lojban, suprasegmentals are superfluous." -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Fri Apr 16 18:46:05 1993 Date: Fri, 16 Apr 93 18:46:05 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9304161646.AA10562@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: John Cowan's message of Fri, 16 Apr 93 17:20:26 +0200 Subject: irony, sarcasm, etc. My standard theory is that the smilie corresponds to the utterance `just kidding, ha ha.' I shudder to think what a triple smilie is. What is this special tone in English? In my usage, irony is marked by a greater use of hyberbole and emphasis, and a more positive tone overall. If irony does not masquerade as sincerity, it is not irony. Let me predict that if Lojban is ever used by a humorist, the particles for irony, sincerity, positiveness and so on will be used in ways quite contrary to logic. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) >From lojbab@grebyn.com Fri Apr 16 19:04:53 1993 Date: Fri, 16 Apr 93 13:04:36 -0400 From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9304161704.AA25248@daily.grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: irony,sarcasm, etc. Irony or sarcasm is unfortunately strongly tied into conceptions of truth, and its nature and importance, along with nonsense. When you are seeking some kind of intercultural or international communications, what is "obviously" true and "obviously" nonsense start to get very uncertain. What may be subtle to one culture might be a gross insult in its boldness in another. Thus, if your purpose in making a statement is anything other than a simple declaration, and you are communicating with someone in another culture, you serious risk miscommunication if you do not "mark" irony or sarcasm. People might believe you. Without going into details, I witnessed several examples of such miscommunication between cultures in the last week when a group of Russian adoption officials visited the US. HUmor was taken seriously. Threats were made that in context may have caused the exact opposite of their intent, and aside comments on various political and social situations related to adoption were probably taken as deep seated beliefs. Almost all of these things were due to the cultural differences between the two peoples. Never trust that things are "obvious" to the other person, especially when you know that the person is likely to be operating under different assumptions than you are. Given the situation, sarcasm may be taken as claims of truth, and if like Lars, you boldly claim not to mark sarcasm, you may not be taken seriously when it is important. (Of course, on the net, it may never be i important %^). lojbab >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Fri Apr 16 19:42:17 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (Marnen Laibow-Koser ) Message-Id: <9304161741.AA29044@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Re: irony, sarcasm, etc. To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Fri, 16 Apr 93 13:41:06 EDT In-Reply-To: <9304161646.AA10562@tyr.diku.dk>; from "thorinn@diku.dk" at Apr 16, 93 7:23 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] thorinn@diku.dk says: [...] *} Let me predict that if Lojban is ever used by a humorist, the *} particles for irony, sincerity, positiveness and so on will be used in *} ways quite contrary to logic. In Robert Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,_ the computer (known as Mike) can understand both Loglan and English, but prefers English because of its inherent ambiguities and thus greater potential for humor ;>. Indeed, early on in the book (if memory serves) Mike gives the narrator one thousand jokes (in English, natch!) and asks him to explain them to further his (Mike's) understanding of humor..... It seems to me that Lojban (keep in mind that I'm saying this from the perspective of someone who's *fascinated* by it but knows almost none), in a peculiar way, has the _drawback_ of being logical: to my mind, one of the beauties of natural language (and "naturaloid" languages such as Esperanto) is their ambiguity -- while it is nice to have an entirely "logical" language, it's also nice to be ambiguous on occasion, and not to beat people over the head {metaphor marker, not to be taken literally} while making sure there are no loopholes {figurative expression} in one's utterance..... BTW, how would one translate _Finnegan's Wake_ into Lojban? *} Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) -- =============================================================================== /| /| /| | Marnen Laibow-Koser | |/| |/| | | | | | | | | /| /| /| /| /| /| /| /| | State University of | | | | | | /| | | |/| | | |/| | /| | | |/| | | New York at Purchase | | | | | | /| | | | | |/ | | | | /| |/ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | / | | | | | brick.purchase.edu | | | | | | | |/| | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ | =============================================================================== ...practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty... >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Fri Apr 16 21:18:41 1993 Date: Fri, 16 Apr 93 21:18:40 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9304161918.AA11040@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: Logical Language Group's message of Fri, 16 Apr 93 19:25:36 +0200 <9304161704.AA25248@daily.grebyn.com> Subject: irony,sarcasm, etc. I have been known to edit my signature. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) >From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Mon Apr 19 19:08:17 1993 Message-Id: From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: irony, sarcasm, etc. To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1993 11:18:00 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <9304161646.AA10562@tyr.diku.dk> from "thorinn@diku.dk" at Apr 16, 93 07:23:25 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1345 thorinn@diku.dk writes: > What is this special tone in English? In my usage, irony is marked by > a greater use of hyberbole and emphasis, and a more positive tone > overall. If irony does not masquerade as sincerity, it is not irony. I probably should have said "intonation", and I think it may also be necessary to distinguish (following Frye) between "naive" and "sophisticated" irony. Sophisticated irony indeed masquerades as sincerity, as in Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal" (to solve the overpopulation problem in Ireland by infant cannibalism). However, consider the following dialogue: Q: Do you want me to help you with that problem? A: No, I want you to leave me alone. Now this may be said sincerely, or even with sincere anger. However, there is also an intonation which conveys "Of course I want you to help me with this problem!". It is this intonation which the Lojban particles capture. > Let me predict that if Lojban is ever used by a humorist, the > particles for irony, sincerity, positiveness and so on will be used in > ways quite contrary to logic. As a Lojban humorist myself, I don't "lie with attitudinals", but instead try to capture the spoken intonation of a joke over the written medium of the net. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Tue Apr 20 12:56:39 1993 Date: Tue, 20 Apr 93 12:56:38 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9304201056.AA01422@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Pointer from sci.lang to conlang The sci.lang FAQ was posted a few days ago, and I sent a couple of suggestions to the maintainer. So now it seems that people will be able to find out about conlang through official channels---provided that they care to read a couple of FAQs, and that is a quite strong requirement, if you judge by the inane questions that get asked on news every day. (Question 14 in the sci.lang FAQ is about constructed languages, and is relatively new, I think---February, perhaps. It does not reference any network sources, only a couple of books.) Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) Subject: Re: sci.lang FAQ (periodic posting) To: thorinn@diku.dk > 1) How about getting the FAQ into the news.answers system, and adding > the special headers &c. that will make most systems keep it until the > next one comes along? OK. > 2) How about inserting a pointer to soc.culture.esperanto in question > 14, and mentioning that the FAQ for that group has references to > several mailing lists about constructed languages? I'll add a reference next posting. >From zack@netcom.com Wed Apr 21 21:53:21 1993 Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 12:53:22 -0700 From: zack@netcom.com (Zack T. Smith) Message-Id: <9304211953.AA17275@netcom2.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Lojban -- anyone got a lexicon or primer online? I thought I'd ask since there are always so many posts regarding Lojban or Loglan. There is some stuff on Loglan at the local university (ucla), but nothing about Lojban (pronounced loyy-bahn??). BTW, has conlang got a ftp archive anywhere? If not (if so?), I have an idea: that everyone to put descriptions of their personal languages in a central archive for others to browse. Has this been discussed already? Besides permitting the curious to enjoy themselves, this might also cut down on the noise level, since people wouldn't need so badly to say "So what's *you're* language like..." Of course, there's the privacy issue. I suppose that for some, one's language is a personal creation only, not to be distributed or disturbed. Comments? <---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Zack T. Smith, Zack@netom.com I'd rather be using FirstClass BBS! Yo, let's tax the rich and give to the poor. Hey'x tih ey fey peh di su'y? >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Thu Apr 22 00:00:15 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (Marnen Laibow-Koser ) Message-Id: <9304212158.AA28900@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Re: Lojban -- anyone got a lexicon or primer online? To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 17:58:52 EDT In-Reply-To: <9304211953.AA17275@netcom2.netcom.com>; from "Zack T. Smith" at Apr 21, 93 10:39 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Zack T. Smith says: [...] : but nothing about Lojban (pronounced loyy-bahn??). "Lojban" is pronounced "LOZHban": in Lojban vowels are as in Italian or Esperanto with the addition of "y", pronounced as a schwa (like "a" in English "about" or "sofa") and consonants are as in Esperanto except for the following: "c"="sh," "j"="zh," "x"="kh" (like "ch" in German "Bach"). Also, "'" (the apostrophe) is pronounced much like "h," "." (period) indicates a glottal stop, and "," (comma) indicates a syllable break. : <---------------------------------------------------------------------------- : Zack T. Smith, Zack@netom.com : I'd rather be using FirstClass BBS! : Yo, let's tax the rich and give to the poor. : Hey'x tih ey fey peh di su'y? What language is this? It looks like Chinese -- or is it a conlang? Best, -- =============================================================================== /| /| /| | Marnen Laibow-Koser | |/| |/| | | | | | | | | /| /| /| /| /| /| /| /| | State University of | | | | | | /| | | |/| | | |/| | /| | | |/| | | New York at Purchase | | | | | | /| | | | | |/ | | | | /| |/ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | / | | | | | brick.purchase.edu | | | | | | | |/| | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ | =============================================================================== ...practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty... >From EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Thu Apr 22 01:19:06 1993 To: conlang@diku.dk From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Subject: Re: Jigwa Lines: 24 Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 16:18:48 PDT Message-Id: <9304211618.2.14395@cup.portal.com> X-Origin: The Portal System (TM) Subject: Jigwa Rick Harrison's "Journal of Planned Languages" has an interesting article on a new creation called Jigwa. It seems to be an effort to combine Euro- pean and Chinese elements in a way that I think is superior to the other attempts I have seen. European roots, when they are borrowed, seem to be a lot more recognizable than in Vorlin: "skri" = "to write" (though there is a monosyllabicity re- quirement that does hurt recognizability some: "gwa" is all that is left of "lingua" to mean "language") and unlike the loglans (including Lojban) no attempt is made to mix roors from multiple sources into one morpheme (which leads to forms that look like none of the source languages!) The idea of having forms with beginning elements from a fixed list and endings from another, so word divisions are unambiguous, gives an automatic division resembling that in the loglans, though the mechanism seems to be more influenced by Mandarin Chinese than by Lojban or the original Loglan. I wish the author would not have chosen anonymity; I would have liked to communicate with him to find out more than the small communication in JPL. While Jigwa is not going to make me abandon my feeling that the best interlanguage would closely resemble Intal or Novial, I think that someone who has an allergy to "Euro-clones" ought to look into Jigwa. Bruce R. Gilson >From zack@netcom.com Thu Apr 22 01:49:01 1993 Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 16:49:03 -0700 From: zack@netcom.com (Zack T. Smith) Message-Id: <9304212349.AA09052@netcom2.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Lojban -- anyone got a lexicon or primer online? >: Hey'x tih ey fey peh di su'y? >What language is this? It looks like Chinese -- or is it a conlang? It's my conlang. For lack of a real name I call it Tha Dih Su, or roughly, "thing to speak with." Actually, the name isn't even a valid expression in the language any longer. For your amusement, I'll break down the expression: Hey'x --- it is the case that tih --- you-singular with the subjunctive tense (tense and pronoun are combined) ey --- verb, to like fey --- token which indicates that an action-description follows peh --- adverb, "a little" di --- to express oneself verbally, i.e. to say something su --- with 'y --- "ya" or me/I. Hence the expression means "Would you like to talk with me?" The "x", by the way, is pronounced like "th" in "that"; "ey" is pronounced like the "e'" of French; "ih" is pronunced like "i" in "sit", "eh" like "`e" from French, and "i" like "ee" in "cheek". Now, if we had an archive to put language-descriptions in, I could put the entirety of Tha Dih Su in there for examination. Zack <---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Zack T. Smith, Zack@netcom.com I'd rather be using FirstClass BBS Faisons le paint-balle, tuons nous-memes au facon des sauvages Du ka zho sel pa'w fek, leyn fa kong dih shihn sua di >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Thu Apr 22 02:48:12 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (Marnen Laibow-Koser ) Message-Id: <9304220046.AA15278@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Vorlin To: conlang@diku.dk (conlang) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 20:46:50 EDT X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Is there anyone out there who has any more info about Vorlin than just the vocab and basic grammar available on Langserv? I'm trying to create a parser (not to mention learning Vorlin) and I'd appreciate anything anyone could give me. Thanks, -- =============================================================================== marnen/laibow-koser/laibow@brick.purchase.edu/state/university/of/new/york/at/ purchase/box/1649/735/anderson/hill/road/purchase/new/york/10577/united/states/ of/america/practice/random/kindness/and/senseless/acts/of/beauty!/ =============================================================================== >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Thu Apr 22 03:14:37 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (Marnen Laibow-Koser ) Message-Id: <9304220113.AA21743@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Re: Lojban -- anyone got a lexicon or primer online? To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 21:13:15 EDT In-Reply-To: <9304212349.AA09052@netcom2.netcom.com>; from "Zack T. Smith" at Apr 22, 93 2:56 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Zack T. Smith says: : : : >: Hey'x tih ey fey peh di su'y? : >What language is this? It looks like Chinese -- or is it a conlang? : : It's my conlang. For lack of a real name I call it Tha Dih Su, or : roughly, "thing to speak with." Actually, the name isn't even a valid : expression in the language any longer. : : For your amusement, I'll break down the expression: : : Hey'x --- it is the case that : tih --- you-singular with the subjunctive tense (tense and pronoun are : combined) : ey --- verb, to like : fey --- token which indicates that an action-description follows : peh --- adverb, "a little" : di --- to express oneself verbally, i.e. to say something : su --- with : 'y --- "ya" or me/I. : : Hence the expression means "Would you like to talk with me?" : The "x", by the way, is pronounced like "th" in "that"; "ey" is : pronounced like the "e'" of French; "ih" is pronunced like "i" in "sit", : "eh" like "`e" from French, and "i" like "ee" in "cheek". : : Now, if we had an archive to put language-descriptions in, I could put : the entirety of Tha Dih Su in there for examination. Well, even though we don't, I'd very much like a copy (laibow@brick.purchase.edu). Also, I'll let the folks at the Planned Languages Server (langserv@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu) know about it (though I suppose if they read the Conlang list, they already do....). For those who don't know, the Planned Languages Server is, I believe, the major online clearing house for Lojban materials, and it also has a good deal of information on Esperanto and other less well-known languages, such as Guaspi (not only is it a _very_ logical language, as far as I can tell, but it uses tones for syntactic purposes -- fascinating!), Ido (Esp offshoot), Interglosa, Vorlin (old and new), Ro (a philosophical language), and La Langue Bleue (strange -- reminds me a little of Volapu"k, though I don't know either language at all well). Send it a message whose body consists of the single word "help," and uudecode the response if you need to. -- =============================================================================== /| /| /| | Marnen Laibow-Koser | |/| |/| | | | | | | | | /| /| /| /| /| /| /| /| | State University of | | | | | | /| | | |/| | | |/| | /| | | |/| | | New York at Purchase | | | | | | /| | | | | |/ | | | | /| |/ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | / | | | | | brick.purchase.edu | | | | | | | |/| | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ |/ | =============================================================================== ...practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty... >From WEINBERG@gmuvax.gmu.edu Thu Apr 22 04:05:45 1993 Message-Id: <9304220205.AA13238@odin.diku.dk> Date: 21 Apr 93 21:53:00 EST From: "STEVEN WEINBERGER" Subject: reference list To: "conlang" Can anyone recommend a very concise list of reference books/articles that deal with the (formal) linguistic aspects of conlangs in general or some specific conlangs? I will be most appreciative. steven h. weinberger dept. of english program in linguistics george mason university fairfax va 22030 >From lojbab@grebyn.com Thu Apr 22 06:45:46 1993 Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 00:40:23 -0400 From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9304220440.AA09574@daily.grebyn.com> To: zack@netcom.com Subject: Re: Lojban -- anyone got a lexicon or primer online? Cc: conlang@diku.dk I will send you several files on Lojban (pronounced with Romance pure vowels, and j=zh= voiced palatal-alveolar fricative). Among the files is an index of our material on the Planned Languages Server (note that the address is now langserv@columbia.edu, slightly different from the one given in the file) which also is the closest thing to a conlang archive site that I know of, though no actual messages are archived. We also have mail order printed materials which are better formatted than electronic text, and considerably more advanced material on the languages as well. Books are in preparation (note that Lojban IS Loglan, just a newer version thereof - and that most likely the stuff in libraries are the 1974-5 books or earlier, and almost totally obsolete whether you are interested in Loglan/Lojban or the current Loglan Institute version of the language (those interested in more info on why there is now two versions of Loglan should specifically request info from me - I have a prepared file describing the situation for those who ask; we obviously feel that Lojban is the far superior of the two, and have a much larger and more active community to back our claim). lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@grebyn.com Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Thu Apr 22 13:46:10 1993 Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 13:46:09 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9304221146.AA19585@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Conlang archive In my opinion, conlang already has an archive site---the PLS---so I am not planning on setting up an extensive file archive on my listserv. It is currently keeping a log of all outgoing messages, but that is not yet accessible. (It will be, I just have to find the time to read the manual.) I think that I will be uploading the log to the PLS on regular intervals, as a sort of volumes. It is possible to set up a welcome message for the list, and that is probably where stuff like the PLS should be explained. I would like to beg out of writing it myself, however. Any volunteers? Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) >From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Thu Apr 22 17:54:28 1993 From: (Mark E. Shoulson) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 11:54:14 -0400 Message-Id: <9304221554.AA05046@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: Marnen Laibow-Koser 's message of Thu, 22 Apr 93 03:52:58 +0200 <9304220113.AA21743@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Lojban -- anyone got a lexicon or primer online? Yes, indeed. If you have a description of a language, or anything of conlang interest, please send it archive-management@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu, and we'll put it up on the server. Now, if we can just fix that annoying multiple-messages bug, we'd be back in business.... ~mark >From jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk Thu Apr 22 18:44:26 1993 Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1993 18:43:38 +0200 X400-Originator: jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk X400-Recipients: conlang@diku.dk X400-Mts-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<3207.9304221643@sys.uea.ac.uk>] X400-Content-Type: P2-1984 (2) Content-Identifier: Multiple mess... From: " (Richard Kennaway)" Message-Id: <3207.9304221643@sys.uea.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Multiple messages (was Re: Lojban...) X-Sender: jrk@139.222.1.5 FYI, a small proportion of all the mail I receive from mailing lists arrives in duplicate, not just from conlang. -- ____ 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. >From zack@netcom.com Thu Apr 22 22:49:43 1993 Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 13:49:52 -0700 From: zack@netcom.com (Zack T. Smith) Message-Id: <9304222049.AA07998@netcom2.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: anon ftp archive I've discovered that it's possible for me to set up an anonymous ftp archive on my machine (netcom.com). If anyone is interested in setting up such a service, e.g. to store information about various conlangs, please speak up. Note that the space used costs money; each megabyte is $2.50 per month, I'd be willing to pay for the first meg. Zack Zack T. Smith, zack@netcom.com I'd rather be using FirstClass BBS Jouons du paint-balle, tuons-nous au facon des animaux Du ka zho sel pa'w fek leyn fa kong dih su shihn ayadih >From lojbab@grebyn.com Fri Apr 23 06:46:30 1993 Date: Fri, 23 Apr 93 00:46:13 -0400 From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9304230446.AA24396@daily.grebyn.com> To: thorinn@diku.dk Subject: Re: Conlang archive Cc: conlang@diku.dk I should let Mark speak for the PLS, since he is one of the managers, but he has been silent of late on the subject. The PLS does NOT support archiving of open-ended accumulations of material, such as back archives of conlang, back issues of the Lojban newsletter journal, etc., due to very limited disk space. They want well-edited material that actually describes specific conlangs, not archives, and have refused the latter when it has come up in the past. Note also that individuals cannot upload to the PLS, but must ask one of the managers to add material, unless something has changed recently. We have the possible basis for an intro to the PLS for use in your welcome message incorporated in our PLS message for Lojban, but you would need to remove the Lojban specific information, and maybe add a mention of the other langauges that ARE covered on the PLS, to make a general-conlang posting. lojbab >From KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE Sat Apr 24 13:33:27 1993 Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1993 12:28 GMT +0100 From: J%org Knappen Subject: esperanto ftp server To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01GXE133MG808WWDA6@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> X-Envelope-To: conlang@diku.dk X-Vms-To: GATEWAY"conlang@diku.dk" The esperanto ftp server at ftp.stack.urc.tue.nl also has material related to other conlangs. Enjoy! J"org Knappen. >From dasher@well.sf.ca.us Mon Apr 26 06:22:48 1993 Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1993 21:22:31 -0700 From: D Anton Sherwood Message-Id: <199304260422.AA09590@well.sf.ca.us> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: `we' exclusive/inclusive There are some types of formal language in which it's not obvious who is the audience. In languages that distinguish between inclusive and exclusive `we', which is used in contracts? Is "you" the other party, or the witnesses? How about the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution (We the people ... do ordain and establish)? Anton Sherwood dasher@well.sf.ca.us +1 415 267 0685 1800 Market St #207, San Francisco 94102 USA "Don't forget, your mind only *simulates* logic." -- Glen C. Perkins >From KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE Mon Apr 26 01:14:51 1993 Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1993 00:09 GMT +0100 From: J%org Knappen Subject: Vowels To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01GXG3V6EJBK8WW1EH@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> X-Envelope-To: conlang@diku.dk X-Vms-To: GATEWAY"conlang@diku.dk" Lastly, we have seen the most popular consonants in the world's languages. The question of vowels was raised. This question is not that easy too answer, because vowels have not distinct places of articulation like consonants. Therefore one always talks about the vowel systems of languages. There is another caveat: If one talks about "the" vowel system of a language, one always talks about the short vowels (if there is a distinction). The set of long vowels is often richer due to monophthogised diphthongues (example sanskrit: short vowels a,i,u, long ones: a,e,i,o,u). After these preliminaries, here are the most popular vowel systems: 1. five vowels: a, e, i, o, u 2. seven vowels: a, , e, i, , o, u 3. three vowels: a, i, u Nasals occur quite often in all language families, but they aren't very stable. They come and go in the course of language evolution. I don't think that nasals are a good idea for a conlang. Note: The vowel systems of middle and northern european languages (french, geman, english, danish, norwegian,...) are unusually rich, having upto 15 qualitatively different vowels. >From WHITTEN@FWVA.SAIC.COM Mon Apr 26 21:17:18 1993 Subject: Remove From List request. Sorry. Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1993 12:05:47 Message-Id: <12265847@MVB.SAIC.COM> From: David Whitten X-Vms-To: MVB::"conlang@diku.dk" To: conlang@diku.dk Hi, I'm sorry to send this to the whole list. I tried sending it to conlang-request@diku.dk, but there is no such user, thus it bounced. I need to be removed from the list. I'm going to be unavailable for some time, thus I don't want a full mailbox when/if I come back. Thanks, David Whitten OB CONLANG: There are some American Indian languages that have voiced and unvoiced consonants like an aspirated /n/ and an unvoiced /m/. They aren't spoken very much since they are hard to hear in modern environments. Could you take advantage of this hand have the consonants used for 'intimate' endings on verbs, or nouns. After all, intimate situations mean you are within less than three feet of the other person, so there shouldn't be a problem with them hearing you... >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Mon Apr 26 21:33:49 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (Marnen the Songbringer) Message-Id: <9304261932.AA12367@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Re: Vowels To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Mon, 26 Apr 93 15:32:35 EDT In-Reply-To: <01GXG3V6EJBK8WW1EH@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE>; from "J%org Knappen" at Apr 26, 93 12:23 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] J%org Knappen says: [...] : After these preliminaries, here are the most popular vowel systems: : 1. five vowels: a, e, i, o, u : 2. seven vowels: a, , e, i, , o, u : 3. three vowels: a, i, u I notice no mention of "umlauted" vowels, which I thought were fairly common. Isn't a, e, i, o, o", u, u" rather popular as well? : : Nasals occur quite often in all language families, but they aren't very : stable. They come and go in the course of language evolution. I don't think : that nasals are a good idea for a conlang. I agree. -- =============================================================================== _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | Marnen E. | |/ \ \ / \ \ / \ \ | |/ \_\ | |/ \ \ / \_\ | |/ \ \ | Laibow-Koser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@brick. |_| |_| |_| \_\|_| |_| |_| |_| \_\_/ |_| |_| | purchase.edu | SUNY Purchase =============================================================================== >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Mon Apr 26 21:48:50 1993 Date: Mon, 26 Apr 93 21:48:49 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9304261948.AA18980@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Remove From List request. Sorry. Since conlang is now on a listserv, you can unsubscribe yourself. Just send a message to listserv@diku.dk with this line in the body: unsubscribe conlang It can do several other things as well, so if you (not just David) want to know what is possible, just send it the message "help". For instance, you can ask it to stop sending mail _without_ unsubscribing by saying "set conlang mail postpone". Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Tue Apr 27 11:48:12 1993 From: C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Date: Tue, 27 Apr 93 10:49:55 BST Message-Id: <2981.9304270949@ccw309.brad.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Remove From List request. Sorry. Quoth David Whitten: > OB CONLANG: > There are some American Indian languages that have voiced and unvoiced > consonants like an aspirated /n/ and an unvoiced /m/. They aren't spoken > very much since they are hard to hear in modern environments. Could > you take advantage of this hand have the consonants used for 'intimate' > endings on verbs, or nouns. After all, intimate situations mean you > are within less than three feet of the other person, so there shouldn't > be a problem with them hearing you... Voiceless nasals also occur in Welsh, as the nasal mutation of unvoiced stops: tad ~ fy nhad, ('father' ~ 'my father') ci ~ fy nghi ('dog' ~ 'my dog') The sounds are no less audible than any other voiceless continuants. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Going though the fear is strong, | Colin Fine Going with your knees a-quake, | Dept of Computing Maybe something you've been wanting | University of Bradford for so long, | Bradford, W. Yorks, England And never dared take. | BD7 1DP You don't have to get yourself ready, | Tel: 0274 733680 (h), 383915 (w) or conquer your fear, | But just welcome the moment, | do se cinri pei? lo rutni bangu And say Yes to the moment, | ('Are you interested in artificial and the Moment is here! | languages?' in Lojban) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Tue Apr 27 11:55:15 1993 From: C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Date: Tue, 27 Apr 93 10:57:01 BST Message-Id: <2986.9304270957@ccw309.brad.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Vowels Laibow answers Knappen: > I notice no mention of "umlauted" vowels, which I thought were fairly > common. Isn't a, e, i, o, o", u, u" rather popular as well? They are indeed fairly common, but there is nevertheless a tendency to associate roundedness with backness, and thus avoid fronted rounded vowels. English, Welsh, and Greek are examples of languages which formwerly had a high front rounded vowel (/y/) which has lost its rounding. : > : Nasals occur quite often in all language families, but they aren't very > : stable. They come and go in the course of language evolution. I don't think > : that nasals are a good idea for a conlang. > I agree. It all depends on what you want your conlang to do. Nasals are no more unstable than many other features - they've been there in French, Polish and Portuguese for a good few centuries. Surely the more significant criterion is their degree of auditory distinctness. I agree that for conlangs developed for the usual reasons, phonemic nasalisation is probably not recommended, any more than phonemic aspiration or (pace Jim Carter) phonemic tone. But 'stability', whatever that may mean, is neither here nor there. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Going though the fear is strong, | Colin Fine Going with your knees a-quake, | Dept of Computing Maybe something you've been wanting | University of Bradford for so long, | Bradford, W. Yorks, England And never dared take. | BD7 1DP You don't have to get yourself ready, | Tel: 0274 733680 (h), 383915 (w) or conquer your fear, | But just welcome the moment, | do se cinri pei? lo rutni bangu And say Yes to the moment, | ('Are you interested in artificial and the Moment is here! | languages?' in Lojban) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ >From KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE Tue Apr 27 12:57:36 1993 Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1993 11:52 GMT +0100 From: J%org Knappen Subject: Re: Vowels To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01GXI6PK0RKW8WWJOB@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> X-Envelope-To: conlang@diku.dk X-Vms-To: VZDMZA::IN%"conlang@diku.dk" Umlaute are not that frequent as you may think. They occur only in vowel systems with 8 and more vowels. I don't have the figures here, but I would roughly estimate their frequency at about 20% of languages in the sample. The same is true for central vowels (like schwa), which are even more rare. Also diphthongues are rather rare, at about 20%. Diphthongues are quite unstable, also. There is a widely believed conjecture, that the vowels tend to keep the largest possible distances from each other. However, a try to model mathematical precision into this notion has failed so far (You can try to define a metric function on the vowel chart, alternatively you can try an approach via the `formants' in the spectrum). However, the intuition gives quite good results. A vowel system of e, , o does not occur (to my knowledge). There are alos universals or near universals of the form x implies y, but I don't have them ready either. The most frequent unusual vowel seems to be unrounded u , replacing u in a five vowel system (ex. japanese). Yours, J"org Knappen. >From lojbab@grebyn.com Wed Apr 28 07:29:16 1993 Date: Wed, 28 Apr 93 01:28:41 -0400 From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9304280528.AA01579@daily.grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: retransmission - Part 1 sci.lang on Esperanto syntax Complexity of Esperanto Syntax Pt 1 of 4 Over the last couple of months on sci.lang (and possibly at least in part on soc.culture.esperanto), there has been an interesting discussion on the linguistic properties of Esperanto. Now that it has finally ended, I have edited the discussion together into a single stream (in order to make it short enough to post). This discussion shows the type of questions I think people who are seriously trying to develop conlangs need to discuss, if they want to have a complete design, rather than the old-hat discussions of phonology and morphology that seem to dominate everyones description of their pet project. Esperanto is clearly shown, despite its 'simplicity', to be an extremely complex language for people to actually use (and the Esperantists agreed!). We've tried with Lojban to define a lot of the things that were left up to custom in the design of Esperanto (rather than explicitly defined), hopefully resulting in a more satisfying result, at least for linguists. I didn't have time to do a comparison with Lojban. Perhaps someone else in our community would wish to tackle this??? The summary is divided into 4 parts since some people do not receive traffic over 16K. lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@grebyn.com Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 ========================================================== MR: From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) DH: From: donh@netcom.com (Donald J. Harlow) KM: From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu PJ: From: pcj1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Pierre Jelenc) ID: From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) NY: From: nyoung@desire.wright.edu EGE: From: etg10@cl.cam.ac.uk (Edmund Grimley-Evans) SLB: From: slb22@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Seth "the Lesser") MR1: Esperanto syntax is about as idiosyncratic and complex as that of any natural language. (later modified to read "the average natural language") DH1: Having studied Esperanto, Latin, and (to some degree) French, Russian and German, I would seriously question Mark's contention that Esperanto's syntax is in any way as idiosyncratic and complex as the syntaxes of any of the other four languages in that group. MR2: Well, this is merely an unsupported assertion... as was mine, of course. Would you care to build a case for your position? DH2: I should here paraphrase an old proverb: "Post in haste, repent at leisure." Actually, I would agree with Mark that Esperanto's syntax is "probably" as complex as that of any "average natural language" (assuming that we all know what a "natural language" is, and what is an "average" one). MR4: Oh, good. I won't even object to the "probably", given the informality of our discussion, and the lack of in-depth syntactic analyses of Esperanto. DH2: (cont.) I responded quickly, and took "complex" to mean "complicated," which of course it does not. I would argue that Esperanto's syntax is not as "idiosyncratic and complicated" as those of other languages, but "complexity" is quite another matter. As to building a case -- sorry, I have no rigorous way of doing so. I can only quote my own experience, which is "hands on" rather than theoretical. During the period 1957-1960 I studied Latin in high school, and in 1960 won an award at a statewide foreign-language field day as the best Latin student in the state of Oregon. During six months in 1959- 1960 I was an exchange student in Denmark, and was required to learn and use Danish in my studies and daily life. At various times I studied French (one year), Russian (one year) and German (one semester) in college, and have spent some 28 years in the company of a native Spanish-speaker (my wife) and various in-laws. I can read (to some extent), understand, write and speak (to a much lesser extent) any of these languages, but only with extreme difficulty. I studied Esperanto on my own, out of Cresswell & Hartley's "Teach Yourself Esperanto", in the summer and fall of 1959, and in October of that year heard the language spoken for the first time, at a meeting of the Randers Esperanto-Forening in Denmark; the speaker was a Japanese visitor, and I was astonished to discover that I could understand everything he said, including one very bad pun. I have never had a similar experience with any other language I've studied. Whether this can be attributed to a less complicated and idiosyncratic syntax is a question that others would have to answer. Perhaps there is a budding linguist out there who is looking for a dissertation topic? MR4: Just one quibble: syntax is precisely what you can throw out or mangle and still have a fair shot at understanding. I'd agree that Esperanto is easy to learn (for English speakers, at least), but not necessarily because of its syntax. By the way, what Esperanto I have I learned from _Teach Yourself_ book too. MR2: By the way, do you consider English syntax simple? DH2: Not that I've ever noticed. MR4: Good; I would have jumped on you if you said it was. :) MR2: To approach this question scientifically we'd have to do some solid syntactic investigation, such has been done with English over the last thirty years. I don't know how much of this kind of work has been done with Esperanto. I'll attempt to provide a bit of informal support for my claim by noting some areas where the same kinds of complexities found in natural languages exist in Esperanto. Some of the complexity lies in the mere fact that these constructions exist; but I emphasize that most of it will lurk in the detailed rules that tend to surround these constructions, and which would require further study to elaborate. DH2: Some reactions to a few of Mark's specific comments: MR4: Thanks for the reactions, which however I won't pursue. I was trying to suggest the range of questions a syntactician would be interested in; I still think a detailed study of Esperanto syntax and pragmatics would be quite worth doing. MR2: * Case usage. There are arbitrary differences between verbs, as seen in Ili diris AL SHI kelkajn vortojn. 'They spoke several words to her' vs. Demandu do LIN vi mem. 'So ask him yourself' DH2: Personally, I always say "Demandu do AL LI vi mem." It is also legitimate to say "Ili diris SHIN", but not if there is a direct object. In actual usage, the -N ending can replace the preposition AL as long as there isn't a direct object to confuse the matter (this basically follows from rule 13); but since, with words such as "diris" or "sendis" there is almost always a direct object, you almost never see this usage. (This "priority" rule, incidentally, is an interesting example of a syntactic rule not, so far as I know, explicitly described anywhere.) ID1: Could there be no arbitrary differences between verbs? MR5: Sure there could; but they add to the complexity of the language. ID5: Then which differences are arbitrary and which aren't? Could the complexity of the language be lowered by postulating that all speech verbs must use the same marking for the speaker, the same marking for the addressee and the same marking for the content of the communication? MR6: Ceteris paribus, sure. Too bad Zamenhof didn't read Fillmore... ID1: Why does one expect the two highlighted arguments above to bear the same case marking? MR5: Well, French manages it: _Ils lui disaient quelque chose_; _Je lui ai pose la question_; _Demandez-lui vous-meme._ ID5: So French marks the addressee of `tell' ("dire") and `ask' ("demander") in the same way. Is this a desirable thing to have in a planned language? MR6: I was thinking about the complexity of Esperanto syntax, not about what is desirable. But since you ask: sure, I'd think it would be desirable. Not that I think it matters what features exist in a planned language. It's not the lack of some feature or another that keeps Esperanto from taking off. ID1: Do they have the same thematic role, and if so, what is it called? MR5: c. Are you assuming that thematic roles are the same in all languages? ID5: I don't see why I should assume the contrary. MR6: Nor do I; but I wouldn't exclude it either. How much analysis of deep case has been done in non-European languages? MR2: * Preposition usage. Many of the footnotes in the _Fundamenta Krestomatio_ relate to choice of preposition. Again, many are simply arbitrary: why do you get married _kun_ and not _al_ somebody else? DH2: Actually, you can get married _al_ somebody, depending on what word you use for "get married": Mi edzighis _al_ mia edzino (I got married to [became husband to] my wife) Mi geedzighis _kun_ mia edzino (I got married with [jointly] my wife) Personally, I prefer the latter. It emphasizes the "jointness" of the act of marriage. ID1: This is essentially the same question as the first one. MR2:(cont.) * Collocations. It's often quite a chore to know what verbs go with what nouns in a language, and I don't know why Esperanto would be an exception. For instance, you 'take' a course in English, but 'follow' it in French. DH2: In Esperanto, "Mi STUDAS la kurson", which seems reasonable. ID1: And in Bulgarian the student takes the exam, if the professor will give it to him, whereas in Russian it is the other way around. But this has nothing to do with syntactic complexity, as far as I can see. MR5: What words must be used with what other words does seem like syntax to me. ID5: What categories of words must be used with what other categories of words is syntax, but here we're dealing with phraseology, to which syntax is insensitive. For all syntactic purposes that I can think of "take a pencil" and "take an exam" are identical. ID1:(cont.) In any case, I would expect a planned language to restrict metaphor to a necessary minimum. MR5: Which leads to the questions-- Why do you think that would be desirable? ID5: Because the only two alternatives are to allow any speaker to come up with any metaphor that seems handy to him, which (given the speakers' different cultural backgrounds) would make the result unintelligible, or to do what natural languages do, that is, to postulate a (necessarily idiosyncratic) set of licensed metaphoric expressions for learners to struggle with. MR5:(cont.) Why do you think it would even be possible? ID5: Well, since that necessary minimum can't be strictly defined, what I formulated was a tendency rather than a state of affairs to achieve, and Lojban, for example, follows that very tendency. MR6: I was asking these questions thinking of Lakoff's ideas on the centrality of metaphor to language. I also wonder whether one can dictate the amount of metaphor in a living language... I suspect speakers will use it extensively no matter what the language academy says. MR2: * Transformations. Like any natural language, Esperanto allows clauses to be embedded in other clauses in various ways: via conjunction, relative clauses, participles, etc. It would be interesting to know what kinds of clefting and raising are permitted-- or not permitted-- in the language. What are the rules for pronoun movement, or negative movement? * Impersonal constructions. One can say either Gravas manghi multe da freshaj fruktoj Estas grave manghi... 'It's important to eat lots of fresh fruit.' These are a nice source of complications in English; how about Esperanto? For instance, is the "Estas..." form ever prohibited? ever obligatory? DH2: No and no. Which one you use is a question of personal style (personally, I'd tend to alternate them; that way, nobody gets bored). >From lojbab@grebyn.com Tue Apr 27 16:15:08 1993 Date: Mon, 26 Apr 93 23:05:33 -0400 From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9304270305.AA12280@daily.grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu Subject: Esperanto on sci.lang pt 2 of 4 Complexity of Esperanto Syntax Pt 2 of 4 MR2:(cont.) * Clause-mate reflexivization. Compare Li ordonis al la servisto vesti lin 'He ordered the servant to dress him' Li ordonis al la servisto vesti sin '...to dress himself' Obviously Esperanto reflexivization is as dependent on clause structure as it is in English. (But are the rules exactly the same?) DH2: Almost certainly not. (My own language-usage uses the infinitive a lot less, in favor of the "ke -u" structure; hence "Li ordonis, ke la servisto vestu lin" vs. "Li ordonis, ke la servisto vestu sin".) ID1: For what it's worth, Russian distinguishes between _On prikazal sluge odet' sebja_. (the servant is to dress the orderer) _On prikazal sluge odet'sja._ (the servant is to dress himself) This despite the fact that _odet'sja_ < _odet' sebja_. Not sure if Polish works in the same way (and Esperanto has roots in both of these). MR5: Actually it looks like Esperanto agrees with English here, and disagrees with Russian. ID5: Yes. MR5: _sebja_ ~= _sin_, n'est-ce pas? ID5: _sebja_ est l'accusatif du pronom re'flexif, c'est-a`-dire plus ou moins la me^me chose que "sin". Mais ci-dessus _sebja_ indique le mai^tre, alors que "sin" indique le valet. MR2: * Conjunction reduction. Can one say Kristo dormis kaj liaj sekvantoj. 'Christ slept and his servants.' What reductions are possible and not possible? * Copula reduction. One can say Mi farbos la muron blua. 'I will paint the wall blue.' but what about Mi volas la muron blua. 'I want the wall blue.' Mi kredas la muron blua. '*I believe the wall blue.' DH2: All are used. ID1: Another interesting question is why it is _blua_ rather than _bluan_. (I'm extrapolating from Russian again.) PJ1: Mi farbos la muron bluan = I will paint the blue wall Mi farbos la muron (tiel ke g^i ig^u) blua = I will paint the wall (so that it becomes) blue MR2:(cont.) * The verbal system. Like Spanish or English, Esperanto has a mixed verbal system, making use of both auxiliaries and inflections. _Esti_ is used to form both passives and progressives: La shipo estas chirkauita de akvo. 'The ship is surrounded by water.' Li estis dirinta kelkajn vortojn. 'He had been saying a few words.' One must learn which verbs are inherently transitive (e.g. _movi_ 'move'), requiring inflection for intransitive meanings (_movighi_), and which are intransitive (e.g. _sidi_ 'sit'), with a derived transitive (_sidigi_). DH2: Yes, but this is a lexical, not a syntactic, question. Transitivity and intransitivity are inherent in the meanings of the words. Problems with transitivity/intransitivity seem to arise in general because most people learn Esperanto as a second language and absorb the semantic content of its words in terms of the semantic content of similar words in their own language. As William Auld once pointed out, "If you learn that _droni_ means 'to drown,' you are going to be confused; but if you learn that it means _sufokighi en akvo_, you'll have no problems." MR2:(cont.) Imperfect tenses are produced with yet another inflection (_movadis_ 'was moving, often moved, etc.'). DH2: To us, this is not an imperfect tense of "movi" but a past tense of "movadi," which is a different word from "movi". MR2: The sequence of tenses in dependent clauses is a bit odd for English speakers: Li diris, ke li faris [past] ghin. 'He said he had done it.' Li insistis, ke mi faru [imperative!] tion. 'He insisted that I do it.' DH2: But actually more understandable: in Esperanto indirect discourse, ", ke X" is an exact replacement for the direct ": 'X'", whereas the English rules, like the Latin ones, are somewhat more complicated. ID1: Since English speakers speak a very odd language, it is to be expected that anything simple and sensible will sound a bit odd to them. :-) In this case Esperanto once again patterns with Slavic, as well as with such languages as Japanese, whose syntaxes are free of the abomination known as coordination of tenses. MR2:(cont.) Again, it would be interesting to know what restrictions occur on these processes. Some English sentences don't passivize, for instance. Can you say "La pilko estas havata de mi" ('*The ball is had by me')? DH2: Yeahp. In fact, we can say it in English, too; we just _don't_. Maybe in a few hundred years Esperanto will also have modes of expression which are syntactically legal but are simply not used for reasons of habit. MR2: * Presuppositions. Presumably Mi scias ke Paulo mortighis. 'I know that Paul is dead.' implies that Paul is dead. I'd be surprised if presuppositions, conversational implicatures, speech acts, were any less complex in Esperanto than in English. DH2: Probably not. KM1:(on MR2) With all due respect (and BTW it's nice to know that there are Esperantists now who are aware of pragmatics; MR3: I was a teenage Esperantist; KM3: Me too; 'course that's not all I was a teenage. Luckily, I studied other languages, which was why I learned E very well. MR3: but in later years I'm afraid my loyalty shifted to other languages and other causes... KM3: Truth is, there are plenty of people around who know the language but don't have movement loyalties. Maybe we need a support group <:-> KM1:(cont. on MR2) I hope it's spreading <:->), the sentence above can't possibly make any sense. It's possible that I'm misinterpreting you here, but note that a constructed language doesn't "have" presuppositions, implicatures, and speech acts because these notions have to do with the extent to which interpretations of utterances in context follow from the shared belief-worlds of speaker and hearer, i.e., culture. ID2:(on KM1) You are misinterpreting him. The example he gave was (more or less) `Mi scias ke _P_.' --> `_P_.' `I know that _P_.' --> `_P_.' (For `-->' read `presupposes'.) I already expressed my feeling that the presupposition in this case is extralinguistical; in so far as "scii" means `know', the presupposition has to be there. You can't say someone knows something that is not true, no matter in what language. KM2: As I suggested in my original post, the jury is still out, to say the least, on presuppositions, so I'll say nothing more about this example, except that since presuppositions are linked to specific linguistic expressions (their "triggers"), absolutely nothing that I know of prevents a language from having a verb that means what 'know' means but is not factive. Ditto for 'regret,' 'admit' and all the other ones. But the issue here is whether presuppositions depend in some way on the shared belief-world of the language users, and until we know what presuppositions are, I don't think we can approach that question. (The problem, for those interested, is that presuppositions can't be what they have been thought to be -- propositions taken for granted mutually by speaker and hearer at the time the utterance containing the presupposition trigger is performed -- because they can be used to introduce new information. For example We regret that the meeting has been cancelled. is supposed to presuppose (like 'know' in the other example) the truth of its complement; but this sentence can be used to inform someone who didn't already know it, that the meeting had been cancelled. Similarly Sorry I'm late; my children spilled milk on me. is supposed to presuppose (via existential presupposition) that the speaker had children; but the sentence could be used to inform someone who didn't already know it that the speaker had children. So: in view of this, Georgia Green (in _Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding_) proposes that presuppositions are taken for granted only by the speaker. Fine? No, because then I do not see the difference between asserting and presupposing.) ID3: "think", "believe", "suppose" or something. That is, for me the factivity of "know" is an essential part of its semantics. KM4: The standard doctrine is that the presuppositions triggered by a lexical item can't be part of its semantics, i.e. part of its lexical meaning, because (a) lexical meaning is affected by negation while presuppositions aren't (e.g., both "John knows that tea is free" and "John doesn't know that tea is free" presuppose "tea is free") ID4: That would lead me to the thought that lexical meaning has a part which is affected by negation and a part which isn't, so that negation is akin to the operation defined on complex numbers (whatever it may be called in English) which inverts the sign of the imaginary part (what you call the lexical meaning) but leaves the real part (the presuppositions) as is. KM4: and (b) presuppositions can be suspended, as in "Tea may be free, though I don't know that it is" (but not denied, of course, as in "*I know that tea is free, but it isn't"), while things that clearly are part of lexical meaning can't be suspended, as in "*Bill may be dead, since Henry killed him." ID4: Isn't this a different "know" we're dealing with here? One that means `be certain of' as opposed to `be aware of'? What makes me wonder about this is that you can't do this with the Russian _znat'_, say, which means that there ought to be separate entries in a bilingual dictionary. KM3:(on KM1 and MR3 response below:) Note emphasis on *have* in the above; I think your comments immediately below miss that. I was trying to emphasize that a language doesn't "have" a pragmatics in the sense that it "has" grammatical features. (Whence my reluctance to get into this: there are linguists who still try to account for some pragmatic phenomena semantically, and for them, what I just said would not necessarily hold.) MR5: Hmm, then what *does* "have" pragmatics? I suppose the most reasonable answer is "the culture". However, I don't think this leaves the divisions between "language" and "pragmatics" airtight; after all, language is an expression of culture. For example, English has scores of questions with the force of requests-- "Could you get me a drink?" "Can I bother you for the time?" "Do you suppose you could turn that thing down?" "Would you be willing to wait?" Wierzbicka tells us that such sentences would sound quite strange-- and more to the point, wouldn't always accomplish their intent-- if translated into Polish. She argues that such questions support the values and goals of Anglo-American *culture* (e.g. respect for others' individuality, avoidance of being seen to impose). So is this culture or language? On the one hand the values expressed and the desire to express them are cultural. On the other hand the language itself provides the means to gratify those desires. I suppose Esperanto would not have developed constructions, such as English indirect imperatives, or the Polish system of diminutives, or the "formal" forms of verbs in Japanese, keyed to the values or practices of specific cultures. It would be interesting to know if it's developed or even adopted *any* pragmatic constructions that are not simply common to all the European languages. >From lojbab@grebyn.com Tue Apr 27 16:15:09 1993 Date: Mon, 26 Apr 93 23:07:33 -0400 From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9304270307.AA12285@daily.grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu Subject: Esperanto on sci.lang pt 3 of 4 Complexity of Esperanto Syntax Pt 3 of 4 MR3:(cont. on KM1 on MR2) Hmm, that's an interesting claim, but surely rather too strong. Do you really maintain that Mi scias, ke mia fratino parolas Maundsbarlingve. 'I know that my sister speaks Moundsbar.' doesn't imply that my sister speaks Moundsbar (and, for that matter, that my sister exists)? KM3: [not imply] presuppose As I said before we really don't understand presupposition, even fundamentally. If *I* uttered the above sentence I would be making those presuppositions, because I would be tacitly assuming that 'scii' precisely corresponds to my native 'know' and is therefore factive. Obviously this would not necessarily hold for speakers of a language in which one may use a near equivalent of Eng. 'know' and follow it with an indication of doubt, e.g. saying literally John knows Mary is ill, but maybe she's not. I'm told you can get such things in Japanese; perhaps someone could comment on that. MR5: I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around the concept of a non-factive 'know'. Wouldn't such a term really be an equivalent of 'believe' not 'know'? MR3:(cont. on KM1 on MR2) Or that you can't baptize a baby, christen a ship, or open a meeting in Esperanto? KM3: Note that none of this can be decided on purely linguistic grounds. You can do any of this stuff that some culture has legitimated in E. You could also do it in Lojban or Pig Latin if such were legitimated. NB: you could have doubts about legitimacy. Austin in _How to Do Things with Words_ (the original modern statement of speech act theory) actually makes provision for cases where a person might do something like try to perform a marriage in Esperanto only to find it was not legitimate (culture can't provide for every contingency). Possible uncertainties like this, for Austin, merely reinforced his contention that it all depends on society, not language. Turning to less institutional examples, if some Esperantist says to me something like Sendube mi cxeestos la kunvenon. Doubtlessly I will attend the meeting. I really *don't* know whether that was a promise or not! It could be a hedge. I have to guess at the speaker's intent, which depends on non-linguistic factors. Somebody suggested earlier that such things could be listed in lexical entries in dictionaries. But words like 'sendube' won't even be in dictionaries, because they're regularly derived forms..."Mi kulpigxis pro tio" does that count as an admission of guilt or not? My PV doesn't say... MR5: I think it was Takao Suzuki who complained that dictionaries are no good at defining words-- that is, at explaining how words fit into the semantic structure of the language. Certain pragmatic information seems to me to be part of the definition of a word, whether or not dictionaries do it that way. For instance, "but" differs from "and" chiefly pragmatically, does it not? With your "Sendube..." example, however, I don't think even a pragmatically savvy dictionary could help you with (for instance) a Slavic speaker who (from an Anglo point of view) overuses absolute terms like "sendube"; or with an Indonesian speaker who is just saying what he expects you want to hear; or any kind of speaker who just happens to be idly speculating, or resolving, or lying, rather than promising. MR3:(cont. on KM1 on MR2) You also seem to assume that *no* aspects of culture are shared, at least among people who speak Esperanto. Remember, only a restricted subset of human cultures are likely to learn it-- I doubt there are any Yanomamo Esperantists. For that matter, on your own showing Esperantists have at least one shared cultural phenomenon-- the Esperanto movement itself. KM3: Agreed. And I might add there's quite a lot more to it than outsiders are aware of; it isn't *just* interlanguage advocacy. It's interesting and subtle, and (I think) becoming more so. KM1:(cont. on MR2) For the sake of the uninitiated, if you offered me coffee while giving me lunch and I answered, Cximatene mi havis tason. (I had a cup this morning.) you would infer that I was referring to a cup of coffee, that I not only "had" it but drank it (guessing or knowing the anglicism), that the coffee was brewed rather than out of the can, and that I didn't want any more coffee, though none of this was in my utterance. ID2:(on KM1) I would interpret "mi havis _x_" as `I had _x_ in my possession' (and probably still have it, unless it changed owner or ceased to exist). KM2: In this *context* you would so interpret it? ID2: In English "I had" can mean `I consumed', but this is not a culture- related inference, it is the polysemy of the word "have". I don't think Esperanto "havi" has those additional meanings (the library with the dictionaries, where such things ought to be listed, is too long a walk away). KM2: (I intentionally included an Anglicism which the hearer has to interpret because the discussion was in the context of Esperanto and these things happen when Esperanto is used.) It is not possible to build all implicatures into lexical meaning, because a given utterance in context has an indefinite number of implicatures. ID3: Yet it is not the case that any word can mean anything, as H Dumpty would have it. KM4: I too disagree with Mr Dumpty: it is not the case that any word can mean anything. But given appropriate context, any word(s) can give rise to just about any *implicature.* (For me pragmatics and semantics are quite distinct; this is not an unusual view.) KM2:(cont.) So some of them have to be conversational. As a standard example, the following, uttered by a helpful bystander to a motorist whose Hyundai is out of gas: There's a gas station around the corner. Implicatures include belief on the part of the bystander that the station is open it has gas (the tanks are not empty) either the person on duty knows how to put the gas in, or there is a self-serve island the station owner does not have a policy of not serving Hyundai owners the station is not at the time in the process of being held up by a gang of hoodlums ... As you can see the list goes on and on; we can establish that all of these things really are implicated by the utterance by noting the bizarreness reaction of the motorist upon arriving at the gas station and finding any of the above propositions to be false. (Or at least we can perform this as a mental experiment.) After all, the helpful bystander didn't *say* the station was *not* being held up; etc. etc. ID3: Some implicatures are licensed by the language, and those I lay at the door of lexical meaning. The example with the petrol station is not language-specific, and should therefore work in Esperanto as well as in any natural language. KM4: Conversational implicatures are in general indeed not language-specific; this is why the last thing we want to do is to lay them at the door of lexical meaning. The implicatures in the example with the petrol station came from the belief-worlds of the participants in the conversation, something we normally associate with culture. ID4: But do we associate it with a particular culture, or with some universal feature of verbal communication? Is there a group of people for whom the question `Is there an xyz nearby?' in the appropriate setting does not imply `... such that I can take advantage of it'? ID2:(cont. on KM1:) I think it is also up to the language whether `a cup' can mean `a cupful' -- whether you may name the vessel and mean the content. This kind of thing, too, ought to be mentioned in books. KM2: Same point. ID1:(on MR2, written before KM1 comments above) Does this imply that they are up to the language? I thought presuppositions and conversational implicatures were the same, no matter whether one spoke Esperanto or English. Counterexamples? MR5:(on the above ID1 and ID2, ID3, KM1, KM2 which followed): In the case of "know", I agree with you. If _scii_ didn't assume the truth of the complement, it couldn't be translated "know". I was quite surprised by Ken's claim that Esperanto has *no* presuppositions etc. ID5: Yes, that's exactly the point that I've been struggling to make. MR5: But I doubt that all languages have the *same* presuppositions and conversational implicatures. ID5: I'm not convinced the other way either, it was rather the example with "know" vs "scii" which led me to make this generalisation. MR5: I'd recommend Anna Wierzbicka's _Cross-cultural pragmatics_ here; whether or not you like her theories or notation, the pragmatic facts are fascinating. Examples? How about the French and English exchanges --Voulez-vous du cafe? 'Do you want some coffee?' --Merci. 'Thank you.' Presumably _Merci_ and _Thank you_ mean the same thing, but the pragmatics differ: the French speaker is declining the offer, the English speaker is accepting it. I believe it's been alleged that Grice's rules are culturally variable. For instance, "Be relevant" and "Be truthful" may be rules in Anglo-Saxon culture; in some Oriental cultures it'd be "Say what the listener wants to hear" instead. ID5: Hmm. Yes, conversational implicatures can be a strange thing; a culture may be responsible for a message conveying the exact opposite meaning of what its semantic content appears to be. The only cure is, of course, to keep this kind of thing out of a planned language. People certainly can learn not to accept or decline offers by just giving thanks. That's even further away from syntactic complexity, though. MR6: Which from the point of view of an English or French speaker would increase the complexity of the language's pragmatics... Has the Esperanto movement come up with any pragmatic rules for Esperanto speakers? --that is, any rule that's both pragmatic and something all or most members of the movement can't simply import from their native languages? KM5:(on ID5) Grice based his conception of conversational implicature on the fundamental assumption that users of a language are "cooperative." It has, as Mark suggests, become questionable whether this idea can be interpreted in a universally valid way. The Keenans have done some early spadework on Malagasy (there's a nice sketch in one of Tim Shopen's collections, either _Languages and Their Speakers_ or _Languages and Their Status_, I'm not sure which one) which suggests that either "cooperative" means different things in different cultures, or cultures have different principles governing implicatures. Brown and Levinson's politeness theory has to my mind shed a great deal of light on the issue, by showing that the reason we communicate so much by implicature and by indirect speech acts is that directness and abruptness is (universally, they would say) impolite. (Their theory is built on face effects from Goffman and others.) This is very nice because we are already very much aware of cultural differences with regard to politeness (maintaining one's own persona and avoiding affronts to the other guy's). So Brown & Levinson have taken something hard to understand and related it to something we do have some understanding of. SLB1: Of course, that doesn't address whether politeness, either, is universally valued. Work on sex differences in communication has shown that some cultures have blunt, explicit male speech and flowery, indirect female speech, while others have the opposite. Frequently the difference is quite pronounced. In all (available) cases, the male speech pattern is judged to be "better" (i.e., higher status) than the female speech pattern, by both males and females. [This led off into a thread on gender differences in language, most of which had little to do with conlangs.] KM5:(cont.) So: as for keeping this kind of thing out of a planned language, I think it *was* kept out of all of them, or rather, none of it was "put in." Planned languages have all been constructed on the assumption that language is pure encoding/decoding. We now think that much if not most of what is communicated in an utterance (= piece of language in context) is not in the utterance. Users of any one constructed language (Esperanto, say) are bound to share enough culture not to have many problems with pragmatics. But this does *not* mean that these languages "have" implicatures, etc.! The pragmatic effects come from a language interacting with the rest of a culture over a (perhaps long) period of time. MR5: Where does this leave Esperanto? I have no idea. I think only fieldwork among the Esperantists can resolve the question. KM1:(cont. on MR2) Any or all of these inferences would be wrong in a culture that drank coffee out of gourds exclusively, ID2: Not really. The listener would have to interpret your utterance as meaningful and relevant, and the only way to do this would be to imagine your cup full of coffee, even if he only drinks it from gourds. KM1: or that wasn't aware of the undesirable effects of too much coffee, ID2: Which is the culture where a cup in the morning and a cup in the afternoon counts as too much coffee? Anyway, I would count on your intonation and facial expression to infer that you mean you're done with coffee for the day. KM1: or in which if you hold a cup in your hand you have to drink a beverage within 24 hours for good luck. ID2: That's too much speculation, isn't it? Our intuitions become fragile when we strain our imagination too much. KM2: Agreed; but that's just what happens when you confront the crucial data on much of anything in linguistics. >From lojbab@grebyn.com Tue Apr 27 16:14:57 1993 Date: Mon, 26 Apr 93 23:14:44 -0400 From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9304270314.AA12304@daily.grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu Subject: Esperanto on sci.lang pt 4 of 4 Complexity of Esperanto Syntax Pt 4 of 4 KM1:(cont. on MR2) This sort of thing is far more important in language use than literal meanings (if such there are!), and reaches depths of subtlety we can at present only imagine. MR3: Very true; but most of these inferences would seem to be pretty safe in talking to an Esperanto speaker, few of whom, I would think, come from countries in which coffee is drunk from gourds. KM3: "[discussion of implicatures; no real disagreement]" MR3: I can't accept the claim that Esperanto has *no* pragmatics, but I can see that differing cultural expectations could derail many an exchange between Esperanto speakers (of different cultures). On the other hand, is this really much worse than possible interactions conducted in English between (say) an inner-city African-American, a Jewish New Yorker, a Scotsman, and a recent Chinese immigrant? KM3: Probably not. Having used plenty of E and plenty of International English in my life, I can't say I've noticed much if any difference in this regard. The best E speakers know several (European) languages. This gives them a good feel for what pragmatics they need, though of course this takes place below the level of awareness unless something goes wrong. EGE1: Although it is true that some of the best Esperanto speakers were accomplished linguists (Zamenhof, Kalocsay, Grabowski and Szilaghy, for example), I don't think this generalisation is correct. Julio Baghy, definitely a very major figure, knew only two languages (Esperanto and Hungarian), and I don't think that William Auld, possibly Esperanto's greatest poet, is a particularly great linguist. MR3: If you were often thrown into such situations, you'd surely develop some strategies to deal with it (e.g. you'd avoid slang, paraphrase a lot, become aware of some foreign idioms). Perhaps Esperanto speakers just borrow the pragmatics of their native language until experience teaches them better. KM3: Yes, I think that's what happens. (It would be nice to have some research on this, but it's the kind of thing that's very hard to research.) MR3: But again, not only did Zamenhof blow off Chomsky; he completely failed to read Anna Wierzbicka. KM1:(cont. on MR2) There's no way to do justice to this subject in a posting and I'm not going to try. (For one thing, there's lack of agreement within the field on details.) But I would just like to point out that lack of attention to pragmatics, or ignorance of it, is what IMO underlies the endless argument about the "expressiveness" of Esperanto. It also underlies the undeniable fact that Esperanto is at its liveliest when used to discuss Esperanto. (A few weeks ago on soc.culture.esperanto there was a self-conscious attempt to talk about other things for a while; it didn't last of course!) MR3: Ooh, can you say "flame-bait" (in Esperanto)? MR2:(cont.) * Word order and pragmatic marking. Thanks to its morphological accusative, Esperanto has fairly free word order, but not all word orders are equivalent. According to J.C. Wells, VSO is unmarked, others are used "for stylistic effect". Similarly adjectives can follow the noun if they are long or "for emphasis". DH2: VSO is rare, but I've seen it consistently used (in a partial translation of the first book of the Mabinogion), and it did not strike me as foreign or unusual. Wells, who is a native English speaker, may well use non-SVO word orders "for stylistic effect" -- others (Hungarians, for instance) use other word orders much more liberally, again without bothering other speakers of the language. Adjectives can follow the noun for any reason whatsoever -- I usually put them there when I think of them as afterthoughts. MR2: * Adjective order. One can say "granda rugha libro" 'big red book', or "tri blindaj musoj" 'three blind mice', but surely "rugha granda libro" or "blindaj tri musoj" sound odd. DH2: An interesting point. "Rugha granda libro" does not sound odd to me at all, but "blindaj tri musoj" does indeed. Could this be because "tri" is not an adjective but a numeral (a completely different type of bird)? (To relatively new English-speaking Esperantists, "tri unuaj lecionoj" also sounds odd; they favor "unuaj tri lecionoj". As you can see, this is the exact opposite of the "tri blindaj musoj" vs. "blindaj tri musoj" situation. I think what we have here is simply first-language interference.) ID1:(on MR2:) Wait a minute. "Tri" is a numeral, not an adjective. One of Greenberg's universals says that if the demonstrative pronoun, the numeral and the qualifying adjective precede the noun, they go in this order, and if they follow it, the order is either the same or the opposite. This relieves Zamenhof from the responsibility for "tri blindaj musoj". Since "granda" and "rugha" are both qualifying adjectives, the problem with "rugha granda libro" can't be up to the language. MR2:(cont.) A few oddities more peculiar to Esperanto: * Use of adjectives vs. participles. Compare Chu lingvo internacia estas bezona? 'Is an internat'l language needed?' Chu lingvo internacia estas ebla? 'Is an internat'l language possible?' The _Krestomatio_ disapproves of the first (it prefers _bezonata_) but not the second. Why? DH2: Zamenhof (?) disapproved of the first simply because it is wrong. "Bezoni" is a transitive verb, more or less equivalent to the English "to need"; so when you convert it to an adjective, you also get a transitive adjective (if that makes sense). Convert it back again: "Chu lingvo internacia bezonas?" Bezonas kion?? Actually, a good translation of the original sentence is: "Is an international language in need (of something)?" Does this make a lot of sense? On the other hand, the second usage is not only grammatically legal (from the inherent meaning of -EBL-) but also quite common. MR2:(cont.) * There's a curious transformation which turns verbs into adverbials: Forpelite de la edzino, li rifughis chi tie. 'Chased out by his wife, he found refuge here.' Trovinte pomon, mi ghin manghis. 'Having found an apple, I ate it.' DH2: This is not really "curious," but follows directly from the fact that any Esperanto stem can be converted from one word type to another simply by changing the ending. So a participle can be adjectival, adverbial, substantive, or even verbal (so-called "synthetic" verb forms which some people like to use). For those interested, the difference between Mark's example "Forpelite de la edzino, li rifughis chi tie" and one with a standard adjectival participle, "Forpelita de la edzino, li rifughis chi tie" is this: The first describes the situation in which he took refuge (in other words, it describes the verb) -- "After being driven out by his wife, he took refuge here" -- while the second identifies the person who took refuge (in other words, it describes the subject) -- "He, who had been driven out by his wife -- not my brother-in-law, the other guy -- took refuge here." MR2:(cont.) * Roots fall into verbal, nominal, and adjectival classes, sometimes arbitrarily. For instance, _shoveli_ 'to shovel' forms a nominal with the same root (_shovelo_ 'a shovelling'), but _marteli_ 'to hammer' requires suffixation (_martelado_); this seems to be because the root for 'shovel' is verbal, but that for 'hammer' is nominal (_martelo_ = 'a hammer'-- compare suffixed _shovelilo_ 'a tool for shovelling, a shovel'). DH2: The "class" theory, proposed by de Saussure and polished up by Kalocsay years later, was accepted by the Esperanto Academy some years ago, but certainly not by all Esperanto-speakers (e.g. William Auld, Szerdahelyi Istvan, to some degree myself). However, it is true that every root contains some kind of semantic content, and that there is a lot of arbitrariness in what that semantic content is. (The classic expression of the particular discrepancy you've quoted is "broso" vs. "kombilo" -- brush vs. comb.) Again, this is a lexical, not a syntactic, matter. MR2:(cont.) If you're not a linguist, your reaction to all this might well be, "So what's wrong with all that? That's just how languages behave." In a way that's precisely my point. Esperanto behaves, syntactically, like any other language because it *is* a human language-- and because Zamenhof simply modelled his use of the language on the languages he knew, probably without thinking about it much. DH2: As mentioned above, Zamenhof defined Esperanto's syntax in the _Ekzercaro_; most of his books were written during the period 1906-1913, long after the syntax had been defined. The principle, of course, remains the same. MR2:(cont.) Statements like this make me suspect we're not talking about the same thing. The corpus represented by the _Ekzercaro_ is nowhere near big enough or complex enough to address many of the questions about syntax a modern linguist would have. The _Krestomatio_ and Zamenhof's translations would be a better start, but really only an extensive reading of Esperanto writing and interaction with large numbers of Esperanto speakers would suffice. DH2: Ah, there indeed we aren't talking about the same thing. The student of Esperanto who reads and understands the content of the _Ekzercaro_, and then augments his knowledge with a sufficiency of lexical material, can speak Esperanto correctly and fully -- but obviously he won't know those syntactic rules implicitly defined in the _Ekzercaro_, _nor the great number of others which follow automatically from the first batch_. At least not consciously. Your hypothetical linguist (hypothetical, because very few linguists seem to have any interest in Esperanto) reminds me of Tycho Brahe in his observatory, spending his life making planetary observations -- all of which could have been calculated ahead of time if only he'd had access to Kepler's three simple laws of planetary motion (which in turn all derive from one simple formula of Isaac Newton's). This is not, of course, a put down either of Tycho Brahe or of your descriptive linguist; Kepler's laws wouldn't have been devised without Brahe's observations, nor Newton's gravitational formula without Kepler's laws. But the need for a large number of observations to induce and define a set of natural laws does not necessarily relate to the amount of complication involved in those laws. MR4: True; but you can't make the syntactic generalizations before you have the syntactic data; and syntactic data just take time to discover. Linguists are still discovering new oddities of English syntax-- things that people automatically do, and learn somehow, but that nobody's ever stated explicitly. NY1: For fear of starting a battle, I will get to the point (at which point my friends will say "Eh?"): Some time back I posted a query abt a transformational grammar of Esperanto. I got a few replies and am grateful. But the recent conversations about syntax & pragmatics in or around Esperanto have been interesting. Thanks to those involved for the further info. I am presently taking a grammatical structures course and from time to time see things in the phrase structure rules and transformations that remind me Esperanto. By no great shakes a speaker of Esperanto, I still have to wonder how Zamenhof managed to capture so much about the operation of language without any training in linguistics. (Yes, I know. He was a language genius. I know. I know.) As for the culture of Esperanto, I think there is one, but from what I see, the culture of Esperanto exists because of Esperanto. It is the language that is the culture. How this plays in real languages is a good question. Maybe after I get my copy of the "Great Eskimo Hoax" (or whatever it is called), I'll understand that one better. =================================== lojbab again: Lojban will presumably have a culture as its speaker base grows. It is important to Lojban's use as a tool of linguistic research that we be aware of such "cultural" aspects of Lojban use - places where usage makes the language other than what it is defined to be on paper, and of course, places where what we have designed on paper is not adeqauate to the task of human communication. The preceding discussion, although solely about Esperanto, points out several areas we need to look at in Lojban. Are we subject to a similar analysis? Will someone say that Lojban is a "complex" as Esperanto? I will collect the replies from both conlang and Lojban List on this issue. Conlangers - I also await people talking about these questions as they apply to other conlangs. lojbab >From ucleaar%ucl.ac.uk@mail-a.bcc.ac.uk Wed Apr 28 22:20:51 1993 Via: uk.ac.bcc.mail-a; Wed, 28 Apr 1993 21:19:52 +0100 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Message-Id: <9304282019.AA25436@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Jigwa Date: Wed, 28 Apr 93 21:19:46 +0100 Sender: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk bruce wrote: > Rick Harrison's "Journal of Planned Languages" has an interesting article > on a new creation called Jigwa. It seems to be an effort to combine Euro- > pean and Chinese elements in a way that I think is superior to the other > attempts I have seen. Bruce's description of Jigwa reminds me of Rick H's description of Yalo (anonymous author, mutually exclusive sets of word-initial & word-final syllables...). Does anyone know if Jigwa is a new name for Yalo? --- And. [p.s. I am about a week behind with my email: sorry if the Jigwa-Yalo connection has already been raised.] >From ucleaar%ucl.ac.uk@mail-a.bcc.ac.uk Wed Apr 28 22:38:20 1993 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Message-Id: <9304282035.AA20275@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk X-Ungarbled_Sender: And Rosta Subject: diachronic conlangs Date: Wed, 28 Apr 93 21:35:48 +0100 Sender: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Does anyone know of conlangs that also have an invented history - I mean that not only is the synchronic state of the language invented but also the stages through which it has evolved over time, e.g. through Old, Middle & Modern stages. I can think of 3 cases: 1. The Eldarin languages. (Tolkien.) 2. Steve Rice, who participated in the short-lived ur-conlang list but not in the public one, mentioned that he had invented a family of languages - the Zhasniad group. But although I asked him for more information, I never got any reply. 3. Namjuan (pronounced 'dhabya' - [abj]). Not long after this list began, I discussed Namjuan - which was then called Yathoyua (Jaitojuan in its standard orthography). Namjuan has been being created by a friend of mine for the last 15 years: although the history hasn't been invented out of nothing, the language evolves at an astonishing rate, so that the difference between its earliest version & its modern form is comparable to the difference between Latin & French. So, roughly, it evolves about 100 times faster (or more) than natural language. (The speed of change explains why the pronunciation differs from the orthography (same reasons as with English)). [No matter how much I have chivvied the author of this language, he never gets round to writing a reference grammar for it so I am not able to supply any extensive information about Namjuan.] ---- And. >From zack@netcom.com Wed Apr 28 23:39:00 1993 Date: Wed, 28 Apr 93 14:39:08 -0700 From: zack@netcom.com (Zack T. Smith) Message-Id: <9304282139.AA18071@netcom2.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Jigwa I might have missed the answer to the following question when it was presented, but where can I get a copy of the Journal of Planned Languages? I've never heard of it. Also, are there similar such publications? Does anyone have a list of related books and publications ? (minus the Esperanto propaganda?) Thanks in advance, Zack T. Smith, zack@netcom.com I'd rather be using FirstClass BBS >> My personal anon ftp archive is netcom.com, directory pub/zack << Sel xa du ka zhi wa fek, kon xa kong di su shihn ayadi >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Thu Apr 29 00:22:36 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk) Message-Id: <9304282221.AA18125@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Re: Jigwa To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Wed, 28 Apr 93 18:21:02 EDT In-Reply-To: <9304282019.AA25436@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk>; from "Mr Andrew Rosta" at Apr 28, 93 11:23 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Mr Andrew Rosta says: : : bruce wrote: : > Rick Harrison's "Journal of Planned Languages" has an interesting article : > on a new creation called Jigwa. It seems to be an effort to combine Euro- : > pean and Chinese elements in a way that I think is superior to the other : > attempts I have seen. : : Bruce's description of Jigwa reminds me of Rick H's description of Yalo : (anonymous author, mutually exclusive sets of word-initial & word-final : syllables...). Does anyone know if Jigwa is a new name for Yalo? I've never heard of either language. Can anybody send me more info? : --- : And. : : [p.s. I am about a week behind with my email: sorry if the Jigwa-Yalo : connection has already been raised.] Not to my knowledge! -- =============================================================================== _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | Marnen E. | |/ \ \ / \ \ / \ \ | |/ \_\ | |/ \ \ / \_\ | |/ \ \ | Laibow-Koser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@brick. |_| |_| |_| \_\|_| |_| |_| |_| \_\_/ |_| |_| | purchase.edu | SUNY Purchase =============================================================================== >From EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Thu Apr 29 03:06:38 1993 To: conlang@diku.dk, ez-as-pi@cup.portal.com From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Subject: Re: Jigwa Lines: 22 Date: Wed, 28 Apr 93 18:06:32 PDT Message-Id: <9304281806.1.1047@cup.portal.com> X-Origin: The Portal System (TM) Zack Smith (zack@netcom.com) writes: >I might have missed the answer to the following question when it was presented, >but where can I get a copy of the >Journal of Planned Languages? >I've never heard of it. It is put out by Rick Harrison. He originally developed a new conlang called Vorlin and started a journal called "Vorlina vidpuni" as a house organ for that language. However, he also accepted articles on other conlangs and after a while they outnumbered those on Vorlin. So "Vorlina vidpuni" became the JPL. You can write to Rick at: Box 54-7014 Orlando, Fla. 32854 >From lojbab@grebyn.com Thu Apr 29 04:49:20 1993 Date: Wed, 28 Apr 93 22:49:01 -0400 From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9304290249.AA15700@daily.grebyn.com> To: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Subject: Re: diachronic conlangs Cc: conlang@diku.dk One of the pieces in _Interlinguistics_, the "academic" study of conlangs that has been occasionally mentioned, deals with efforts to devise a stylistic "old Esperanto" for use in translating or writing texts where such a variant would make sense. The result seemed quite interesting. Of course, Loglan/Lojban has evolved at a remarkable rate over 35 years, and is well-documentedfor parts of those periods (1960, 1962, 1974-5, 1976-82, 1987-93). JCB once said to me that Loglan seemed to evolve at the apparent rate of 100 years per year. But we could easily use an archaic Loglan or Lojban as a variant dialect is Lojban text if it were desirable, at the cost of ambiguity in some cases. lojbab >From EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Fri Apr 30 00:46:50 1993 To: conlang@diku.dk, ez-as-pi@cup.portal.com From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Subject: The long article on Esperanto syntax Lines: 47 Date: Thu, 29 Apr 93 15:39:56 PDT Message-Id: <9304291539.1.6408@cup.portal.com> X-Origin: The Portal System (TM) I think the discussion which lojbab posted here recently was very interest- ing. I will reply only to the conlang list, because I don't think much of what I have to say is relevant to Lojban enough to go onto that list. The point about the inconsistent usage of prepositions (and Esperanto's non- prepositional case marker -n) reminds me strongly of discussions that the= members of the Voksigid Development Group had when we were trying to define preposition usage in that language. We had some problems because usages that to one of us seemed self-evidently logical did not to another, and we had too small a group to bring it to a vote at the time. The Esperanto usage of nominative forms as objective complements (in a sentence like "I painted the house _blue_") is certainly a good example of what I have often pointed to as Esperanto's very idiosyncratic use of the accusative, not agreeing with any natural language to my knowledge. This is one of my major reasons for abandoning the use of an accusative ending entirely. (Of course, in a language such as we were attempting to create in Voksigid, "blue" would be in a phrase marked by a preposition that indicates "final state" -- a natural semantically-based syntax.) I will leave my comments at these two points, since these are the only ones where I think I have a lot to contrib- ute. However, I think the whole discus- sion was very interesting, though I do not concur with lojbab's implied statement that discussions on phonology and morphology are insignificant by comparison. In developing a complete system, all these must be treated, INCLUDING things like phonology and even orthographic conventions. Bruce >From ucleaar%ucl.ac.uk@mail-b.bcc.ac.uk Fri Apr 30 15:54:10 1993 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Message-Id: <9304301322.AA87039@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: diachronic conlangs [reposting] Date: Fri, 30 Apr 93 14:22:56 +0100 Sender: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk [The listserv rejected this first time round.] > Of course, Loglan/Lojban has evolved at a remarkable rate over 35 years, > and is well-documentedfor parts of those periods (1960, 1962, 1974-5, 1976-82, > 1987-93). JCB once said to me that Loglan seemed to evolve at the apparent > rate of 100 years per year. But we could easily use an archaic Loglan or > Lojban as a variant dialect is Lojban text if it were desirable, at the cost > of ambiguity in some cases. I'm not sure this is what I was thinking of. Virtually all invented languages get revised, usually in order to improve the language, but if one takes a diachronic perspective of these revisions the history of change does not resemble the diachrony of natural language: in NLs change is gradual and is particularly salient in the phonological system (& maybe also in the inflectional morphology); in ALs change is sudden & massive - large chunks of the language are added or deleted at a stroke, word meanings change not gradually by subtle meaning shifts but totally, by fiat. Tolkien invented both the synchrony & the diachrony of the Eldarin languages. Namjuan has evolved with incremental sound changes and meaning & grammar shifts. Since stability is felt by many to be a desideratum for an IAL, I would expect to find invented diachronies only in the relatively 'fictive', glossopoeic conlangs. In current Tolkienian linguistics there are controversies about the relationships between the internal (fictional) history of the development of Eldarin languages, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the external (real) history of the invention of the same languages. In principle the two could be completely distinct. Namjuan is interesting because the internal history is the same as the external history. - --- And.