archives of the CONLANG mailing list ------------------------------------ >From dasher@well.sf.ca.us Sun May 2 18:14:46 1993 Date: Sun, 2 May 1993 09:14:26 -0700 From: D Anton Sherwood Message-Id: <199305021614.AA22829@well.sf.ca.us> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: diachronic conlang Dad tells me that dialect is traditionally rendered in Esperanto with Zamenhof's proto versions (how much material on those is available?), but I used to have a book called "Arcaicam Esperantom" in which someone invented a five-case paradigm, a pseudo-Romance orthography and so on. *\\* Anton Ubi scriptum? >From KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE Sun May 2 21:37:51 1993 Date: Sun, 2 May 1993 21:36 GMT +0200 From: J%org Knappen Subject: Re: diachronic conlang To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01GXPQKDF77K8WW6KF@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> X-Envelope-To: conlang@diku.dk X-Vms-To: VZDMZA::IN%"conlang@diku.dk" I cannot confirm this. I have one esperanto _krimromano_ in which dialect and slang are given in Popido (some Ido-type language). Obviously, only the evil ones speak Popido. --JK >From zack@netcom.com Sun May 2 21:40:32 1993 Date: Sun, 2 May 93 12:40:38 -0700 From: zack@netcom.com (Zack T. Smith) Message-Id: <9305021940.AA13162@netcom4.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Tha Dih Su language description is ready A few people recently requested that I write up something about my language, Tha Dih Su. I've done this, and produced both text and MS Word (Mac 5.0) format documents. They're available on the netcom.com ftp archive in the directory pub/zack/Conlangs/Tha_Dih_Su. If you need it mailed, just lemme know. Otherwise, Enjoy! and remember that ideas / comments are always welcome. 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 Sun May 2 22:25:45 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk) Message-Id: <9305022024.AA11561@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Voksigid and Vorlin To: conlang@diku.dk (conlang) Date: Sun, 2 May 93 16:24:18 EDT X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Can anybody send me (laibow@brick.purchase.edu) or point me toward any info on Voksigid or Vorlin? I know very little about these languages, so anything you have will be appreciated. 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 Sun May 2 22:30:58 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk) Message-Id: <9305022029.AA14161@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Re: diachronic conlangs [reposting] To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Sun, 2 May 93 16:29:32 EDT In-Reply-To: <9304301322.AA87039@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk>; from "Mr Andrew Rosta" at May 2, 93 3:51 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] I don't think I'd count this as a true diachronic conlang, but Klingon makes some stabs at having a history: in explaining "'ejDo'" ("space vessel") and "'ejyo'" ("Starfleet") the Klingon Dictionary points out that "'ej" (which appears in no other words pertaining to space or space travel) could be a holdover from earlier days, as could "Do'" for "vessel" (where the 'modern' Klingon word is "Duj"). -- =============================================================================== _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | Marnen E. | |/ \ \ / \ \ / \ \ | |/ \_\ | |/ \ \ / \_\ | |/ \ \ | Laibow-Koser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@brick. |_| |_| |_| \_\|_| |_| |_| |_| \_\_/ |_| |_| | purchase.edu | SUNY Purchase =============================================================================== >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Mon May 3 21:56:43 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk) Message-Id: <9305031955.AA18042@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Logical extensions to English (!)..... To: conlang@diku.dk (conlang), lojban@cuvmb.bitnet Date: Mon, 3 May 93 15:55:24 EDT X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] To all my fellow conlangers and Lojbanists: I have just come up with a rather unorthodox idea, and I'd like any help I can get in testing/implementing it. I am trying to create logical extensions (conceptual parentheses and a MEX grammar) for English (or French, or German, or Esperanto, or...; i. e. natural and naturalistic languages -- could we call this lojgliban.?). The need for these is made clear from this example (taken from a paper on Lojban negation): does 'Not everybody loves me' mean 'Not (everybody) loves me,' i. e. 'There are those who do not love me,' or does it mean 'Not (everybody loves me),' i. e. 'Nobody loves me'? To deal with such things, I propose -- and I am by no means sure that this is the best solution -- the adoption of cmavo. Since I have next to no knowledge of Lojban (and since there are many things I don't like about it anyway) I have created my own cmavo for parentheses (these are interim, thought up rather hastily at 4 A.M.). First of all, to deal with nested parentheses, this plan assigns each pair a number, as follows: ... (0 ... (1 ... (2 ... )2 ... )1 ... )0. Thus, the higher the number, the less the extent of the pair. The second step is to give these numbers a verbal form. Here is my (far from perfect) suggestion for this: ( ) | 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | x10 x100 x1000 x10000 k p | a e i o u sa se si so su | l m n r Thus, pair 0 would be ka ... pa, pair 7 would be ksi ... psi, pair 18 would be kelso [k-e-l-so: (-1-x10-8] ... palso, pair 250 would be kimsala ... pimsala (or kasalim ... pasalim, but I prefer to put larger powers of 10 first), and so on. This system provides for 99999 pairs of parentheses. Alternatively, one could use a simple positional notation, something like the following: ( ) | 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 k p | ra re ri ro ru sa se si so su where pair 0 would be kra ... pra, pair 7 would be ksi ... psi, pair 18 would be kreso ... preso, pair 250 would be krisara ... prisara, etc. This system has several advantages: there's only one form for each number, and it allows for an infinite number of parentheses. Please let me know what you think about this, and let me know about any ideas you have for a MEX (Mathematical EXpression) grammar. Other than the parentheses, I have no proposal for MEX syntax yet. I look forward to hearing from you! Thanks, -- =============================================================================== _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | Marnen E. | |/ \ \ / \ \ / \ \ | |/ \_\ | |/ \ \ / \_\ | |/ \ \ | Laibow-Koser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@brick. |_| |_| |_| \_\|_| |_| |_| |_| \_\_/ |_| |_| | purchase.edu | SUNY Purchase =============================================================================== >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Mon May 3 22:40:37 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk) Message-Id: <9305032039.AA12564@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Oops To: conlang@diku.dk (Conlangs List), lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu (Lojban List) Date: Mon, 3 May 93 16:39:21 EDT X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] In my post on logical extensions to English, I said that in my first proposal, (18 ... )18 would be kelso ... palso. I goofed. It should be kelso ... pelso. Once again, please get in touch with me if you have any ideas at all that you'd like to share. Thanks very much, -- =============================================================================== _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | Marnen E. | |/ \ \ / \ \ / \ \ | |/ \_\ | |/ \ \ / \_\ | |/ \ \ | Laibow-Koser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@brick. |_| |_| |_| \_\|_| |_| |_| |_| \_\_/ |_| |_| | purchase.edu | SUNY Purchase =============================================================================== >From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Mon May 3 23:13:49 1993 From: (Mark E. Shoulson) Date: Mon, 3 May 93 17:13:45 -0400 Message-Id: <9305032113.AA14175@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk's message of Mon, 3 May 93 22:20:11 +0200 <9305031955.AA18042@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Logical extensions to English (!)..... Hmmm. I seem to recall someone years ago on soc.culture.esperanto who had some complex system of precedence in conjunctions (for Esperanto), enabling many conjunctions to be used without questions about distributivity and things like "red and yellow apples" ("(red and yellow) apples" vs. "red apples and yellow apples"). I can't recall who he was offhand. It was based on some binary tree system and suffixes on the conjunction, like "kajmu" and "kajfu" and stuff. I don't think I have much on it, but I might. ~mark >From dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu Tue May 4 02:46:55 1993 From: "" Date: Mon, 3 May 93 19:49:13 CST Message-Id: <4243.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu_POPMail/PC_3.2> X-Popmail-Charset: English To: conlang@diku.dk, writers@vm1.nodak.edu Subject: timetraveling language Situation: A society in which time travel is common. (Was common, will be common, will have been common....). Common enough so that "I'm going to meet him for lunch yesterday" is a fairly mundane piece of information. The language(s) would have to change. In what ways could a language handle this situation? The above assumes that the past doesn't get changed by what time travellers do. If they _do_ change the past, how does the language deal with _that_? Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Tue May 4 04:08:41 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk) Message-Id: <9305040207.AA19729@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Re: timetraveling language To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Mon, 3 May 93 22:07:25 EDT X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Dan Goodman says: : : Situation: A society in which time travel is common. (Was common, will be : common, will have been common....). Common enough so that "I'm going to : meet him for lunch yesterday" is a fairly mundane piece of information. : : The language(s) would have to change. In what ways could a language handle : this situation? : : The above assumes that the past doesn't get changed by what time travellers : do. If they _do_ change the past, how does the language deal with _that_? : Utterly fascinating question, and I'm not even going to begin to try to answer it. However, there's an interesting passage on the topic in _The Restaurant at the End of the Universe_, the second book of the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ series by Douglas Adams. He doubtless meant it to sound ridiculous, but it does raise some relevant points. Sorry I can't give a better citation right now -- I don't have the book handy. : Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu -- =============================================================================== _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | Marnen E. | |/ \ \ / \ \ / \ \ | |/ \_\ | |/ \ \ / \_\ | |/ \ \ | Laibow-Koser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@brick. |_| |_| |_| \_\|_| |_| |_| |_| \_\_/ |_| |_| | purchase.edu | SUNY Purchase =============================================================================== >From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Tue May 4 15:16:55 1993 From: (Mark E. Shoulson) Date: Tue, 4 May 93 09:16:51 -0400 Message-Id: <9305041316.AA19785@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk's message of Tue, 4 May 93 04:19:55 +0200 <9305040207.AA19729@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: timetraveling language >Utterly fascinating question, and I'm not even going to begin to try to answer >it. However, there's an interesting passage on the topic in _The Restaurant at >the End of the Universe_, the second book of the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the >Galaxy_ series by Douglas Adams. He doubtless meant it to sound ridiculous, but >it does raise some relevant points. Sorry I can't give a better citation right >now -- I don't have the book handy. For another, slightly more serious perspective, check out Larry Niven's short story "Theory and Practice of Time Travel"; I think it's in _All the Myriad Ways_. He also mentions the problems, mentioning you need a past future tense, a future past tense, an altered future tense, an excised future tense (future that can no longer happen), a home-base present tense, a present-of-the-moment tense, an enclosed present tense (for when you're in the time vessel and travelling in time), pronous for you-of-the-past, you-of-the-present and you-of-the-future (actually just some way of distinguishing them, since past present and future are all relative anyway), etc... And while I'm at it, another Niven plug: in _Convergent Series_ there's the story "Grammar Lesson", which I've mentioned here before, about the race whose language had intrinsic, extrinsic, and relational possessives, remeniscent of Lojban's po'e/po/pe series (though not really). ~mark >From robin@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU Tue May 4 17:14:39 1993 Date: Wed, 5 May 1993 01:14:30 +1000 From: Robin F Gaskell Message-Id: <199305041514.AA03125@extra.ucc.su.OZ.AU> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Cina-lingua (Glosa) From: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au (Robin Gaskell) 3 May 93 To: conlang@diku.dk (Conlang Mail List) Subject: Cina-lingua Konfusi (Glosa) Artikla ge-prepara pro PGN ex Robin Gaskell PLUSO LINGUA KONFUSI - CINESE NE MO GE-GRAFO LINGUA!? Holo na ski: plu Cinese demo uti plura dialekti, kron mu dice; sed mu uti solo mo lingua, kron mu grafo qod mu pa dice. U-ci histori nu ne habe veri. E te explika u mode in qi mi pa detekti plu veri faktu, mi nece grafo de mi recento experi. Duranto un ultima Di 6+7 de Mo 4, mi pa ki ex Sydney a Melbourne te unio ko plu Baha'i-pe; qi doci de u Baha'i Fide a plu Cina-pe. Il pa es poli Cina-pe to u konfera, e duranto u sekunda di, intra u diskursi, na pa disci: ke plu Cina-pe ex Cina-landa ne lekto plu Baha'i prega. In mero, u-ci situ veni ex u retro-akti de voka plu line de u "Pusi Rubi Bibli"; sed pluso, proxi holo plu juvo Cina-landa- pe ne pote lekto plu prega; qi na pra gene ge-typo pro mu. Lento, tem u diskursi pa progresi, u mysteri no-volve-se. Na pa trovi ke plu translati de plu Baha'i grafo uti plu klasiko pikto-graf, e inklude plu verbi; qi pra gene ge-apo ex u Cina-landa verbi-bibli. Plu Cina-pe ex Singapore, Malaysia e Hong Kong pa translati plu Baha'i grafo in Cina-lingua, e natura, pa uti plu pikto-graf; qi pa gene ge-uti intra Cina to u tem; mu pa ki ex id. Plu-pe; qi dice u-ci Sud-Est Asia Cina-lingua, uti mega ma verbi de plu Cina-landa-pe; e poli de plu-ci verbi ne es ge-rekogni de plu Cina-landa-pe. Pluso-co, plu klasiko pikto-graf; uti de plu Sud-Est Asia Cina-pe, habe ma orna de plu-la; uti intra Cina-landa; e, ka u Cina-lingua ne uti plu litera, plu Cina-landa-pe ne pote deduce plu semani de plu ne ge-rekogni karaktera. So, plu Cina-landa-pe; qi habe meio de 40 anua, ne pote lekto u Cina-lingua info; qi pa gene ge-typo intra Sud-Est Asia. Te lekto plu Baha'i grafo, mu elekti uti un English-lingua versio. Un histori gene klu ma mali. Te face u lingua ma facili, e te meio u numera de no-litera-pe, plu Cina-landa krati-pe pa simplifi u grafo de plu karaktera. Per gradu, mu vo simplifi singu karactera - tem tena un origi eso de mu. A nu, u-ci procesa pa habe bi re-vide: singu tem, pluso karaktera pa gene ge-simplifi; e plu civi de Cina-landa pa nece re-disci plu-ci ge-re-vide karaktera. Recento, il pa es u tri re-vide, sed u demo de Cina ne pa acept id. Id feno ke u bi re-vide fu eske u regula tem plu seqe oligo anua. Qe, es no resolve? Qe, u Cina-lingua fu gene ge-re-vide ex tem a tem: u lingua fu gene dura ge-muta? Ya, il es u solve. Na gyra u pleni ciklo te dice: ke plu Cina-pe, ali-lo, fu jugo u munda per uti u `munda lingua' ... alo u hemi gradu ad id, un ge-akorda lingua de globo alterno uti. Kron un Internatio Auxi Lingua gene ge-adopta, U tensio fu gene ge-apo ex u Cina-lingua: bi de mu. Plu Sud-Est Asia Cina-pe e plu Cina-landa-pe fu komunika alelo per u neo ge-adopta lingua; e ni u Landa-lingua ni u Sud-Est Asia lingua fu nece habe u meso-via. Simi, u demo de plu hetero mero de u munda e plu Cina-pe, ali-lo, fu komunika, sine turba de qod natio lingua; mu dice. Plu Cina-landa krati-pe fu volu dura muta mu lingua, te ma simplifi id; sed mu fu pote akti id ma lento, ka u presa de translati e eduka fu gene ge-apo. Iso tem plu Cina infanta gene doci Pinyin e plu ge-asocia karaktera, mu fu pluso gene doci de un Internatio Auxi Lingua. Pro mo ra, mu fu disci dice id uti Pinyin, grafo id uti u ge-simplifi karaktera, e dice e grafo id internatio forma. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Translation into English to follow. Hints on reading the Glosa: (In brief, pronounce `c' as CH, and vowels as in Italian.) Consonants - `s', `g' pronounced hard; `q' as KW; `c' as CH. Vowels - a = AH, e = AY, i = EE, o = OR, u = OO e.g. `disci' = "learn" pronounced _disCHi_ (lazy alternative _diSHi_) `nece' = "need/necesary" pronounced _nAY CH AY_ `asocia' = "(to) associate" pronounced _AHsOR CH EE AH_ Punctuation - , _ marks off phrases and the ends of clauses ; - indicates the start of clauses, e.g. ` ...; qi ... ' >From robin@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU Tue May 4 17:17:19 1993 Date: Wed, 5 May 1993 01:17:15 +1000 From: Robin F Gaskell Message-Id: <199305041517.AA03171@extra.ucc.su.OZ.AU> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Cina-lingua (Eng. transl.) From: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au 3 May 93 To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Cina-lingua Konfusi (Eng. transl.) Article prepared for PGN by Robin Gaskell N.B. The original of this article was written in Glosa; this is a translation, into English, of that article. MORE LANGUAGE CONFUSION CHINESE NOT ONE WRITTEN LANGUAGE!? All of us know: the Chinese people use several dialects, when they speak; but they use only one language, when they write what they have said. This story now is not true. And to explain the method in which I discovered the true facts, I need to write about my recent experience. During the last week-end of April, I went from Sydney to Melbourne to meet with Baha'is, who teach about the Baha'i Faith to Chinese people. There were many Chinese at the conference, and, during the second day, in the discussion, we learnt, that Chinese from Mainland China do not read the Baha'i prayers. In part, this situation comes from a reaction to the reciting of lines from the "Little Red Book"; but also, nearly all of the young Mainland Chinese cannot read the prayers, that we had had printed for them. Slowly, as the discussion progressed, the mystery unravelled itself. We found that the translations of Baha'i writings use classical picto-graphs, and include words that had been removed from the Mainland dictionary. Chinese from Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong translated the Baha'i writings into Chinese, and naturally, used the picto-graphs which were used in China at the time they left it. People who speak this South-East Asian Chinese use many more words than Mainland Chinese; and many of these words are not recognised by the Mainland Chinese. As well as this, the classical picto-graphs used by the South-East Asian Chinese, are more ornate than those used in China; and, because the Chinese language does not use letters, Mainland Chinese can not deduce the meanings of the unrecognised characters. Thus, Mainland Chinese, who are less than 40, can not read Chinese language information that has been printed in South-East Asia. In order to read the Baha'i writings, they choose to use the English language version. The story gets even worse. In order to make the language easier, and to reduce the number of illiterates, the Mainland leaders have simplified the writing of the characters. By stages, they wish to simplify every character - while retaining the original essence of each. So far, this process has had two revisions: each time, further characters have been simplified; and the citicens of the Mainland have needed to re-learn these revised characters. Recently, there was a third revision, but the people of China did not accept it. It seems that the second revision will become the standard for the next few years. Is there no resolution? Will Chinese get revised from time to time; will the language be continually changed? Yes, there is a solution. We turn full circle to say that Chinese people, anywhere, will join the world by using the `world language' ... or the half step towards it, the agreed language for global alternative use. When the International Auxiliary Language is adopted, the tension will be lifted from the Chinese language: both of them. The South-East Asian Chinese and the Mainland Chinese will communicate together by means of the newly adopted language; and neither the Mainland language nor the South-East Asian language will need to be compromised. Similarly, people from the other parts of the world and Chinese people, anywhere, will communicate, without worrying what national language they speak. The Chinese leaders will want to continue changing their language, to simplify it more; but they can do it more slowly, because the pressure of translation and education will be removed. At the same time Chinese children get taught Pinyin and the associated characters, they will also get taught the International Auxiliary Language. For one object, they will >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Wed May 5 00:07:11 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk) Message-Id: <9305042205.AA09897@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Re: timetraveling language To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Tue, 4 May 93 18:05:52 EDT In-Reply-To: <9305041316.AA19785@startide.ctr.columbia.edu>; from "shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu" at May 4, 93 3:24 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu says: [quotations deleted] : For another, slightly more serious perspective, check out Larry Niven's : short story "Theory and Practice of Time Travel"; I think it's in _All the : Myriad Ways_. He also mentions the problems, mentioning you need a past : future tense, a future past tense, an altered future tense, an excised : future tense (future that can no longer happen), a home-base present tense, : a present-of-the-moment tense, an enclosed present tense (for when you're : in the time vessel and travelling in time), pronous for you-of-the-past, : you-of-the-present and you-of-the-future (actually just some way of : distinguishing them, since past present and future are all relative : anyway), etc... As I read your post, two more sources for time-travel-related language came to mind: Robert Heinlein's _Time Enough for Love_, in which 'will/did' is used occasionally when the main character visits his childhood as a grown man, and Isaac Asimov's _The End of Eternity_. A bit of background is necessary for this one: Eternity is an organization which has divided Time into Centuries (Eternals don't think in years) and whose purpose is to alter Time as necessary to generate the most favorable Realities (all these capitals are Asimov's, not mine). The Century one is born in is one's 'homewhen,' higher-numbered Centuries are 'upwhen,' lower-numbered ones are 'downwhen,' if someone is not in a particular Century, s/he is 'outwhen,' and so on. The concept of 'physiotime' is also invoked: within Eternity, one still ages, but because of the time-travel, one can be in just about any Century at any time; Eternity runs on an arbitrary 24-hour 'physioday,' etc. It's a fine book, and I highly recommend it for the story as well as the language. : And while I'm at it, another Niven plug: in _Convergent Series_ there's the : story "Grammar Lesson", which I've mentioned here before, about the race : whose language had intrinsic, extrinsic, and relational possessives, : remeniscent of Lojban's po'e/po/pe series (though not really). I'm afraid I don't understand the difference between these types of possessives. Could you explain? : ~mark -- =============================================================================== _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | Marnen E. | |/ \ \ / \ \ / \ \ | |/ \_\ | |/ \ \ / \_\ | |/ \ \ | Laibow-Koser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@brick. |_| |_| |_| \_\|_| |_| |_| |_| \_\_/ |_| |_| | purchase.edu | SUNY Purchase =============================================================================== >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Wed May 5 00:15:16 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk) Message-Id: <9305042214.AA13646@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Re: Cina-lingua (Eng. transl.) To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Tue, 4 May 93 18:14:00 EDT In-Reply-To: <199305041517.AA03171@extra.ucc.su.OZ.AU>; from "Robin F Gaskell" at May 4, 93 5:28 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Robin Gaskell's article on Chinese was fascinating; I don't know much Chinese, but am often outraged (and sometimes grateful) at the (over)simplified characters used in Mainland China (btw, I believe this was one of Mao's ideas). It is also relevant here that the Japanese, who write in a mixture of phonetics and Chinese characters, use yet _another_ form of the Chinese characters. To make matters worse, calligraphers use cursive forms which are all but illegible... you get the idea. ;> BTW, can anybody give me some info on Glosa? Later, -- =============================================================================== _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | Marnen E. | |/ \ \ / \ \ / \ \ | |/ \_\ | |/ \ \ / \_\ | |/ \ \ | Laibow-Koser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@brick. |_| |_| |_| \_\|_| |_| |_| |_| \_\_/ |_| |_| | purchase.edu | SUNY Purchase =============================================================================== >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Wed May 5 00:32:44 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk) Message-Id: <9305042231.AA16808@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Logical extensions to English [followup] To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Tue, 4 May 93 18:31:27 EDT In-Reply-To: <9305031955.AA18042@brick.purchase.edu>; from "The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk" at May 3, 93 10:22 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] I have an _extremely_ preliminary version of the MEX grammar I'm trying to create at this point. I'm not even sure I would consider it a first draft; however, I'll be happy to send it out to anybody interested. Drop me a line at laibow@brick.purchase.edu and remember -- any and all ideas are welcome! This MEX grammar was created without any knowledge of Lojban's MEX grammar (or that of any other language, for that matter), and it has many problems, so the more help I can get, the better. ;> Looking forward to hearing from any and all of you, -- =============================================================================== _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | Marnen E. | |/ \ \ / \ \ / \ \ | |/ \_\ | |/ \ \ / \_\ | |/ \ \ | Laibow-Koser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@brick. |_| |_| |_| \_\|_| |_| |_| |_| \_\_/ |_| |_| | purchase.edu | SUNY Purchase =============================================================================== >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Wed May 5 00:34:14 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk) Message-Id: <9305042232.AA03831@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Re: Cina-lingua (Eng. transl.) To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Tue, 4 May 93 18:32:58 EDT In-Reply-To: <9305042214.AA13646@brick.purchase.edu>; from "The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk" at May 5, 93 12:27 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] One other thing...Robin's posting was cut off. Is there any way I can get the rest? Please advise. Thanks very much, -- =============================================================================== 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 Wed May 5 01:32:00 1993 From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9305042331.AA09261@medici.trl.OZ.AU> Subject: Chinese (was Cina-lingua) To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Wed, 5 May 1993 09:31:50 +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: 1435 The simplified characters used in Mainland China are in fact mostly print-style forms of the cursive writing (cao3shu1) which looks all but undecipherable. As a result, anyone literate, that is, who has been taught the "proper" characters and can at least read the cursive script, can also read a text printed in simplified characters with little trouble (except that they look absolutely awful). The reverse is not true: those who have been taught only simplified characters are very much lost when confronted with a text in full characters. I even doubt that it is easier to learn Chinese using simplified characters. Simplified characters are made of fewer strokes, but the calligraphic principles are mangled as the balance of each character is lost. It's difficult to explain, you have to have actually practised writing to get the feel. Further, you still have to memorize about just as many components. The only economy is that each simplified component requires fewer strokes to write (the simplified character for "door, gate", for instance, requires 3 strokes instead of 7). I studied Chinese in Paris in 1962-65, when the simplified character movement was in full swing. It was painful, for they would keep introducing new simplifications, meaning that we had to learn and unlearn all the time. Then, in third year, it was back to the proper characters again since the syllabus started us then on the classical language. >From EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Wed May 5 03:38:46 1993 To: conlang@diku.dk, ez-as-pi@cup.portal.com From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Subject: Re: Voksigid and Vorlin Lines: 17 Date: Tue, 4 May 93 18:38:41 PDT Message-Id: <9305041838.1.6194@cup.portal.com> X-Origin: The Portal System (TM) laibow@brick.purchase.edu writes: >Can anybody send me (laibow@brick.purchase.edu) or point me toward any info on >Voksigid or Vorlin? I know very little about these languages, so anything you >have will be appreciated. Voksigid was developed by a group I headed. It was designed as a predicate language using preposition/tags rather than pure word order as in Loglan/ Lojban. I sent some descriptive material to the PLS, so it should be there. Vorlin was devised by Rick Harrison, whose address I put on here recently. Bruce >From EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Wed May 5 04:05:21 1993 To: conlang@diku.dk, ez-as-pi@cup.pirtal.com From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Subject: Re: Glosa Lines: 29 Date: Tue, 4 May 93 19:05:15 PDT Message-Id: <9305041905.2.7105@cup.portal.com> X-Origin: The Portal System (TM) laibow@brick.purchase.edu writes: >BTW, can anybody give me some info on Glosa? Glosa started out as Interglossa, a creation of Lancelot Hogben's in the 1940's. Interglossa combined vocabulary from Latin and Greek with syntax from Chinese -- the idea being that the Latin/Greek vocabulary is international while Chinese syntax is particularly simple. It never got off the ground, and subsequently Ron Clark got Hogben's permission to work on it; he and Wendy Ashby made some modifications, one of which eliminated double letters (hence Glosa with one s where Inter- glossa had 2!) I am not sure how much difference there is because I have seen very little Interglossa; Wendy Ashby told me in a letter that the differences are small, but Nick Nicholas has said that they were significant and he thinks for the worse. Bruce >From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Wed May 5 18:00:23 1993 From: (Mark E. Shoulson) Date: Wed, 5 May 93 12:00:16 -0400 Message-Id: <9305051600.AA28417@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk's message of Wed, 5 May 93 00:20:17 +0200 <9305042205.AA09897@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: timetraveling language I recall a culture mentioned in passing by an anthropology teacher of mine (wonderful things, these references. Completely unfalsifiable, I can't/don't give you any data whatsoever about them). She said that where we (modern Western culture) views future-time as being "ahead" of us and the past being "behind" ("well, that's behind us..." "He has his whole life ahead of him") and our own experiences as somehow travelling forward in time, they view things the other way around. The image they have is of people standing in a river of time, which flows past them. They face downstream, so the past is what's already gone by, and is thus ahead of them, while the future hasn't reached them yet, and so is behind them. This image has its points; after all, you can see what's ahead of you, the past, with clarity, but you don't know the future, since it's behind you (though perhaps you can feel premonitory currents as events approach). >Date: Wed, 5 May 93 00:20:17 +0200 >Comment: Issues related to constructed languages >Originator: conlang@diku.dk >Errors-To: thorinn@diku.dk >Version: 5.5 -- Copyright (c) 1991/92, Anastasios Kotsikonas >From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk) >shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu says: >: And while I'm at it, another Niven plug: in _Convergent Series_ there's the >: story "Grammar Lesson", which I've mentioned here before, about the race >: whose language had intrinsic, extrinsic, and relational possessives, >: remeniscent of Lojban's po'e/po/pe series (though not really). >I'm afraid I don't understand the difference between these types of >possessives. Could you explain? Well, I've mentioned the story before, and I probably will again, so here goes: The chirpsithra's language has three flavors of possessive: intrinsic (for things that are part of the possessor, e.g. my arm, my nose), extrinsic/property (for things that are merely owned by the possessor, e.g. my credit cards, my house, my husband [chirpsithra males are non-sentient and considered chattel]), and relational (for things related to the possessor, e.g. my mother, my sister). I'm not sure what they'd use for things associated with you but not owned by you; I'd guess extrinsic. Anyway, in the story, a chirpsithra tells the narrator an old chirpsithra story about the importance of distinguishing those possessives. It's actually history, not just a fable. During the expansion of the chirpsithra, they got into a territorial conflict with another expanding race. By observing the behavior of their captives, the chirpsithra managed to figure out that the race had evolved on a one-faced planet (one whose rate of rotation matched that of its revolution, and thus always showed the same side to its primary). So they pulled back from those planets, thus either apoiding conflict or somehow catching the others unprepared or something, I forget. Anyway, the point was that it was no hardship for the chirps to give up those planets, while a human might die trying to protect HIS home (here the speaker used the intrinsic to make her point). ~mark >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Wed May 5 18:30:29 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk) Message-Id: <9305051629.AA08273@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Re: Chinese (was Cina-lingua) To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Wed, 5 May 93 12:29:10 EDT In-Reply-To: <9305042331.AA09261@medici.trl.OZ.AU>; from "Jacques Guy" at May 5, 93 2:22 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] *Note: My remarks about simplifications refer only to the Mainland Chinese forms; the slightly simplified forms used in Japan are a vastly better compromise between idealism and practicality. Jacques Guy says: [...] : As a result, : anyone literate, that is, who has been taught the "proper" : characters and can at least read the cursive script, can : also read a text printed in simplified characters with : little trouble (except that they look absolutely awful). I don't know that I'd agree with that. My knowledge of Chinese characters comes mainly from Japanese, and (especially in the case of the more drastic simplifications) I'm often amazed to see the familiar character behind an unfamiliar simplification. Also, I'm not sure you're entirely right about the cursive correspondence, since many of the cursive forms would be hard to put into stiff form. : I even doubt that it is easier to learn Chinese using : simplified characters. Simplified characters are made : of fewer strokes, but the calligraphic principles are : mangled as the balance of each character is lost. Not only that, you lose (in many cases) the benefit of seeing the actual components of a character (or what it depicts, for those characters which actually depict something), which also makes memorization more difficult. : It's : difficult to explain, you have to have actually practised : writing to get the feel. I think I may be able to explain this. I once devised a font (and have seen other similar fonts) in which each letter was reduced to its essential strokes: thus C retained only its lower half, D its upper half, and so on. The information is all there, but it violates Roman calligraphic principles and looks unsettling as a result. However, the feeling seems to be stronger about simplified Chinese characters. : Further, you still have to : memorize about just as many components. The only economy : is that each simplified component requires fewer strokes : to write (the simplified character for "door, gate", for : instance, requires 3 strokes instead of 7). In some cases, you have to memorize _more_ components: for example, the radical for 'metal' has one form when used as a character in its own right, and another when used as a component. That 'gate' character, BTW, even though the Japanese use it as a sort of 'shorthand' version on occasion, strikes me as an abomination (For those who don't know what I'm talking about, I'll try to represent the two versions in ASCII). Original Simplified (see the gate?) (what the heck is this?) __ __ _______ |__| |__| |\ | |__| |__| | \ | | | | | | | | | | _| | _| Later, -- =============================================================================== _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | Marnen E. | |/ \ \ / \ \ / \ \ | |/ \_\ | |/ \ \ / \_\ | |/ \ \ | Laibow-Koser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@brick. |_| |_| |_| \_\|_| |_| |_| |_| \_\_/ |_| |_| | purchase.edu | SUNY Purchase =============================================================================== >From ucleaar%ucl.ac.uk@mail-b.bcc.ac.uk Wed May 5 21:03:52 1993 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Message-Id: <9305051753.AA48722@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: diachronic conlang In-Reply-To: (Your message of Sun, 02 May 93 18:19:14 O.) <199305021614.AA22829@well.sf.ca.us> Date: Wed, 05 May 93 18:53:31 +0100 Sender: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk > I used to have a book called "Arcaicam Esperantom" in which someone > invented a five-case paradigm, a pseudo-Romance orthography and so on. Could anyone give a bibiliographical citation for this? Perhaps I had misjudged Esperanto as lacking Glossopoeic interest. ---- And. >From ucleaar%ucl.ac.uk@mail-b.bcc.ac.uk Wed May 5 21:03:57 1993 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Message-Id: <9305051800.AA98184@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk X-Ungarbled_Sender: And Rosta Date: Wed, 05 May 93 19:00:08 +0100 Sender: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk The latest issue of _Language_ contains a review of Marina Yaguello's _Lunatic lovers of language_. The review is negative (I think all the criticisms are deserved), and it points out that the (in my view brilliantly apt) phrase _fou de langage_, from Yaguello's original French is most inadequately rendered into English. _Language nut_, or just untranslated _fou de langage_ would be better. ---- And. >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Thu May 6 16:38:06 1993 Date: Thu, 6 May 1993 15:32:16 +0100 Message-Id: <11674.199305061432@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk, LOJBAN@CUVMB.EARN Cc: tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us Subject: Lojban gathering (sorry Klingon list -Cc'd by mistake & can't cancel!) I am planning to hold a Lojban weekend (lojyfest) in Bradford (Yorkshire, England) sometime over the Summer - probably September. Please mail me if you would like more information. Colin ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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 lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Thu May 6 17:28:19 1993 Message-Id: From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: timetraveling language To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Thu, 6 May 1993 10:21:56 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <9305051600.AA28417@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> from "shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu" at May 5, 93 06:23:32 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 918 Mark Shoulson writes: > I recall a culture mentioned in passing by an anthropology teacher of mine > (wonderful things, these references. Completely unfalsifiable, I > can't/don't give you any data whatsoever about them). She said that where > we (modern Western culture) views future-time as being "ahead" of us and > the past being "behind" ("well, that's behind us..." "He has his whole life > ahead of him") and our own experiences as somehow travelling forward in > time, they view things the other way around. The image they have is of > people standing in a river of time, which flows past them. They face > downstream, so the past is what's already gone by, and is thus ahead of > them, while the future hasn't reached them yet, and so is behind them. Quechua time metaphors are based on this principle. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From zack@netcom.com Thu May 6 19:26:03 1993 Date: Thu, 6 May 93 10:26:18 -0700 From: zack@netcom.com (Zack T. Smith) Message-Id: <9305061726.AA24352@netcom2.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: timetraveling language > we (modern Western culture) view future-time as being "ahead" of us and > the past being "behind" ("well, that's behind us..." "He has his whole life > ahead of him") and our own experiences as somehow travelling forward in > time. Seem to me that if some group of people has some style of living that is either 'conservative' (anti-change) or somehow highly dependent on past knowledge, it would be appropriate to say that the past is the 'future', since knowledge about the past would be a vast resource which can't ever be fully utilized, and the connection between the people and their past knowledge would probably be held to be critical. In other words, a culture which has some obsession with the past, or which, in the case of Indians, perhaps has no effective form of writing and there- fore must force its supporters to focus incessantly on past information, would only likely have this sort of linguistic setup. Be the fixation due to neurosis or necessity, the language will usually bend to meet the needs of its creators. Zack ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 doug@netcom.com Fri May 7 06:45:45 1993 Message-Id: <9305070446.AA23070@netcom.netcom.com> From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt) Date: Thu, 6 May 1993 21:46:03 PDT In-Reply-To: zack@netcom.com (Zack T. Smith) "Re: timetraveling language" (May 6, 8:19pm) X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: timetraveling language Zack said: >Seem to me that if some group of people has some style of living that is >either 'conservative' (anti-change) or somehow highly dependent on past >knowledge, [...] >In other words, a culture which has some obsession with the past [...] >must force its supporters to focus incessantly on past information, [...] > Be the fixation due to >neurosis or necessity, the language will usually bend to meet the needs of >its creators. I am very disappointed at the assumption of superiority and inferiority in this. Obsession? Incessantly? Fixation? Neurosis? You are assuming that one modality is better than the other, but you don't explicitly support that hypothesis. It seems to me that, for one thing, dependence on information from the past is vital to all cultures, to all thinking beings, and indeed even to physical laws as generally understood, since they are generally thought to be causal, and causality is defined as dependence only on past data. (I could support the latter claim by quoting from physics, mathematics, and signal processing texts if you really doubt it...hopefully it's obvious though.) For another thing, even assuming that there *were* some choice in that, one could argue your assumption of the strong Sapir Whorf hypothesis... but this is conlang, and most of us assume some form of it. But even so, your assumption of the "needs of its creators" still comes back to your prior assumption that those needs are inferior, which is highly questionable. The original point was whether a language/culture/people view the past as behind or in front of them. I see no compelling argument so far that indicates that either view is more than a curiosity. Why jump to the conclusion that one way is better than the other? It may well be completely irrelevent to any other trait. Or do you think you could demonstrate that all cultures that are static have this view of time? I doubt it! And even if they did, is static bad? Only if one insists that stasis is stagnation... a popular view in western culture's progress oriented mentality, but highly debatable once the assumptions are discussed. For one thing, absolute stasis never exists...it is still temporary, but with a longer time constant of change than certain other cultures. But I digress. I have practiced trying to imagine that my personal consciousness faces out the back of my head. It turns out to be difficult to do so, but I have done this from time to time over the years as a curiosity and to increase my mental flexibility, not because I assume that either visualization is better or worse than the other. Similarly some cultures think the "self" is in the head, some in the heart, some in the liver...some cynics would even name more scatalogical parts of the body. :-) But are any of these better or worse than others? I'm not merely a nut for open mindedness, although I may err on that side. If you can come up with a persuasive reason why one of these views is better than the others, I'll retract the above. So far I just don't see it. Doug >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Fri May 7 11:24:13 1993 Date: Fri, 7 May 1993 10:18:55 +0100 Message-Id: <10891.199305070918@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> Received: from Colin Fine's Macintosh (colin_fine.comp.brad.ac.uk) by atlantis.brad.ac.uk; Fri, 7 May 1993 10:18:55 +0100 From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Direction of time (Was:timetraveling language) I concur with Doug's distaste for Zack's suggestion (or at least, Zack's way of expressing it). Doug put it better than I would have. I also want to point out the dangerous assumption that Zack is making here: that there will be a correlation between the metaphorical direction of time in the language and the orientation (past or future) of its speakers. Sapir-Whorf with a vengeance! The assumption MAY be valid, but without some support I would regard it as dubious, and rather on a par with pre-modern ideas about the identification of supposed characteristics of peoples and their languages (the amorousness of French/the French, the clipped humourlessness of German/the German etc.) Note also that according to Whorf, Hopi is incapable of abstracting, metaphorising or nominalising time. If he was right (and I have seen some of his analyses of Hopi challenged) then the question "do you see the future or the past as ahead of you" would be no more meaningful (?or even expressible) in Hopi than "do you see 'how' as before or behind you?" ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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 zack@netcom.com Fri May 7 17:20:28 1993 Date: Fri, 7 May 93 08:20:46 -0700 From: zack@netcom.com (Zack T. Smith) Message-Id: <9305071520.AA01325@netcom2.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: My defense |Zack said: |>Seem to me that if some group of people has some style of living that is |>either 'conservative' (anti-change) or somehow highly dependent on past |>knowledge, [...] |>In other words, a culture which has some obsession with the past [...] |>must force its supporters to focus incessantly on past information, [...] |> Be the fixation due to |>neurosis or necessity, the language will usually bend to meet the needs of |>its creators. |I am very disappointed at the assumption of superiority and inferiority |in this. Obsession? Incessantly? Fixation? Neurosis? You are assuming |that one modality is better than the other, but you don't explicitly |support that hypothesis. I was presenting an extreme scenario. What I intended to describe was a potential negative connection between the form of a language and the psychology of its speakers. I wasn't claiming that one modality was better than another per se, though I was assuming that the described, inverted view of time was unnecessary, since it seems to me that any perceptual fixation either on future or past will blind the thinker of perceivable information which has the potential of being useful. |It seems to me that, for one thing, dependence on information from the |past is vital to all cultures, to all thinking beings, and indeed even |to physical laws as generally understood, since they are generally thought |to be causal, and causality is defined as dependence only on past data. |(I could support the latter claim by quoting from physics, mathematics, |and signal processing texts if you really doubt it...hopefully it's |obvious though.) Suppose that your neighbor Jim scratched your car yesterday. Suppose that something in your culture or language in some way made your fixation on that event and your annoyance at Jim more 'acceptable' or made it seem somehow worthwhile. Would language be serving its speakers as a tool then, as language only ever should? Only if those speakers were war-mongers... Now look toward Yugoslavia, or Iraq, or Ireland. Indeed, think back to America's Red Scare, whose effects still linger in our society. Do you see people who are thinking rationally about the past, or people who have embraced it, as if it were 'the future'? And suppose that those people were given a language which promoted a fixation with the past. Prominent in my thoughts at the time of writing of the original post was Orwell's language, Doublespeak, which was designed to illustrate how thought can be limited and emotion numbed by language. What I'm getting at is that language can also promote certain psychological non-optimalities, phenomena which the human mind supports, but which civilized people must reject most of the time in order to remain civilized. Now think of the rightist totalitarian system. In such a system, not only would a state-mandated conlang be limiting, but it would perform the most basic function any fascist system-- to bring about thoughts and biases which are irrational, unreasonable, fearful, hateful -- neurotic, violent -- and to help in providing justification for resultant motivations. If a fixation on supposed past oppressions is one means to implementing that psychology or mentality, or if a fixation on future conflict is, then the means to that fixation should be removed from the language. |For another thing, even assuming that there *were* some choice in that, |one could argue your assumption of the strong Sapir Whorf hypothesis... |but this is conlang, and most of us assume some form of it. But even |so, your assumption of the "needs of its creators" still comes back |to your prior assumption that those needs are inferior, which is highly |questionable. I intended to warn more than judge, though I assumed that we all consider irrational fixation to be more of a problem than a virtue. |Or do you think you could demonstrate that all cultures that are static |have this view of time? I doubt it! Didn't say that. |And even if they did, is static bad? Conservatism is maladaptive in the long run. Is maladaptation "bad" to you? Surely it's self-destructive and eventually anti-survival. (Though it's a pro-survival strategy in some ways as well.) Question is, is present pleasure worth the risk of future destruction? Some would claim yes, but of course, these are people who in past lives ate their children. (Nowadays they simply cause the extinctions of species after species, carelessly clear-cut precious forests, etc.) |I'm not merely a nut for open mindedness, although I may err on that side. |If you can come up with a persuasive reason why one of these views is better |than the others, I'll retract the above. So far I just don't see it. | Doug To clarify the situation, you've interpreted my post as suggesting that (from what I can tell) 1. Conservatism is "bad" 2. language construct => negative psychological phenomena I personally think that conservatism is destructive and that it is a catalyst for numerous, negative psychological phenomena, such as perpetuated emotional immaturity, perpetuated insecurity and xenophobia, etc. Being that this is not a psychology list, we'll have to leave that as being merely my 'opinion', unless you really want to argue about it. I wasn't asserting #2. What I intend to express in full is, 1. Language constructs can support maladaptive psychological phenomena; no saying they actually do. 2. Language designers must be socially responsible, and seek to not create a new Doublespeak or a language which promotes fear or hate 3. If some negative psychological phenomenon is statistically likely, and some language feature will only allow it to become accentuated or dominating, then one should design it out of a language. 4. Negative psychological phenomena will, over the long term, influence the evolution of a language (as will positive phenomena and other factors) 5. Neurosis is negative, psychosis is negative, self-destruction is negative; immaturity and insecurity are negative; negative meaning "unwanted, since they are factors which uncivilize people" Hope this clarifies. >From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Fri May 7 18:06:04 1993 Message-Id: From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: timetraveling language To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Fri, 7 May 1993 11:53:38 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <9305070446.AA23070@netcom.netcom.com> from "Doug Merritt" at May 7, 93 07:24:16 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 799 Doug Merritt writes: > The original point was whether a language/culture/people view the past > as behind or in front of them. I see no compelling argument so far that > indicates that either view is more than a curiosity. Why jump to the > conclusion that one way is better than the other? It may well be completely > irrelevent to any other trait. Quite so. One example: in French, Napoleon I (the famous one) is called >Napoleon Premier< 'N. the first', whereas Napoleon II is called >Napoleon Deux< 'N. Two', using a cardinal rather than an ordinal. What conclusions can we draw about France, the French, French thinking, or even the French language from these facts? Clearly, none at all. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From zack@netcom.com Fri May 7 19:00:37 1993 Date: Fri, 7 May 93 10:00:55 -0700 From: zack@netcom.com (Zack T. Smith) Message-Id: <9305071700.AA11219@netcom2.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: timetraveling language >What conclusions can we draw about France, the French, French thinking, or >even the French language from these facts? Clearly, none at all. Here we go again. First, I never said that any logical proof can be formed merely looking at language. Nor was I suggesting that one can even guess things. My last post stressed this fact. But perhaps you haven't read my last post. Hopefully you composed the above blerb before my post was mailed to you. Second, now that you've brought up the point yet again: To say that we can learn nothing about the French from their language is ridiculous. Ever heard of anthropology? Ever heard of Jane Goodall? Living creatures CAN be studied and useful information CAN be gleaned by observing their outward behaviors! Sure, many of them (you, perhaps?) might not WANT to be examined, mais ca, c'est tant pis! Again: I concede that logical proofs hard to come by, But: Rough inferences -can- be made. It's called scientific analysis; check it out sometime. :-( ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Fri May 7 23:53:54 1993 Message-Id: From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: timetraveling language To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Fri, 7 May 1993 16:20:57 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <9305071700.AA11219@netcom2.netcom.com> from "Zack T. Smith" at May 7, 93 07:24:09 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1737 Zack T. Smith writes: > >What conclusions can we draw about France, the French, French thinking, or > >even the French language from these facts? Clearly, none at all. > > First, I never said that any logical proof can be formed > merely looking at language. Nor was I suggesting that one can even guess > things. My last post stressed this fact. > > But perhaps you haven't read my last post. Hopefully you composed the above > blerb before my post was mailed to you. Correct; such effects are an inescapable property of non-real-time conversation. > Second, now that you've brought up the point yet again: > > To say that we can learn nothing about the French from their language > is ridiculous. So it is, and had I said that, I would be fair game for ridicule. But of course I did not. I draw your attention to my phrase "these facts", quoted above, referring to the facts about the naming of Napoleons (not quoted above). > [flamebait deleted] > Again: > I concede that logical proofs hard to come by, > But: > Rough inferences -can- be made. Yes; the trick is to be sure that the basis for your inference is a useful one. On examining the word >dua< 'two' in Malay, visions of Indo-Europeanity dance in one's head, particularly considering how stable number words usually are. It takes a lot more investigation to pin down the true affiliation with the Austronesian language group. There is a slippery slope between the Napoleon example (obviously bogus, and introduced by me as such), Whorf's original 'Hopi speakers don't grok time as we do' views, and unquestionable examples (if such exist) of S-W effects. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From doug@netcom.com Sat May 8 05:29:32 1993 Message-Id: <9305080329.AA09822@netcom.netcom.com> From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt) Date: Fri, 7 May 1993 20:29:50 PDT In-Reply-To: zack@netcom.com (Zack T. Smith) "My defense" (May 7, 6:19pm) X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: My defense Zack raises some interesting points in his defense against my criticism. >What I intended to describe was a potential negative connection between >the form of a language and the psychology of its speakers. Your phrasings in your defense do indeed clarify quite a bit. For instance, in this general statement, saying "potential" makes it fairly safe. >I wasn't claiming >that one modality was better than another per se, though I was assuming >that the described, inverted view of time was unnecessary, since it seems >to me that any perceptual fixation either on future or past will blind >the thinker of perceivable information which has the potential of being >useful. One thing you still haven't addressed is the (hopefully obvious) issue that English speakers are accustomed to metaphors in which the future is forward/ahead/in front/etc. In the above you seem to be saying that we English speakers are as blind as a culture which uses the opposite metaphor. I would consider that to be a more fair statement, although we still need to look at whether either "fixation" is in fact blinding... yet at least that would put them in parity. >Suppose that your neighbor Jim scratched your car yesterday. Suppose >that something in your culture or language in some way made your >fixation on that event and your annoyance at Jim more 'acceptable' >or made it seem somehow worthwhile. This brings out points in your thinking that were not previously clear. I very strongly agree that there is vast room for criticism of the many cultures that appear to hold grudges forever. The current news stories about the conflicts in Bosnia/Herzegovinia (sp?) are a clear example of that. Who killed who in WWII? Oh, but what about in the 17th century when XYZ slaughtered ABC? Etc. Similarily with the U.S. Confederate enthusiasts in the south, who get fired up about the civil war, when most of us simply think the whole thing was sad. The emotions engendered by century-old conflicts are understandable in one sense, but deplorable in another, and I am happy to do my best to both understand on the one hand, and to praise or deplore on the other. I think it is important to understand before passing judgement, though, and in this I think I am in the minority opinion. But this is the crux of my point. Have you in fact taken time out to understand the viewpoint you criticize? Perhaps you have, but you are not entirely clear on this point, even with your followup. >Now look toward Yugoslavia, or Iraq, or Ireland. Indeed, think back to >America's Red Scare, whose effects still linger in our society. >Do you see people who >are thinking rationally about the past, or people who have embraced it, >as if it were 'the future'? This is a worthwhile point, and so is the question you raise about the extent to which language, metaphor and psychology inter-relate to such things...But: >And suppose that those people were given a language which promoted a >fixation with the past. Ah, but do we have an example of this? I still claim that you are too quick to suppose that we do have an example of fixation in *this* sense. Fixation can be very bad, as we have both pointed out by now...but we must be careful about what we call "fixation", if *that* is what the word means in this discussion. >Prominent in my thoughts at the time of writing of the original post was >Orwell's language, Doublespeak, which was designed to illustrate how >thought can be limited and emotion numbed by language. I would like to hear you elaborate on this point. Orwell made an extremely sharp point with Doublespeak, and I appreciate that you are motivated by this. Yet I don't think that you have developed a strong thesis around this just yet. Perhaps you could take another shot at it? You did of course say some other things that lay behind your thoughts: >Now think of the rightist totalitarian system. In such a system, not >only would a state-mandated conlang be limiting, but it would perform >the most basic function any fascist system-- to bring about thoughts and >biases which are irrational, unreasonable, fearful, hateful -- neurotic, >violent -- and to help in providing justification for resultant >motivations. Well, the dream of Korzybski, along with Sapir-Whorf, would certainly be to bring about the *opposite* of such via language, but so far we have little in that venue to fuel our hopes... >If a fixation on supposed past oppressions is one means to implementing >that psychology or mentality, or if a fixation on future conflict is, then >the means to that fixation should be removed from the language. It is not clear that cultures that hold very long term grudges do so because of their language. I am beginning to suspect that you are a believer in what I might call the "strongest possible form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis"...if so I might note that the extreme position is untenable these days, so if you believe that, you must persuade, not assume. >Conservatism is maladaptive in the long run. Is maladaptation "bad" to you? >Surely it's self-destructive and eventually anti-survival. (Though it's >a pro-survival strategy in some ways as well.) I am not at all conservative myself...quite the opposite. However intellectually I see a place for conservatism. I quite deny that it is generally maladaptive. If an entire culture has trait X for an extended period of time, I would argue that that is sufficient reason to look for the ways in which it is a positive adaptation to circumstance. See for instance Richard Dawkin's discussions of ESS (Evolutionarily Stable Strategies) in "The Selfish Gene". I think that discussion very much carries over to cultural traits. >1. Language constructs can support maladaptive psychological phenomena; no > saying they actually do. Ok. Some form of Sapir-Whorf; the extent of it is left vague... >2. Language designers must be socially responsible, and seek to not create a > new Doublespeak or a language which promotes fear or hate Darn, there goes my current hobby. ;-) >3. If some negative psychological phenomenon is statistically likely, and > some language feature will only allow it to become accentuated or > dominating, then one should design it out of a language. Heh...you are assuming much here. If we knew enough to design such things in or out, we would know a great deal about the extent to which some form of the Sapir-Whorf hyphothesis holds. Your suggestion is "motherhood and apple pie", but we don't know enough to follow it. >4. Negative psychological phenomena will, over the long term, influence > the evolution of a language (as will positive phenomena and other > factors) Oh? This sounds interesting...have some citations? I'd be very interested in getting hold of serious research on the subject. In a casual sense this is believeable, however we need hard data to really get anywhere with it. Otherwise it's just random philosophy. >5. Neurosis is negative, psychosis is negative, self-destruction is negative; > immaturity and insecurity are negative; negative meaning "unwanted, > since they are factors which uncivilize people" Quite so. However, negative/neurosis/psychosis/self-destruction/immaturity/ insecurity are all very much in the eye of the beholder. In the absence of an analytic touch stone by which to distinguish the appearance of such from the actuality of such, I'm not sure how to proceed in discussing these things. After all, my original criticism arose because I thought you assumed far too much about what was negative, with zero data/arguments about those assumptions. Doug >From dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu Sun May 9 00:05:02 1993 From: "" Date: Sat, 8 May 93 17:07:54 CST Message-Id: <526.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu_POPMail/PC_3.2> X-Popmail-Charset: English To: conlang@diku.dk, writers@vm1.nodak.edu Subject: time TRAVELLING languages -- not timebinding I'm still interested in what I recall being my original point -- a language suitable for a society/culture in which time travel is common. One in which the past and the future aren't distant, but merely a short trip away. So someone who says "My grandfather always said...." might be answered by "I left a note for myself next month that I/then had talked with your grandfather at your great-grandfather's marriage to my not-yet-born daughter, and he said [thirty years from now]....." Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Mon May 10 11:49:45 1993 Date: Mon, 10 May 1993 10:44:28 +0100 Message-Id: <29935.199305100944@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> Received: from Colin Fine's Macintosh (colin_fine.comp.brad.ac.uk) by atlantis.brad.ac.uk; Mon, 10 May 1993 10:44:28 +0100 From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: time TRAVELLING languages -- not timebinding Thus Dan Goodman: -------------------- I'm still interested in what I recall being my original point -- a language suitable for a society/culture in which time travel is common. One in which the past and the future aren't distant, but merely a short trip away. So someone who says "My grandfather always said...." might be answered by "I left a note for myself next month that I/then had talked with your grandfather at your great-grandfather's marriage to my not-yet-born daughter, and he said [thirty years from now]....." --------------------- Lojban (and I think Loglan) could make a stab at these by noting the following: 1) tense (which includes space as well as time) is always optional 2) tense may be attached to sumti (arguments) as well as selbri (predicates) 3) two varieties of tense forms express what may be called aspect and potentiality. 4) it is possible to subscript almost anything (including points in time 'defined' on the fly. Thus mi ca ki xi pa pu te notci fo mi pe ca le lamba'i masti fe la'e di'e .i tu'e mi pu tavla le do pafpatfu goi ko'a ca le nu le do pafpafpatfu co'a speni le mi ba tixnu .i ko'a ba le ca xi pa co'a nanca pacimei cu bacru li'o tu'u I at-time set-time sub 1 past sender-of message to me associated-with at-time the adjacent-future month the-message-being the-referent-of the-following new- sentence start-grouping I past talk-to the you father's-father namely ko'a at- time the event the you father's-father's-father initially spouse-of the me future daughter new-sentence ko'a after the now sub 1 initially year (kind- of) thirty-some (main predicate) utters etc. end-grouping {mi cakixipa pu te notci [fo mipecale lamba'i masti] fela'edi'e} .i tu'e {mi pu tavla [ledo pafpatfu goi ko'a] [ca lenu ]} {.i ko'a [ba lecaxipa co'a nanca pacimei] cu bacru li'o} tu'u I [at-time set-time sub 1] past sender-of message [to me associated-with at- time the adjacent-future month] [the-message-being the-referent-of the- following] new-sentence start-grouping I past talk-to [the you father's-father namely ko'a] [at-time the event ] new-sentence ko'a [after the now-sub-1 initially year (kind-of) thirty-some] utters etc. end-grouping I don't say that this trips off the tongue - but it is possible, with greater precision than English. ( One interesting note: in English - and Esperanto - you have to make the choice when you express a predicate whether you are locating it in the past, the present or the future: this is an obligatory grammatical category. In Lojban you need not do so, which could make things easier. In the text above, 'at your great-grandfather's wedding' is a nominal phrase in English, and so escapes that: I therefore have not located the event in time in the Lojban. But the 'He said (thirty years from now)' I have not translated the 'past' in 'he said', as it seems to me to be more an artefect of English. I could if required, though. Colin ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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 lojbab@grebyn.com Wed May 12 22:03:23 1993 Date: Wed, 12 May 93 16:03:16 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9305122003.AA24255@grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Marnen's "MEX" Marnen writes: >I have an _extremely_ preliminary version of the MEX grammar I'm trying >to create at this point. I'm not even sure I would consider it a first >draft; however, I'll be happy to send it out to anybody interested. >Drop me a line at laibow@brick.purchase.edu and remember -- any and all I'm not sure why you are calling your proposal a "MEX" grammar, and it certainly misled me as to what you were talking about until I reread your postings today. (I thought on first reaction that Marnen was attempting to derive a code for unambiguous mathematical expression within English text, of the sort already developed in great depth in the 50's and 60's by Ivor Darreg. And, no, I cannot post much more detail on Ivor's work, due to lack of time; his system was very complex, and more or less complete, though he has said repeatedly that it is a code for reading off the existing mathematical language and not a language in itself.) In the Loglan/Lojban community, MEX is an acronym-jargon for "mathematical expressions", i.e. algebraic formulae, when they are embedded in language text; e.g. the English "I know that two plus two equals four." Because mathematics has its own formal language - expressed by the symbology, it is very easy to come up with mathematical expressions which cannot easily be read, much less embedded in this way in the spoken language (in written language, i.e. in mathematics journals and the like, the MEX is just printed without any attempt to ascribe a grammatical interaction between it and English). As an example of the MEX problem, how do you read off the previous expression if it is a definite integral instead of a sum? "I know that the integral of eff of ex squared dee ex from minus one to one is ..." You quickly have a nightmare. This is rendered even worse when you remember that sometimes mathematics assumes certain conventions, and at other times ignores them. For example, we are taught that in math, certain operations have precedence over others, and need not be parenthesized. But in calculator arithmetic statements (and some spreadsheets), there is no precedence of operations assumed, and "three plus four times five equals thirty-five" is true. MEX started as JCB's attempt to devise a solution to expressing simple math in Loglan as it is normally used in English - i.e. not the quoting of mathematics discussions, but the simple types of arithmetic that occur in natural language. Even here he stumbled, because he did not realize the extent to which mathematics is embedded in language. (A problem in Lojban expression that was not solved until recently was how to translate the start of the Gettysburg address: "Four score and seven years ago", remembering that there is a semantics reason why Lincoln didn't just say "Eighty-seven years ago". When the mathematicians and computer people got involved, however, they made the problem into a Holy Grail of trying to be able to express any mathematical text embedded in Loglan, and do so unambiguously. This of course turned into a political debate, with proponents of reverse Polish notation attempting to reform all of mathematical expression. For the Lojban redesign of Loglan, I took a conservative but strong goal - to be able to express as much of the language of mathemetics as possible so that it can be read off AS IT IS ACTUALLY WRITTEN, without reformulating or manipulating the mathematics in your head. The goal was to comprehensively cover mathematics, because, along the way, it was proposed that a language like Lojban might be a good language for algorithmic specification, for example in stating the requirements for a computer program, in a grammatically unambiguous way. I think we did reasonably well at this. But Lojban MEX has very little to do with parentheses (indeed the idea is to require as few parentheses as possible unless they appear in the mathematical text you are reading off - though unambiguity does sometimes require some such extra parenthesizing), and certainly not parentheses around non-mathematical text, as Marnen seems to suggest. ni'o (new topic) As a side note, Marnen said: >Since I have next to no knowledge of Lojban (and >since there are many things I don't like about it anyway) This is the type of line that really bugs me. He never says what it is he doesn't like, nor has he asked questions to me or on Lojban List about why things are as they are. There may be a good reason for things that he doesn't like that he doesn't yet understand, and an explanation might incidentally give more understanding of the Lojban language as a system. But on top of this vague indictment that defies response, Marnen admits that he has "next to no knowledge". This is not intended to be a personal criticism of Marnen - a lot of people do the same thing - look at a few pieces and make an aesthetic judgement about the whole without ever looking at the whole. A lot of people interested in conlangs (apparently including Marnen, who has asked for information about a half dozen languages on conlang in the last few weeks) seem to want to evaluate languages in this way. It is they who lose, since you really cannot appreciate a system at such a nebulous level. And others lose, because a negative statement about a conlang may be taken by another person as a criticism based on real knowledge. I oc course don't like losing potential Lojbanists as a result of such casual remarks without explanation. But more important, I'm bothered by such statements as Marnen's, since they imply that there is something not being understood, which is therefore turning into a negative reaction. A workable language is going to be a complex system, and there will be a few properties that are not going to be understood out of the full context of the system (Russian declensions don't seem nearly as complex once you see how they work in the language, and the expressive power that results, but English has its own complexities in different areas to achieve the same richness). A significantly smaller percentage of people criticize either a natural language or a conlang for specific features once they have spent some time learning it. Of course, it is intellectually dishonest to criticize a system by targetting individual components of the system as if they exist in isolation. Hence I find attacks on Esperanto's accusative case to be spurious, especially coming from people who haven't learned Esperanto. You cannot evaluate a system as a whole when you haven't learned the whole. And you cannot presume that a system would retain its integrity by changing a couple of features. (For this reason I tend to refrain from criticizing modern art - and art in general. I also don't often go to art museums either. Beyond the surface impression of "like it" or "don't like it", I find that I would have to seriously study the medium and techniques used by the artists to achieve their expression, and I don't have time nor interest to do so.) But presumably those who are reading conlang list have interest in conlangs, and presumably on some level rather deeper than the trivial surface level. Thus, unless one is shopping for features to put into one's own conlang design or simply to understand the breadth of variation that exists among natural languages as well as conlangs (worthwhile goals in themselves, but probably worth identifying when you ask a question since the explanation of the answer should be different when the question is being asked for this purpose), it would seem worthwhile to study a smaller number of conlangs (i.e. one or two at most) in greater depth and really learn something about them. no'i (back to the old topic) Hence my comment on Marnen's "MEX": you are proposing to add parentheses to English - this is also a fiddling-with-features, albeit in a system (English) that you presumably already understand. What is your goal in this proposal? How would such a change detract from the whole that is English as well as add to it (for it would surely do both - if there were no tradeoffs, it would probably have occurred naturally by now)? And of course there is the age-old question to be asked of all would-be reformers of English: to whom are you proposing such improvement? English is also a language particularly immune to prescription; there is no academy that decides what is "good" or "correct" English, and English speakers are by culture particularly resistant of the possibility of such an authority. (The Esperanto community is not, by comparison; they are perfectly happy to accept Zamenhof's prescription as unchangeable. The Lojban community, being motivated to have a completely unambiguous language, are likely to follow prescriptions which preserve that goal. The French are somewhere in the middle: they accept the need for an academy, but feel free to ignore it in casual use.) >From my own standpoint as an English speaker, I don't think that ambiguities of the sort that can be resolved by such simple parenthesization occur often enough to warrant the baggage of using spoken parentheses all the time, or even much of the time. (We do use hyphenation in written English for such grouping, though). And there are so many ambiguities in English that cannot be resolved by simple parenthesization (it takes more than parentheses to resolve "time flies like an arrow"). Furthermore, even if there were such parentheses for English, they would only work in "forethought mode", i.e., when you had thought out in advance what you wanted to say. English already has some such forms for logical connectives (both ... and ...; neither ... nor ...;if ... then ...). The real challenge in designing a logical connective system for Loglan/Lojban or another conlang, is devising unambiguous ways to do 'afterthought' connections. >The need for these is made clear from this example (taken from a paper >on Lojban negation): does 'Not everybody loves me' mean 'Not >(everybody) loves me,' i. e. 'There are those who do not love me,' or >does it mean 'Not (everybody loves me),' i. e. 'Nobody loves me'? That there is >NO< need for "these" in English is made clear by the fact that they don't already exist. If you are in a situation where context does not disambiguate the English, you have an alternate - and short - paraphrase which is much clearer (as you yourself showed in explaining the two meanings. Lojban negation was being designed from scratch, and hence we had to devise methods of expressing both possibilities (and incidentally, if you read the rest of the negation paper, you would see that our solution did not involve parentheses). lojbab >From lojbab@grebyn.com Wed May 12 22:04:26 1993 Date: Wed, 12 May 93 16:04:23 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9305122004.AA24281@grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: how many Esperantists, and how difficult to learn conlangs In mail to me discussing a sci.lang posting on the number of Esperanto speakers, linguist/Esperantist Ken Miner wrote: >Even many American Esperantists don't realize that in Asia, Esperantism >has something like the appeal of the Rotary Club. For this reason >Esperantists are one thing, speakers are another. During my years in te >movement, which were spent in New York City, I met every European >speaker who came through. We had wonderful times, sitting nearly all >night at the Cafe Figaro speaking E, delighted at the perplexed looks of >the other patrons, who of course couldn't figure out what language it >was. But: In all that time I only met about ten people! (It was, I >believe, eleven years; I had learned the language, of course, long >before I went to NYC.) > >As for speakers living in NYC: I don't remember the year, but the year >the World's Fair was in Flushing, Long Island, the fair people wanted to >have a pamphlet translated into many languages, including E. It was a >well-known scandal at the time--every E-ist in NYC talked about it: >they could only find two people in NYC who were deemed competent to do >the translation! I was one of them; the other was a very talented E-ist >named Joel Silverman whom I have unfortunately lost touch with. (George >Allan Connor was out of town, I believe.) > >It was then *no secret* that there were thousands of "Esperantists" even >in the U.S., and hundreds in NYC, who were unable to, or disinclined to >learn the language. We who did speak, complained about it constantly. >How things change in the world of the true believer! Now, a quarter of >a century later, I get angry mail for questioning the outrageous claim >of two million speakers of E! > >The reason there are so few speakers is very simple: it takes about as >much time to learn Esperanto well enough to really use it as it does to >learn one of the national languages. (Zamenhof was wrong about >inflectional irregularity being a major problem.) Many people get >interested in E because they *failed* with a nat'l lang. Esperantists >have always reminded me of the ethnocentric black students at City >College in the late sixties, very enthusiastic about learning Swahili -- >until they discovered it had grammar and required a lot of work to >learn. On the issue of number of speakers, I agreed with Ken that counts of speakers of conlangs rarely hold to the standards of fluency with natural languages. There may be 2 million Esperantists who know something about the language or who have even spoken a few sentences in the language, but by that standard I, and every student who has ever taken a class, am a Spanish and German speaker (when in reality I know little or nothing of either language). I do not claim that there is a single fluent speaker of Lojban, even though I and several others are capable of conversing in the language indefinitely, because I hold to a higher standard of fluency. (For Esperanto, I hear that there is a certification program at ELNA for people who have achieved a certain superior level of fluency, and knowledge of Esperanto history and culture. I wonder what percentage of the ELNA membership has qualified or could qualify for this highest level of Esperanto certification. I also wonder how many conlangs there are that EVER had fluent speakers. I don't doubt that Esperanto has had some, and probably many, and presumably so did Ido by extension and sheer numbers, but I can't even say for sure that Volapu:k ever did, in spite of its numbers - after all, there is the possibly apocryphal story that when they first held an international Volapu:k conference, no one could understand anyone else. But I think Ken's last point is most interesting and most telling. For a language, as a system, to work and fulfill all of the facets of language, it must have a certain level of completeness, and hence, complexity. I don't know what that minimal level is, but as I tried to suggest with that summary of the sci.lang Esperanto discussion last week, it is almost certainly much more complex than the rather trivial questions of which phonemes should be in the language and what the lexicon should be. And if conlangs do not regularly achieve any fluent speakers, even among their inventors and closest adherents, I am also inclined to discount the significance of the translation of certain example texts (like the Lord's Prayer) as being significantly meaningful as to the viability of a language system. People have criticized Lojban as being 'hard to learn' though many of the people who have said so cannot claim to have actually and seriously tried. The ease of learning a language, if such a thing can be measured, must be determined AFTER you've learned the first few hundred words and simplest grammatical forms, when you try to integrate these pieces together into a communicative system. That follow-on learning seems to be where the kernal of language is. I have to admit that I have been stuck short of that level in Lojban for a long time, but then I have also significantly plateaued in Russian at a level far short of adult fluency. (I seem to be able to communicate with my kids on most any subject I want to talk to them about, and some elements of my speech are far more fluent than my Lojban has ever been. But I cannot converse worth beans even at a slow level with adults - I don't have a useful enough vocabulary to maintain an adult conversation on any topic, and the grammatical errors which my kids usually ignore must be appalling to the adult Russians I've tried to talk to. It appalls me since I recognize many errors as quickly as I say them. lojbab >From robin@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU Thu May 13 13:42:58 1993 Date: Thu, 13 May 1993 21:42:33 +1000 From: Robin F Gaskell Message-Id: <199305131142.AA18933@extra.ucc.su.OZ.AU> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: re: Lojban (data-base of conlang descriptions) From: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: re: Lojban -- anyone got a lexicon or primer online? Hello Conlangers, Zack Smith asks: | 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? Well, yes, this sort of thing has come up from time to time especially with initiatives from Rick Harrison. But, what Zack asks for has not been done yet, and there is no easily accessible record where we can check up on the specification of a particular conlang. I would like to see this done, and would be able to contribute the Glosa details. What is an `ftp' archive, and how do I access it? I guess it is a sort of DIY database. I think that the essential details for each conlang shouldbe able to be summarised in one page - two at the outside - and that a more or less standardised format for the descriptions be decided upon. # If necessary, I will submit a sample description of Glosa. # I would like to see suggestions from others on the format of conlang descriptions. I once saw a one-page summary of the grammar of Russian; I was so amazed that such a thing could be done, that I bought a copy of the card. Actually it was in fine print, and, spread out using ASCII format, would probably need about four screens. However, if they can do it for Russian, then it should be a push-over for any conlang. I will enjoy reading the description of the Klingon language. Regards, Robin >From EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Sat May 15 19:16:25 1993 To: conlang@diku.dk, ez-as-pi@cup.portal.com From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Subject: Conlang classification and analysis Lines: 81 Date: Sat, 15 May 93 10:16:25 PDT Message-Id: <9305151016.1.20920@cup.portal.com> X-Origin: The Portal System (TM) It occurs to me that more time ought to be spent on the topic that is my subject line than has been, particularly in some areas. One thing that is a major dichotomy is between languages whose grammars are essentially regularizations of the features common to some set of natlang grammars (e. g. Esperanto and its descendants, Interlingua, etc.) and languages like Lojban with experi- mental grammars, not designed to be _like_ those of existing languages. While the distinctiveness of Lojban grammar is overemphasized by the Lojbanis' insistence of using their own terms rather than "noun, verb, etc." it is certainly possible to describe Lojban without using those terms, and in fact I prefer to do so. But even so, the Lojban grammar is very distinctive: 1. The only content words in Lojban are verbs. 2. A verb may be marked as such (by a prefixed particle "cu") but rarely needs to be, while other particles turn a verb into a noun or adjective. It is the fact that structure words create phrases that function as nouns that really makes Lojban distinctive. Vorlin, on the other hand, is primarily a noun language; it has 3 basic verbs and all other verbs are formed as noun+basic verb compounds. There may be other "experimental grammar" languages (in fact Voksigid would have been one if it had reached the point of being used) but the main point is that these languages must really be studied differently. In effect, it is a syntactic distinction approximately the same as the distinc- tion in vocabulary between a priori and a posteriori languages, though the vocabulary distinction is one that has been given much more attention. Another point is that we may want to look into some features separately that have only been available together with other ones, complicating the analysis. I know that when I was trying to develop Voksigid, I had some Lojban features (the predicate structure) in mind, but I was not particularly interested in others, such as the self-segregating phonology/morphology. Jigwa, on the other hand, seems to have self-segregation as an important goal, without looking in any other way like Lojban. I think it is useful to look at features like these with an eye to analyzing whether they are productive of useful results or simply excess baggage. (My position is that phonological con- straints such as those required by self-segregation are rather negative since I believe strongly in "recogniz- able vocabulary" which is adversely affected by phonological constraints. We as conlang enthusiasts really need to look into such oppositions, though we will hardly agree on which of two conflicting goals is more important; we certainly can agree on questions of whether two goals _are_ in conflict. Comments? >From fschulz@pyramid.com Mon May 17 04:06:28 1993 Message-Id: <9305170206.AA17923@pyrps5.eng.pyramid.com> Subject: conlang features To: conlang@diku.dk (constructed lang) Date: Sun, 16 May 93 19:06:13 PDT From: fschulz@pyramid.com Reply-To: fschulz@pyramid.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com writes >Subject: Conlang classification and analysis > >I think it is useful to look at features >like these with an eye to analyzing >whether they are productive of useful >results or simply excess baggage. (My >position is that phonological con- >straints such as those required by >self-segregation are rather negative >since I believe strongly in "recogniz- >able vocabulary" which is adversely >affected by phonological constraints. >We as conlang enthusiasts really need >to look into such oppositions, though >we will hardly agree on which of two >conflicting goals is more important; >we certainly can agree on questions of >whether two goals _are_ in conflict. > >Comments? > Fascinating article. I would like to have more analysis like this. I view self-segregation as an absolute requirement for a conlang. If no conlang had this, I would switch to studying japanese. There is a high recognition cost to pay for getting self-segregation. For 1.5 years I have spent 0.5 hours per day learning the lojban gismu list of 1536 words. I have made one pass thru the list and estimate another another 2 years before I have the list learned. Lojban gismu are formed by mixing phonemes from the 6 source languages. The assumption is that recognition is a linear function of the number of phonemes present from the source language. When I first saw this, I believed this was a clever way to to build words. After extensive experience, I now believe recognition is better approximated as a digital function, ie. enough features 100% recognition else 0%. For small enough vocabulary lists, you may get pseudo linearity, but for 1000 words I believe the linearity will disappear. Of course, this is untestable since you will never get anyone to learn lists of 1000 elements. I believe recognition is so easily destroyed that even restricting to one source language (English :-( obviously) would not help. I would recomend that words be built to be internally consistent with no regard for existing languages. Say that a list of 1536 words constructed at random has a learning cost of 100. I would guess that lojban has a learning cost of 125. The cost should be less than 100 by the linearity analysis. What happened for me is that the clues did not help much. Making matters worse was wrong clues which create ambiguity. A miscued word can take 100 times as long to learn as a random word. Example: pelji is paper papri is page. Fortunately, there are very few of these or the language would be unlearnable. -- Frank Schulz ( fschulz@pyramid.com ) >From zack@netcom.com Mon May 17 04:16:01 1993 Date: Sun, 16 May 93 19:16:23 -0700 From: zack@netcom.com (Zack T. Smith) Message-Id: <9305170216.AA04134@netcom2.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: directional info, schemas Recently I've decided to look at the problem of adding directional information to my language, beyond the few easy words such as to, from, upon, surrounding, comprising, etc. I've been putting off this task literally for years, because I knew that it might be a bit of a pain. Now that I'm feeling fully up to it, I have to admit that there appear to be a large number of such words. Some of them can't be adequately described without a diagram or with a short phrase. Many require the use of verbs. I was wondering, has anyone come up with a complete list of such concepts? Does anyone involved with psycholinguistics know if there might be, say, a set of well-known schemas that most humans tend to possess concerning object placement, motion, connection, etc.? Here I'm kind of wondering whether a minimal list of directional words has been identified that all humans tend to use, (as with people using only 11 or so basic colors) or whether the number of such words in use tends to be highly variable. For instance, do Eskimos have 20 words for "diverging", or does Swahili have 6 words for "on top of"? Note that I'm not looking for conceptually similar but semantically mixed words; I'm looking for words that offer directional information only, not other information e.g. social or emotional data. Here are a few ideas that I've got: on top of under to the left of to the right of in the center between during just after just before amidst prominent/perceivable with without together apart converging diverging parallel moving in parallel side by side moving straight toward moving apart moving straight apart perpendicular upright flat/level diagonal rising falling moving left moving right louder quieter touching squeezed together pulled apart upside down on left side on right side on its back face down pushing into balanced imbalanced stable unstable constant continuous discontinuous oscillating up-and-down left-and-right front-and-back motion rolling left rolling right rolling forward rolling backward turning left turning right moving forward moving backward near far from midway one-third of the way two-thirds way stacked sideways row impacting bouncing crashing on perimeter marginalized inside outside picked up left go idle moving branching out to from passing by passing through passing by both sides circling alternating shifting empty full half-empty half-full Any comments? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi Mon May 17 15:07:05 1993 Date: Mon, 17 May 93 13:52:59 +0100 From: matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi (Matthew Faupel) To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: fschulz@pyramid.com's message of Mon, 17 May 93 04:22:02 +0200 <9305170206.AA17923@pyrps5.eng.pyramid.com> Subject: Learning time/learnability (was: conlang features) This post rambles a bit, so here's a summary: 1. I don't think self-segregation is an absolute requirement for all conlangs. 2. I'd be interested in hearing about learning times for conlangs. 3. The properties of a language being mnemonic and being recognisable are different and should not be confused. 4. The fact that "false friends" exist in a language which has a large proportion of recognisable or mnemonic vocabulary does not make that language unlearnable. 5. Even with false friends, having recognisable vocabulary aids learning. >>>>> On Mon, 17 May 93 04:22:02 +0200, fschulz@pyramid.com said: FS: I view self-segregation as an absolute requirement for a conlang. Depends entirely on your goals for the conlang; if computer parsing comes into it anywhere then self-segregation is very useful. However, humans don't seem to have extreme problems parsing non-self-segregating languages so if, say, the ability to absorb new words from other languages with minimal modification is deemed to be more important then it may be worthwhile sacrificing this feature. It could also be argued that although self-segregation allows computer parsing of a language using current technology, the more difficult task of analysing the semantics of the input after it has been parsed has not yet been solved for the general case. When the technology exists for doing this, the problem of parsing non-self-segregating input may be less formidable and so, perhaps, self-segregation should not be over-valued if it means losing other features more useful to the target speaker community. FS: There is a high recognition cost to pay for getting self-segregation. FS: For 1.5 years I have spent 0.5 hours per day learning the lojban FS: gismu list of 1536 words. I have made one pass thru the list and FS: estimate another another 2 years before I have the list learned. This is an interesting set of figures, though to make more use of it you'd have to tell us what proportion of the list you currently have sight recognition of and what proportion is well enough remembered to form part of your working vocabulary (i.e. what % of the list could you translate from lojban to english and what % english to lojban?) As a comparison, I have been learning Finnish for an equivalent period of time (perhaps nearer 2 years) and spend about 1.5 hours a week doing so. I think Finnish is a good natural language equivalent to Lojban for English speakers in terms of alienness of vocabulary and grammar yet I'm sure that I have an active vocabulary of at least 1500 words already so, to me, 3.5 years to learn 1500 words sounds like a lot of time. If this is a problem specific to Lojban then *the people ought to know* :-) FS: Lojban gismu are formed by mixing phonemes from the 6 source FS: languages. The assumption is that recognition is a linear FS: function of the number of phonemes present from the source language. FS: When I first saw this, I believed this was a clever way to to build FS: words. After extensive experience, I now believe recognition FS: is better approximated as a digital function, ie. enough features FS: 100% recognition else 0%. For small enough vocabulary lists, you FS: may get pseudo linearity, but for 1000 words I believe the linearity FS: will disappear. Of course, this is untestable since you will never FS: get anyone to learn lists of 1000 elements. I'm not sure that I agree with this, not because of your theory on recognition but mainly because it attacks Lojban on the wrong grounds. The formation of Lojban gismu was done (as I understand it) as a mnemonic device rather than a recognition device, i.e. it was intended to give as many learners as possible a handle on remembering gismu once known rather than to provide recognition of unknown gismu. FS: I believe recognition is so easily destroyed that even restricting FS: to one source language (English :-( obviously) would not help. FS: I would recomend that words be built to be internally consistent FS: with no regard for existing languages. The two languages I've spent most time learning in the past couple of years are Spanish and Finnish, both of which I started learning from scratch at approximately the same time. I am now conversationally fluent in Spanish and can make a good attempt at reading novels without a dictionary while I still struggle with Finnish. Part of this is grammar difficulties but a lot of it is to do with the fact that a large part of Spanish vocabulary can be guessed at because of its common roots with other European languages as opposed to Finnish where you either know a word or you don't. In other words, despite the fact that there isn't a one-to-one mapping between english and spanish vocabulary and despite the fact that sometimes the correlations are not obvious in the surface forms of the words I still found the matches that were there aided learning. FS: Say that a list of 1536 words constructed at random has a learning FS: cost of 100. I would guess that lojban has a learning cost of FS: 125. The cost should be less than 100 by the linearity analysis. FS: What happened for me is that the clues did not help much. Making FS: matters worse was wrong clues which create ambiguity. A miscued FS: word can take 100 times as long to learn as a random word. FS: Example: pelji is paper FS: papri is page. FS: Fortunately, there are very few of these or the language would FS: be unlearnable. I'm not sure about this one either. Spanish is full of "false friends" such as the above, e.g. salida - exit; exito - success; suceso - event; manifestacion - demonstration; pretender - to intend; intentar - to try. This hasn't made the language unlearnable for me, in fact these curiosities probably stick in my mind more than some other words which have no visible connection to English at all. Having made my conclusions at the top of the article, I'll say no more here! Cheers, Matthew >From KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE Mon May 17 15:33:02 1993 Date: Mon, 17 May 1993 15:31 +0200 From: J%org Knappen Subject: Re: Conlang classification and analysis To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01GYAC6OY57K8WX921@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> X-Envelope-To: conlang@diku.dk X-Vms-To: VZDMZA::IN%"conlang@diku.dk" I'd like to comment on Bruce's article, specially on the discussion of the parts of speech (nouns vs. verbs), but unfortunately I'm lacking the time to do it well. Therefore I have to delay the response. Yours, J"org Knappen. >From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Mon May 17 21:02:59 1993 Message-Id: From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Two-level self-segregation To: conlang@diku.dk (conlang), lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu (Lojban List) Date: Mon, 17 May 1993 13:31:36 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 4377 Lojban/Loglan (for my present purposes they are one and the same) has frequently been criticized by conlangistanis for various features of its design, notably its "ugly" morphological rules and its allomorphy. The purpose of this essay is to explain why these features are necessary to achieve Lojban's goals, and indeed are mutually dependent. Self-segregation, the ability to pick words out of a continuous phoneme stream, has often been mentioned on conlang as a useful trait for a constructed language. Some have even said it is mandatory; others have considered it less important than some other goal (such as easy recogniz- ability), but as far as I know no one has deemed it positively harmful. Various languages other than Lojban have been designed for varying degrees of self-segregation: Vorlin and -gua!spi come to mind, and there are very likely others. These two languages self-segregate at what may be called the "word" level; the phoneme stream can be chopped into lexical units in only one way. Without word-level self-segregation, problems like "night rate" vs. "nitrate" can arise, and various kinds of ambiguous sentences are possible. One of Lojban's most important goals is structural unambiguity, and so word-level self-segregation is essential. In the language Voksigid, however, there is no requirement for word-level self-segregation. Instead, some care was taken during the language design to ensure what I will call "morpheme-level self-segregation". This feature of a language requires that words (lexical units) break up into morphemes (meaning units) in only one way. Without morpheme-level self-segregation, the English word "manslaughter" (man-slaughter) could be broken up as "man-s-laughter", something quite different! Early versions of Loglan (until about 1982) did not have morpheme-level self-segregation. The problem here is not unambiguity; a language could be structurally unambiguous if it had no recognizable morphemes below the lexical level at all. The difficulty is a practical one of vocabulary building. Old Loglan compound words were built by assembling fragments of the root words: however, it was not possible to decompose the fragments reliably. This meant that one had to make a search of the entire existing vocabulary to avoid creating a word that was identical to one already existing. The 1982 reforms (which both current Loglan and Lojban share) provided for morpheme-level self-segregation, at a stroke wiping out the entire existing vocabulary of non-root words (Lojban has also redefined the root words as well, for legal non-linguistic reasons), but allowing for unambiguous decomposition of words into morphemes. Vorlin and -gua!spi avoid the problem by making all words mono-morphemic: there is no distinction between a phrasal compound and a compound word. Lojban/Loglan, however, makes such a distinction: phrases have only loosely constrained semantics, whereas compounds have (in principle) single denotations just as root words do. The only way to allow two-level self -segregation was to distinguish between rules for finding the ends of morphemes and the ends of words. Therefore, allomorphy was unavoidable: the bound and the free forms of morphemes had to be distinct. Zipf's law suggested that the bound forms be shorter than the free forms, and this was done. Since there are fewer short forms than long forms, for obvious combinatorial reasons, it was not possible to create fixed rules for mapping between the two: there are about seven possible short forms for every long form, of which at most three are in use (other possibilities typically are pre-empted by some other morpheme). As far as I know, the only other language with two-level self-segregation is Bee (of Plan B), which achieves it by Huffman coding its words and employing phonemes each of which has both a consonantal and an (unrelated) vocalic representation. Bee is only a sketch, however, not a full conlang. I make no claim that the Loglan/Lojban design for two-level allomorphy is the best possible: it was too strongly constrained by the history of the language and the need to retain the benefits of existing work as much as possible. I would be interested in seeing other designs to the same purpose. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From de0214@u.cc.utah.edu Tue May 18 00:18:06 1993 Date: Mon, 17 May 1993 15:41:55 -0600 (MDT) From: dirk elzinga/linguistics Sender: dirk elzinga/linguistics Reply-To: dirk elzinga/linguistics Subject: self-segregation To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII John Cowan recently posted a discussion of "self-segregation," which he defines as follows: "the ability to pick words out of a continuous phoneme stream." I would like to make three comments and a request. 1) To quote Cowan: "Without word-level self-segregation, problems like "night rate" vs "nitrate" can arise..." This should not be a problem for any English speaker that I know. In "night rate," the first (and last) syllable ends with a glottal stop or preglottalized [t] (which is my pronunciation), thusly: [naj?.rej?] or [naj?t.rej?t] (the "." indicates a syllable boundary) while "nitrate" has an open first syllable, and a second syllable which has two consonants in the onset: [naj.trej?t]. Given the presence of the glottal stop (or glottalized [t]) there should be no confusion on the part of any speaker of English as to which expression has been uttered, since "nitrate" has neither in the first syllable. 2) Again, to quote Cowan: "Without morpheme-level self-segregation, the English word "manslaughter" (man-slaughter) could be broken up as "man-s-laughter." Again, this is not a problem for speakers of English since the two expressions have completely different pronunciations. The confusion arises only when the expressions are written, and then only if normal orthographic conventions are not observed; i.e. no spacing in the case of two or more words, or an apostrophe to indicate the possesive case ending. 3) The "problem" of self-segregation has differing solutions in natural languages, stress patterns being one of them (consistent stress on the initial syllable of a word is a good clue that a new word has begun). But it hinges on what you consider the definition of self-segregating to be. If it is indeed, as Cowan remarks, "the ability to pick words out of a continuous phoneme (phonetic?) stream," then the solution to the problem need be no more complicated than, say, a regular stress rule, or an intonation pattern where each word has a tonal contour of high to low tone thus making each new high tone the beginning of a new word. If, however, your concern is with written language, then some built-in orthographical device such as spacing between words or hyphenation between morphemes seems to be called for. In any case, it is a problem which should be easily dealt with. And now a request. It may seem presumptuous of me to go on about "self-segregation" in a constructed language when I have no clue as to the grammatical shape of the languages under discussion. So, can anyone direct me to references concering Lojban in particular, and constructed languages in general? I have also tinkered with a language of my own, but I doubt it would pass muster with some of the other efforts being discussed in this list and I would appreciate any available information on other languages. Dirk Elzinga Linguistics Program University of Utah dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu >From jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu Tue May 18 00:36:17 1993 Date: Mon, 17 May 93 15:29:46 -0700 From: jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero) Posted-Date: Mon, 17 May 93 15:29:46 -0700 Message-Id: <9305172229.AA06112@glia.biostr.washington.edu> Received: by glia.biostr.washington.edu (911016.SGI/Eno-0.1) id AA06112; Mon, 17 May 93 15:29:46 -0700 Apparently-To: conlang@diku.dk | In any case, it is a problem which should be easily dealt with. *grin*. You seem to have a very theoretical view of all this. Presumably "How to wreck a nice beach" could never possibly be mistaken for "How to recognize speach" in your world? In RL speech-recognition systems, problems do seem to arise in practice, however... both silicon-based and carbon-based ones. The efforts I've seen to address this, mine included, tend to make unrealistic assumptions such as no phone mislabellings etc. | In any case, it is a problem which should be easily dealth with. Well, efficiency tends to be one critical constraint. Humans are loath to use a language even two to ten times more verbose/awkward than what they are used to, in my impression. So any solution must add enough information to uniquely resolve the problem, but not so much that people simply ignore it. The resulting solution space may in fact be empty: normal semantic content may provide so much information for practical word-resolution that people may not be willing to tolerate any system which adds enough redundant information to permit deterministic purely syntactic word resolution of this sort. I can't speak for Lojbab, but Jim Brown used to happily concede that he did not in general insert all the 'obligatory' pauses and such required by his Loglan word resolution algorithm, if memory serves. >From eboyd@unixg.ubc.ca Tue May 18 01:53:26 1993 Message-Id: <9305172352.AA28706@unixg.ubc.ca> Date: Mon, 17 May 1993 16:54:40 -0500 To: "Urs E. Gattiker -- The Bear" , conlang@diku.dk From: eboyd@unixg.ubc.ca(Ewan Boyd) Subject: Re: eVAN bOYD ---- r&d IN CULTURE AND LANGUAGE BARRIERS >hI does it have anything to do with technology? Please let me know.... > >thanks > >urs e. gattiker Thanks for your query. Sorry for the delay. I have been out of town. It depends how you define technology. Developing a global sound/sight communication system will require effort from a wide variety of disciplines inclucing technical. My original query was: "I am part of a group doing R & D on cultural language barriers and various possible long term solutions. We are interested in networking with anyone else in this field. Thank you for any information you may be able to give us." The creative vision comes out of a statement such as "Wouldn't it be great if everyone in the world could communicate directly with everyone else without the need for any aids - e.g.interpreters, translators, computers aids, etc.- now needed to bridge the barriers imposed by different linguistic cultures!". This was the concept of Esperanto. A bi-lingual world. But Esperanto was a 19th century solution. The 21st century deserves more. Here is a copy of a detailed explanation of our query: "GLOBAL LANGUAGE BARRIERS exist because of isolation over the centuries which led to the development of individual sound and then sight communication systems by each isolated group. Now that we have global air transport, telephone, radio, video, computer and fax networks, plus formal compulsory education systems, it seems only logical that children be given the best possible 21st century global sound/sight system to use as a "second language" to communicate with everyone outside their own culture. From a global perspective graduates will only then be truly literate. We are the nucleus of an network whose objectives are:-- a) To gather data on cultural language barriers and the problems associated with them. b) To agree on the best long term solution to overcome these problems. c) To plan the necessary steps to have the agreed solution implemented. We have chosen the Internet as the primary means of global communications for this project. We wish to become effective in using the Internet. We want to connect and work with other groups or individuals. Can you help us find answers to the following questions:-- a) Are there any groups working in this field now? b) If so how do we get in touch? c) If not where can we get help in starting one or more conferences? d) How can we best attract volunteers with useful skills to contribute to these conferences? The interim or commonly proposed solutions all have drawbacks that seem to make further large scale research desirable:-- English as a second language (ESL) is a primary cultural language. This puts the non-native speaker at a disadvantage. Not a level playing field. English has many irregularities that make it difficult and thus expensive to learn. Esperanto was an excellent 19th century attempt at a solution. It has been maintained and might even be the basis for the global second language (GSL) but there is not conclusive evidence that it meets all the criteria that are evolving in the light of 20th century development. There is a specialty group < esperanto@rand.org > who actively promote esperanto as the best solution. Various electronic translating systems are useful in the interim but lack the flexibility of good one to one direct human communication. The cost of producing and maintaining indiviualized equipment would be far higher than teaching a universal second language in the world's schools. Our group will work on all aspects of the problem except language design. Public awareness, statistical data collection, recruitment, long term planning, organization, etc. We will network with groups writing design tender specifications and doing actual language design. We know of of only a few in one group < conlang@diku.dk > working on linguistic academic problems but we know of none who are focused on the overall public relations and organizational planning effort that will be required to launch an awareness and action campaign. Both are vital to the success of the project. Some feel it is not yet time to start. It is overdue. Aviation took from early dreams and the first powered flight in 1903 until the beginning of wide public acceptance with the start of jet service in 1958 - 55 years. Our time frame hopefully will not be as long but it could be much longer unless many dedicated people start working on it soon!" Thank you for your interest I hope this gives you an understanding of the problem and the need. Any comments and/or help will be greatly appreciated. Ewan Boyd, 4-1937 W 2nd Av, Vancouver, BC V6J 1J2 Canada, 604 734 0356, FAX 604-739-1325 Email: eboyd@unixg.ubc.ca >From EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Tue May 18 04:24:23 1993 To: conlang@diku.dk, ez-as-pi@cup.portal.com From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Subject: Re: Learning time/learnability Lines: 31 Date: Mon, 17 May 93 19:24:25 PDT Message-Id: <9305171924.1.26927@cup.portal.com> X-Origin: The Portal System (TM) matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi (Matthew Faupel) writes: >As a comparison, I have been learning Finnish for an equivalent period of >time (perhaps nearer 2 years) and spend about 1.5 hours a week doing so. I >think Finnish is a good natural language equivalent to Lojban for English >speakers in terms of alienness of vocabulary and grammar yet I'm sure that >I have an active vocabulary of at least 1500 words already so, to me, 3.5 >years to learn 1500 words sounds like a lot of time. If this is a problem >specific to Lojban then *the people ought to know* :-) >... >The two languages I've spent most time learning in the past couple of years >are Spanish and Finnish, both of which I started learning from scratch at >approximately the same time. I am now conversationally fluent in Spanish >and can make a good attempt at reading novels without a dictionary while I >still struggle with Finnish. I think this makes a good case forv my comment that recognizability is a very high priority factor. To my knowledge, Finnish is an agglutinative language, and most Esperanto enthusiasts as well as myself feel that an agglutinative language is easier to learn than an inflected language (which Spanish is to some extent). Bruce >From EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Tue May 18 04:34:06 1993 To: conlang@diku.dk, ez-as-pi@cup.portal.com From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Subject: Re: Self-segregation Lines: 16 Date: Mon, 17 May 93 19:34:07 PDT Message-Id: <9305171934.1.26927@cup.portal.com> X-Origin: The Portal System (TM) matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi (Matthew Faupel) writes: >>>>> On Mon, 17 May 93 04:22:02 +0200, fschulz@pyramid.com said: >FS: I view self-segregation as an absolute requirement for a conlang. >Depends entirely on your goals for the conlang; if computer parsing comes >into it anywhere then self-segregation is very useful. And of course, he means computer parsing of _speech_, because written language is marked with word spaces. This was the major reason I felt no need for self-segregation in Voksigid. Bruce >From EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Tue May 18 04:39:16 1993 To: conlang@diku.dk, ez-as-pi@cup.portal.com From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Subject: Recognizability/mnemonicity Lines: 8 Date: Mon, 17 May 93 19:39:17 PDT Message-Id: <9305171939.2.26927@cup.portal.com> X-Origin: The Portal System (TM) matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi (Matthew Faupel) writes: >3. The properties of a language being mnemonic and being recognisable are > different and should not be confused. Please elucidate. To me they are alike. Bruce >From lojbab@grebyn.com Tue May 18 09:22:18 1993 Date: Tue, 18 May 93 03:20:49 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9305180720.AA22015@grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Lojbab doesn't reply - yet Just to let people know that I have been reading this thread, and I do intend to reply. But I'm putting out an issue of Ju'i Lobypli and can't do it for a few days, and I'm trying to find out more about what Frank Schulz's specific experiences are before commenting on them. Regarding Jeff P.'s comment, though. No, we do occasionally omit the pauses that are required by the morphology, but not all that often. On the other hand, i suspect that we flub up pronunciation as often as we miss the pauses. Surprisingly, perhaps, I think we do better when we talk faster. Lojban, like natlangs, has an internal rhythm, and once you get to talking in that rhythm, you tend to get the word boundaries, and hence the pauses and stress correct. The far greater problem from the standpoint of word recognition, is the English speaker's habit of dropping unstressed vowels, especially 'a', down to a lax schwa. This doesn't interfere with real speakers, but is likely to be more of a problem to speech recognizing computers, since a schwa has decided import in the Lojban morphology algorithm. (One of the few places where I would to otherwise if we were doing it all over again, would be to choose a different sound as the 'hyphen', probably the syllabic 'r' that JCB considered and rejected, or something like it. But until we have people talking (and understanding) at fluent speech rates, it really is impossible to say that the morphology has too little or too much reducndancy, or that the speech errors that people make when non-fluent will persist when we speak the language wll enough to talk that fast. lojbab >From matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi Tue May 18 13:36:33 1993 Date: Tue, 18 May 93 12:22:31 +0100 From: matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi (Matthew Faupel) To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com's message of Tue, 18 May 93 05:20:48 +0200 <9305171924.1.26927@cup.portal.com> Subject: Learning time/learnability EZ= EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com (Bruce) MF= me MF: As a comparison, I have been learning Finnish for an equivalent period MF: of time (perhaps nearer 2 years) and spend about 1.5 hours a week doing MF: so. I think Finnish is a good natural language equivalent to Lojban for MF: English speakers in terms of alienness of vocabulary and grammar yet I'm MF: sure that I have an active vocabulary of at least 1500 words already so, MF: to me, 3.5 years to learn 1500 words sounds like a lot of time. If this MF: is a problem specific to Lojban then *the people ought to know* :-) MF: The two languages I've spent most time learning in the past couple of MF: years are Spanish and Finnish, both of which I started learning from MF: scratch at approximately the same time. I am now conversationally MF: fluent in Spanish and can make a good attempt at reading novels without MF: a dictionary while I still struggle with Finnish. EZ: I think this makes a good case forv my comment that recognizability is a EZ: very high priority factor. Recognisability does indeed make a lot of difference to the learnability of a language, but you must remember your target speaker group. It is relatively easy to get a high recognition factor into a conlang if its aim is to be used by people who speak Western European languages as their native tongues through using Latin and Greek roots. If your aim is to get a conlang adopted as a standard second language for the EC then this is probably a good approach to take. However, if you are aiming at a world tongue, finding roots that are recognisable to all is impossible and using indo-european roots on the grounds that it at least helps some speakers leaves you open to accusations of bias. EZ: To my knowledge, Finnish is an agglutinative language, and most EZ: Esperanto enthusiasts as well as myself feel that an agglutinative EZ: language is easier to learn than an inflected language (which Spanish is EZ: to some extent). It is an agglutinative language, but not in the clean sense that Esperanto is. It also has a certain amount of inflection on the agglutinations too just to make life interesting! The agglutination in Finnish is, unfortunately, not nearly regular enough to make it easy to create new vocabulary in the same way as Esperanto, though it does aid in passive recognition of previously unseen words that relate to already known ones. Matthew >From EVERSON%IRLEARN.UCD.IE@vm.uni-c.dk Tue May 18 14:11:52 1993 Date: Tue, 18 May 93 11:15:00 GMT From: Michael Everson Subject: Re: Learning time/learnability To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 18 May 93 05:24:12 +0200 from On Tue, 18 May 93 05:24:12 +0200 said: > To my knowledge, >Finnish is an agglutinative language, >and most Esperanto enthusiasts as well >as myself feel that an agglutinative >language is easier to learn than an >inflected language (which Spanish is to >some extent). Finnish is not by any means agglutinative. It, or rather its close sister Estonian (which I endeavoured to learn for 6 weeks in Tallinn last December), is full of medial and final morphological and phonological complexity that... made me gape in awe more than once. Turkish is a better example of a relatively well-behaved agglutinate. As far as I know, its morphemes are constant, and endings clopped on fore and aft (vowel harmony respected of course). Estonian, on the other hand, enjoys a fantastic profusion of forms caused in part by "consonant gradation". Thus "aeg" 'time' takes the genitive "aja" when prefixed to "lugu" 'story' --> "ajalugu" 'history'. "Lugu" likewise takes a genitive when a new compound is formed: "ajaloomuseeum" 'history museum". I'm new to this list. Recently I've been working with tlhIngan Hol (because it's a great brain teaser translating anything into Klingon) and to some extant with the Tengwar writing system used by Tolkien (an exercise in laser-font making, and a kind of bhakti). Mostly I've been spending the past couple of years localizing software into Irish Gaelic, and hope to be able to work with speakers of other minority languages in the near future. Is there a FAQ for this list? I'd like to look one over before plunging into discussion on "constructed languages". Michael Everson School of Architecture, UCD; Richview, Clonskeagh; Dublin 14; E/ire Phone: +353 1 706-2745 Fax: +353 1 283-8908 Home: +353 1 478-2597 >From mnu@inel.gov Tue May 18 16:24:53 1993 Date: Tue, 18 May 93 08:22:19 MDT From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) Message-Id: <9305181422.AA00179@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > Received: by NeXT Mailer (1.63) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: self-segregation Howdy conlangers! The only real benefit of a self-segregating morphology is in computer speech recognition. Even with the prosodic information available in natural languages, speech recognition algorithms are woefully inadequate at splitting up a stream of continuous speech. Ultimately, I suppose we can assume that the technology will improve enough to work reasonably well, but I don't advise holding your breath. Also, keep in mind that the algorithms will be highly language-specific, and the software development costs for EACH language will be exorbitant. In other words, if your conlang has a self-segregating morphology, you will have a definite advantage over the competition. Personally, I feel that someone who designs a conlang that is NOT self-segregating is out of touch will the modern world and computer reality. Regards, Rick P.S. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of "self-segregating" or "auto-isolating" morphologies, I'd be happy to send you an essay I wrote that discusses the subject. Let me know if you'd like a copy. -- *=*= 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 matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi Tue May 18 20:24:46 1993 Date: Tue, 18 May 93 19:10:46 +0100 From: matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi (Matthew Faupel) To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com's message of Tue, 18 May 93 05:31:13 +0200 <9305171939.2.26927@cup.portal.com> Subject: Recognizability/mnemonicity EZ= EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com (Bruce) said: MF= me MF: 3. The properties of a language being mnemonic and being recognisable MF: are different and should not be confused. EZ: Please elucidate. To me they are alike. To me (inventing definitions on the fly) being recognisable means being able to deduce the meaning of a previously unseen word because its form is sufficiently close to another known language. For instance, with my native language being English, having a good grounding the the latin roots of English and knowing the transformations that latin words have undergone to become spanish words, I find large parts of Spanish recognisable: accion - action, presidente - president, preparar - prepare vender - (vend) - sell, beber - (imbibe) - drink, mujer - (muliere) - woman Conversely, being mnemonic means that the language provides tags to aid my memory of the meanings of words without those tags necessarily allowing me to guess the meanings unaided. An example of this is better found in Lojban than Spanish. I would defy anyone to guess the meanings of the words blabi, blanu and mrenu unaided; I certainly couldn't. However, after having done the introductory lesson once some months ago, I can still remember the meanings because they have mnemonic tags: blabi = blue, blanu = black, mrenu = man -- -- -- -- --- (an interesting side-note is that I find the "ren" part of mrenu is the mnemonic for me because I remember reading that this part of the word came from the Chinese word for "man"). So, in a nutshell, a word being recognisable means that its meaning can be deduced due to its form being similar to or the same as an equivalent word in a known language, while being mnemonic means that it provides some handle to aid the recollection of the meaning of the word once it is known. Matthew >From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Wed May 19 03:41:09 1993 Message-Id: From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: Recognizability/mnemonicity To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Tue, 18 May 1993 17:36:46 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <9305181824.AA22769@odin.diku.dk> from "Matthew Faupel" at May 18, 93 09:24:44 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1479 Matthew Faupel writes: > Conversely, being mnemonic means that the language provides tags to aid my > memory of the meanings of words without those tags necessarily allowing me > to guess the meanings unaided. An example of this is better found in Lojban > than Spanish. I would defy anyone to guess the meanings of the words blabi, > blanu and mrenu unaided; I certainly couldn't. However, after having done > the introductory lesson once some months ago, I can still remember the > meanings because they have mnemonic tags: > > blabi = blue, blanu = black, mrenu = man > -- -- -- -- --- > > (an interesting side-note is that I find the "ren" part of mrenu is the > mnemonic for me because I remember reading that this part of the word came > from the Chinese word for "man"). Although Matthew's description of the difference between "recognizable" and "mnemonic" is quite correct (in Lojban/Loglan descriptions, this distinction is called "recognition vs. recall"), his Lojban examples are unfortunately wrong! {blabi} is not "blue" but "white"; {blanu} is not "black" but "blue"; and {mrenu} is not Lojban at all but Loglan -- the Lojban equivalent is {nanmu}. Note also that Chinese "ren2" is "person, human being", reflected in the Lojban words {prenu} "person, being with personality" and {remna} "human being, member of >Homo sapiens<". -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From dasher@well.sf.ca.us Wed May 19 08:56:29 1993 Date: Tue, 18 May 1993 23:56:14 -0700 From: D Anton Sherwood Message-Id: <199305190656.AA22141@well.sf.ca.us> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: time travel I think a time-traveling language community would have strong motive to uncouple tense from its verbs, and make the tenses adverbs, as Jacques Guy (if I remember right) suggested. This way a complex concept, the "tense" environment, need only be stated when it changes, just as you don't say-- *I got Monday up late because I was Monday cat-sitting and didn't have Monday my usual alarm-clock . . . Anton Sherwood dasher@well.sf.ca.us +1 415 267 0685 1800 Market St #207, San Francisco 94102-6297 USA >From matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi Wed May 19 11:55:07 1993 Date: Wed, 19 May 93 10:41:02 +0100 From: matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi (Matthew Faupel) To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: John Cowan's message of Wed, 19 May 93 04:20:52 +0200 Subject: Recognizability/mnemonicity JC: Although Matthew's description of the difference between "recognizable" JC: and "mnemonic" is quite correct (in Lojban/Loglan descriptions, this JC: distinction is called "recognition vs. recall"), his Lojban examples are JC: unfortunately wrong! Way to go, Matthew... JC: {blabi} is not "blue" but "white"; {blanu} is not "black" but "blue"; JC: and {mrenu} is not Lojban at all but Loglan -- the Lojban equivalent is JC: {nanmu}. Note also that Chinese "ren2" is "person, human being", reflected JC: in the Lojban words {prenu} "person, being with personality" and {remna} JC: "human being, member of >Homo sapiens<". Well, I did say I'd only done the introductory lesson once, and I did get the categories vaguely right :-) I duly eat humble pie and will check my references next time... I hope the point about recognisability/mnemonicity won't be lost in the rush to point out how unmnemonic these examples obviously were! Cheers, Matthew >From matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi Wed May 19 16:46:47 1993 Date: Wed, 19 May 93 15:32:40 +0100 From: matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi (Matthew Faupel) To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: D Anton Sherwood's message of Wed, 19 May 93 09:21:12 +0200 <199305190656.AA22141@well.sf.ca.us> Subject: time travel To: conlang@diku.dk In-reply-to: D Anton Sherwood's message of Wed, 19 May 93 09:21:12 +0200 <199305190656.AA22141@well.sf.ca.us> Subject: time travel BCC: matthew --text follows this line-- DAS= D Anton Sherwood (dasher@well.sf.ca.us) in article <199305190656.AA22141@well.sf.ca.us> DAS: I think a time-traveling language community would have strong motive to DAS: uncouple tense from its verbs, and make the tenses adverbs, as Jacques Guy DAS: (if I remember right) suggested. This way a complex concept, the "tense" DAS: environment, need only be stated when it changes, just as you don't say-- DAS: *I got Monday up late because I was Monday cat-sitting and DAS: didn't have Monday my usual alarm-clock . . . I was thinking about this a bit and it seems to me that part of the problem is the fact that the perceived time line of the time traveller differs from the base time line of the universe; perhaps the problem be solved by attaching possessives to the relative time indicators and verbs, e.g.: I my-will be going to the shops your-tomorrow being equivalent to: At some point during the future as I perceive it, I will be going to the shops on the day that you are going to experience in a day's elapsed time as you perceive it. with some (new) possessive indicating absolute time, e.g.: I abs-will be going to the shops abs-tomorrow being equivalent to: At some time in my past, present or future as I perceive it, I will be or will have been at the shops on the day which is one day absolute into the future from the day on which I am speaking. This scheme can be made slightly easier to use by agreeing default possessives; three possibilities being: 1. The default is the absolute timeline of the universe, so "I will be going to the shops tomorrow" means that if today is May 19, on May 20 you will find me at the shops (although as I perceive time I may already have been to the shops or I may not be going for some days yet). 2. The default is the timeline of the speaker, so "I will be going to the shops tomorrow" implies the speaker has not been yet and will be going in a day's elapsed time as they perceive it, though the absolute date my be in the past or the future (or even now). 3. The default is the timeline of the object associated with the time indicator, so in the phrase "I will be going to the shops tomorrow", speaker is the associated object and so the meaning is the same as in 2 in this case. In the phrase "You went to the shops yesterday, didn't you?" the implication is that the listener went to the shops a day ago as they perceive it, which may be tomorrow absolute time or whatever. This interpretation of defaults could get quite complicated I think! These examples are based on English; another simplifying factor would be the use of a language in which tense marking is not compulsory where it is specified by context (sort of what was suggested by Anton). Matthew >From V119N57H@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu Wed May 19 18:06:10 1993 Date: 19 May 1993 12:07:52 -0400 (EDT) From: Dragon Subject: Conlang classification and analysis To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01GYCXBQV2TE8ZEHF2@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu> Organization: University at Buffalo X-Vms-To: IN%"conlang@diku.dk" Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT >It is the fact that structure words >create phrases that function as nouns >that really makes Lojban distinctive. If I understand this correctly, this is no different from what countless speakers of polysynthetic languages do daily! I don't happen to have the exact examples with me, but to say "I see the lawnmower" in an Iroquoian language one would say something like: I-(it)-see-ASPECT it-grass-cut-ASPECT Here the phrase "it cuts the grass", morphologically based on the verb cut, is treated syntactically as a noun, lawn mower. "Cut" is a content morpheme, a verb root, to which is incorporated another content morpheme, the noun root "grass." Note that "it cuts the grass" does not have to be treated as a noun, but can stand alone as a complete grammatical utterance. Craig Kopris >From ucleaar%ucl.ac.uk@mail-b.bcc.ac.uk Thu May 20 23:45:49 1993 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Message-Id: <9305202140.AA108081@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk X-Ungarbled_Sender: And Rosta Subject: Cowan on morphology Date: Thu, 20 May 93 22:40:37 +0100 Sender: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk John Cowan argues that for maximal freedom from syntactic ambiguity, words need to be self-segregating. I agree. He also argues that for maximal freedom from morphological ambiguity, morphemes need to be self-segregating. In Lojban the semantic structure derived from the unambiguous syntactic structure is unambiguous. This justifies the syntax's freedom from ambiguity. But in the case of word-meaning, *only ambiguous* semantic structure can be derived from the unambiguous morphological structure. Whereas if one knows the meanings of the words in a Lojban sentence one may be sure of the sentence's meaning, if one knows only the meanings of the morphemes in a Lojban word one cannot be sure of the word's meaning: the meaning of the compound word has to be stipulated in a dictionary just like any monomorphemic word; the meanings of the morphemes simply serve as possible but not necessary indicators of the sort of meaning the word might have. Since the meaning of Lojban compounds is not predictable, the unambiguous morphology is not really very useful, and it adds extraordinary complexity to the language and to the task of acquiring vocabulary. A more rational design would make words self-segrating, but not morphemes. Even if morphemes fail to self-segregate, they would still serve as clues to the word's meaning. ----- And >From EVERSON%IRLEARN.UCD.IE@vm.uni-c.dk Fri May 21 01:23:58 1993 Date: Fri, 21 May 93 00:17:24 GMT From: Michael Everson Subject: Ambiguity To: ConLinguists In Irish, the verb "caitheamh" can be used in a number of ways: Chaith me/ an toiti/n. 'I smoked the cigarette.' Chaith me/ am ansin. 'I spent time there' Chaith me/ an geansai/. 'I wore the jumper/sweater' Chaith sibh go maith liom. 'You entertained me well' Chaith me/ i ndiaidh thu/. 'I was pining for you' Chaith me/ le/im. 'I took a jump' Chaith an ba/d o/ thuaidh. 'The boat drifted north' Chaith me/ anuas air. 'I belittled him (i.e. put him down)' Caithfidh me/ imeacht 'I must go' (future conjugation) Is this kind of richness proscribed from constructed languages? Maybe it's not from Klingon or Quenya; maybe not from Esperanto. But what about Lojban? Michael Everson School of Architecture, UCD; Richview, Clonskeagh; Dublin 14; E/ire Phone: +353 1 706-2745 Fax: +353 1 283-8908 Home: +353 1 478-2597 >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Fri May 21 15:47:50 1993 Date: Fri, 21 May 1993 14:47:41 +0100 Message-Id: <18971.199305211347@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> Received: from Colin Fine's Macintosh (colin_fine.comp.brad.ac.uk) by atlantis.brad.ac.uk; Fri, 21 May 1993 14:47:41 +0100 From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: self-segregation Thus Dirk Elzinga: >John Cowan recently posted a discussion of "self-segregation," which he >defines as follows: "the ability to pick words out of a continuous phoneme >stream." I would like to make three comments and a request. >1) To quote Cowan: "Without word-level self-segregation, problems like >"night rate" vs "nitrate" can arise..." This should not be a problem for any >English speaker that I know. In "night rate," the first (and last) syllable >ends with a glottal stop or preglottalized [t] (which is my pronunciation), >thusly: [naj?.rej?] or [naj?t.rej?t] (the "." indicates a syllable >boundary) while "nitrate" has an open first syllable, and a second syllable >which has two consonants in the onset: [naj.trej?t]. Given the presence of >the glottal stop (or glottalized [t]) there should be no confusion on the >part of any speaker of English as to which expression has been uttered, >since "nitrate" has neither in the first syllable. This will indeed not be a problem for most *native* English speakers (though not, I think all - I suspect without definite evidence that Irish speakers would tend to pronounce both with an aspirated /t/). But native English speakers are far from all English speakers. >2) Again, to quote Cowan: "Without morpheme-level self-segregation, the >English word "manslaughter" (man-slaughter) could be broken up as >"man-s-laughter." Again, this is not a problem for speakers of English >since the two expressions have completely different pronunciations. The >confusion arises only when the expressions are written, and then only if >normal orthographic conventions are not observed; i.e. no spacing in the >case of two or more words, or an apostrophe to indicate the possesive case >ending. You are right to object that written and spoken language are not the same. (In my opinion Loglan/Lojban have always overstated the isomorphism - Lojban has verified algorithms for self-segregation in both speech and writing, but they are different). Nonetheless examples of this in speech occur, though they are rare. I recall an episode of a hospital drama in the sixties where a nurse heard 'Give Mr Jones an air-ring [to avoid bed-sores]' as 'Give Mr Jones an airing', and she put him in a wheelchair and took him outside! Furthermore, the written case *is* important, again for non-native speakers. 'Manslaughter/man's-laughter' is an old joke, but there are real examples. (Notice that English written by Germans very often contains compounds that would be written as separate words by native speakers). ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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 ucleaar%ucl.ac.uk@mail-b.bcc.ac.uk Fri May 21 16:12:17 1993 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Message-Id: <9305211354.AA96271@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: lojban@cuvma.earn, conlang@diku.dk, Chris Handley Subject: Re: Cowan on morphology In-Reply-To: (Your message of Fri, 21 May 93 10:44:27 Y.) <9305202244.AA130872@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 21 May 93 14:54:15 +0100 Sender: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Chris writes: > And writes: > > A more rational design would make words self-segrating, but not morphemes. > >Even if morphemes fail to self-segregate, they would still serve as clues > >to the word's meaning. > > > As I see it, and as a very much peripheral Lojbanist I am more than likely > wrong, the problem is not that morphemes may not self-segregate. but that > they may segregate differently from the intension. Although the meaning of a > word is accessible from a dictionary, we normally only consult a dictionary > if we are unsure - we may be wrong but unaware of it. This simply makes the words countermnemonic. > I know this does not seem like the same problem, but I think it is. If we > wish to put together an unlikely string of words in Lojban, then we may, and > we can then attempt to puzzle out the meaning. If we wish to put an unlikely > combination of morphemes to gether, than we should be able to. If > 'legitimate' words pre-empt unlikely words by trespassing on their space, > then we lose the ability to create the unlikely words. > > Remember -- colourless green ideas sleep less furiously in Lojban than the > do in English. You can still have compounds with strange meanings. If it can be morphologically parsed in some alternative, more plausible, but wrong, way, then the compound is that much harder to learn. But personally I don't have much problem with the word _understand_, even though if one didn't know the word one would surely guess it means "stand under". Perhaps if there were an elegant solution to the self-segregating morphology problem then it would be mildly useful, to avoid the problem cases Chris envisages, but these mild sources of awkwardness don't justify the baroque ghastliness of Lojban morphology. If the morphology of Lojban were exported to Klingon, it would be most appropriate. ---- And >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Fri May 21 16:12:49 1993 Date: Fri, 21 May 1993 15:12:47 +0100 Message-Id: <20443.199305211412@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> Received: from Colin Fine's Macintosh (colin_fine.comp.brad.ac.uk) by atlantis.brad.ac.uk; Fri, 21 May 1993 15:12:47 +0100 From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Self-segregation Responses to two different mails from Bruce: >I think this makes a good case forv my >comment that recognizability is a very >high priority factor. To my knowledge, >Finnish is an agglutinative language, >and most Esperanto enthusiasts as well >as myself feel that an agglutinative >language is easier to learn than an >inflected language (which Spanish is to >some extent). Bruce I agree that recognisability is an important factor in ease of learning languages. I would suggest however that recognisability (or rather, familiarity) of the underlying assumptions is nearly as important as recignisability of the vocabulary. I am thinking of such things as the obligatoriness of number, definiteness, or social status. The rigid distinction between 'agglutinative' and 'inflecting' languages does not hold water, and is now little used by serious linguists. The terms designate poles of a spectrum. At the (ideal) agglutinating end, all bound morphemes are invariable, and may be affixed more or less freely in any order. (In most cases the grammar of the language distinguishes different classes of word (parts of speech) and affixes are limited in which classes they attach to; they may themselves have the affect of transforming the word to a different class). At the ideal inflecting end, single affixes express several heterogeneous semantic elements, but cannot be analysed morphologically. Thus one of the characteristics of languages toward the agglutinative end of the spectrum is that affixes tend to be invariable (often they vary in regular phonological ways), and this of course reduces the learning load. On the other hand they often have longer words, which can be daunting for those not used to them. What is important to stress about Esperanto, in my view, is not that it is 'agglutinating' but that its affixes are regular. >And of course, he means computer >parsing of _speech_, because written >language is marked with word spaces. >This was the major reason I felt no >need for self-segregation in Voksigid. Bruce In many, even most, scripts, yes. Not in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cherokee, and sparingly in most Indian languages and Inuit. Colin Fine ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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 Fri May 21 16:23:38 1993 Date: Fri, 21 May 1993 15:23:32 +0100 Message-Id: <21104.199305211423@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> Received: from Colin Fine's Macintosh (colin_fine.comp.brad.ac.uk) by atlantis.brad.ac.uk; Fri, 21 May 1993 15:23:32 +0100 From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: cognizability/mnemonicity Bruce says: >matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi (Matthew Faupel) writes: >3. The properties of a language being mnemonic and being recognisable are > different and should not be confused. > >Please elucidate. To me they are alike. > > Bruce I was going to make the same point as Matthew. The difference is between being able to guess what a foreign word is on first encountering it, and being able to recall it when once you have met it. Recognisability depends mostly on the form of the word, and your knowledge of something connected with it (for example, a related word in your own language). Mnemonicity is a purely personal matter - but it seems to be possible to build some hooks in that help some people mnemonic engine to work. Very few Loglan/Lojban words are recognisable - ie guessable. There are a few that are in hindsight, but they are so few that you would tend to expect them to be false friends and not guess them. Many words in both forms of the languages have some sounds built into them that help me, as an English speaker, to recall them. Loglan 'bukcu' has more of 'book' in it than Lojban 'cukta' - but both have some sounds to help me remember them. I might guess that 'bukcu' meant 'book', but then I might equally guess that Lojban 'bukpu' meant 'book' - but it doesn't (it means 'cloth'). Beyond that, I have my own private mnemonics for some words. I do not know much Arabic, but I recognise 'kitab' in Lojban 'cukta' (Arabic was added to the language base when Lojban was created). I sometimes get confused between Lojban 'tisna' = 'stuff' and 'tinsa' = 'stiff' (a coincidence, I think), but I have got them sorted out by thinking that 'tinsel is not stiff'. Like many personal mnemonics, this may make little sense to anybody else, but it works for me. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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 lojbab@grebyn.com Fri May 21 16:28:38 1993 Date: Fri, 21 May 93 10:28:33 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9305211428.AA05423@grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Cowan on morphology Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu And's logic escapes me. If meaning is not predictable, then self-segregating morphology has no value at all??? And it ADDS complexity to the language and the task of acquiring vocabulary. Based on what it replaced - the old Loglan system of cramming words together in whatever way seemed useful, the Lojban system is immensely better AND easier both for learning vocabulary, AND for inventing new vocabulary on the fly - aprocess that will occupy Lojbanists for many years while the vocabulary remains much smaller than that of English. Having the self-segregating morphology means that you need to memorize the morphological roots that are unique, but as I have argued often before, this is not that onerous a task since the optional root values are from a limited set of forms derivable from the gismu, and you can always use the expanded form that is unambiguously associated with the gismu for any listener (THE thing to do when you are writing or speaking to an audience that may not knwo the rafsi well enough to dissassemble your creation, or deducethe meaning from context). However, with that morphology you have significant clues as to meaning, and moreover, because of the self-segregating quality, you know that a large body of meaniungs is excluded. i.e if the final morphological term is a rafsi for klama (come/go), you know beyond all doubt, that the word relates to going/coming of some type, and not to being blue, beating your wife, or compiling a computer program. It is possible that when you go to make a word, that you may 'invent' a word that already exists, and use it with a somewhat variant meaning - but it won't be dramatically variant, and your approximation is one that you can presumably correct when someone points out that you are a little off. Since my observation (heightened by seeing how my kids learn English) is that language learning is an evolving of successively closer approximations to a norm, Lojban supports easy language learning of this sort. lojbab >From lojbab@grebyn.com Fri May 21 16:34:56 1993 Date: Fri, 21 May 93 10:34:53 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9305211434.AA05501@grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Ambiguity If Michael Everson means: does Lojban proscribe a word from being so polysemantic that I cannot grasp the slightest idea from his examples what role or meaning is played by the common word (I'm not even sure of the part of speech, though his commentary suggests that it is the verb), in each of the sentence, then the answer is that Lojban indeed proscribes such a condition. I cannot see any advantage to it, unless you want a langauge for making bad puns. I see lots of disadvantages, most important that every such idiosyncratic word makes the language that much harder to learn. Since conlangs have enough trouble getting people to be interested in learning them enough to have any greater meaning than a personal hobby of the inventor, such a handicap is fatal. lojbab >From ucleaar%ucl.ac.uk@mail-b.bcc.ac.uk Fri May 21 20:03:47 1993 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Message-Id: <9305211724.AA81306@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Cowan on morphology Date: Fri, 21 May 93 18:24:42 +0100 Sender: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk > And's logic escapes me. If meaning is not predictable, then self-segregating > morphology has no value at all??? And it ADDS complexity to the language > and the task of acquiring vocabulary. It has a little value, but is not remotely worth the cost of Lojban's morphological complexity. It undeniably adds to the complexity of the language. It adds to the complexity of learning gismu. It is not the only possible solution to the task of learning compounds: compounds could be formed by regular principles without necessarily being self-segregating. > Based on what it replaced - the old Loglan system of cramming words together > in whatever way seemed useful, the Lojban system is immensely better AND > easier both for learning vocabulary, AND for inventing new vocabulary on > the fly - aprocess that will occupy Lojbanists for many years while the > vocabulary remains much smaller than that of English. What is needed for inventing new vocab on the fly is regular rules for compounding, not necessarily self-segregation. > Having the self-segregating morphology means that you need to memorize > the morphological roots that are unique, but as I have argued often before, > this is not that onerous a task since the optional root values are from > a limited set of forms derivable from the gismu, and you can always use > the expanded form that is unambiguously associated with the gismu for any > listener (THE thing to do when you are writing or speaking to an audience > that may not knwo the rafsi well enough to dissassemble your creation, or > deducethe meaning from context). One-to-one communication where each participant makes allowances for the competence of the other is only a small fraction of communication in a language of a modern culture, Lojban included, probably. When Nik or Colin, for example, post in Lojban to this list, they don't use expanded rafsi, even though they know that significantly fewer readers of the list know rafsi than know gismu. > However, with that morphology you have significant clues as to meaning, and > moreover, because of the self-segregating quality, you know that a large > body of meaniungs is excluded. i.e if the final morphological term is a > rafsi for klama (come/go), you know beyond all doubt, that the word relates > to going/coming of some type, and not to being blue, beating your wife, or > compiling a computer program. You don't know beyond all doubt. Even if the last rafsi is identified as klama's, the lujvo could refer to sapphires, to pick a random example. Say the non-self-segrating, but simple & regular rules for compounding require that for the final morpheme you strip off the initial consonants of the gismu. In this case, the last morpheme of a compound ending in _-ama_ is going to stand for either _klama_ or _jbama_ (bomb). Now I would gladly sacrifice tthe complexity of the self-segregation (i.e. having to learn the rafsi & tosmabru rules, etc. etc.) for the price of having to guess from context whether the compound refers to a kind of going or to a kind of bomb (assuming I was unfamiliar with the word). ----- And. >From ucleaar%ucl.ac.uk@mail-b.bcc.ac.uk Fri May 21 20:21:48 1993 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Message-Id: <9305211756.AA144964@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: lojban@cuvma.earn, conlang@diku.dk, Logical Language Group Subject: Re: Cowan on morphology In-Reply-To: (Your message of Fri, 21 May 93 10:52:15 EDT.) <9305211453.AA55147@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 21 May 93 18:56:07 +0100 Sender: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk > I hate to complain, but could And enlighten us to what he finds baroque > or ghastly about Lojban morphology. I can'rt think of anything much > simpler than having components that represent each possible root, and > putting them together in the order they would appear in a syntactic > based compound. You can call it complex to have multiple choices for the > morpheme to represent some roots in some positions, but since you can always > use the longest form, and ALL forms of the root are identical in meaning > and completely interchangeable, the effects of this polymorphism is minimized > in terms of langauge understanding, while allowing for a redundancy that > Lojban like most highly regular conlangs, tends to otherwise lack. Rafsi have to be memorized: although there is only a finite number of potential phonological structures for the rafsi of any given gismu, this number can be quite large, and one has to learn which of this large number are actually correct. Even after one has learnt one rafsi, there may still be more rafsi to learn for the same word. Rafsi are (fairly) freely varying allomorphs, so if a lujvo contains 3 rafsi, and the gismu for each rafsi has 3 rafsi, then this lujvo has 27 alternative forms. This, I would predict, could vastly impede word recognition. It is well known that many or most readers recognize words by their visual shape. Quite possibly when listening we recognize words holistically by their acoustic shape. Only with unfamiliar words do we bother to do a morphological breakdown. The rules for what constitues a legal lujvo are also complicated. I don't think that the longest forms of rafsi are the ones generally used. Ju'i Lobypli is read mainly by people with low Lojban competence, but the journal does not have a policy of using only 5-letter rafsi. Also, it might be difficult for a competent speaker to remember to reform familiar lujvo into 5-letter rafsi for the benefit of a less competent interlocutor. As for redundancy, I think that for a long time to come the problems of memorizing the vocabulary will loom larger for Lojban users than the problems of talking in a noisy environment. Also, the risk of two brivla having similar sound and equally plausible meaning in context is less acute than the risk of two cmavo having similar sounds and equally plausible meaning in context. It's the cmavo where lack of redundancy is a problem, though even here I think that the mnemonicity gained is worth the redundancy lost. ------ And. >From lojbab@grebyn.com Sat May 22 20:47:13 1993 Date: Sat, 22 May 93 14:47:09 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9305221847.AA21970@grebyn.com> To: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Subject: Re: Cowan on morphology Cc: conlang@diku.dk, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu I don't see how our morphology for compounds has anything to do with learnability of >gismu<. You can learn gismu without learning either rafsi or lujvo. I can't speak for Nick or Colin, but I suspect that most often, people arew writing without particular regard for their audience, or perhaps to write at an audience that they know will be using the word lists, or to write for their peers in the use of the language, who have a reasonable chance of knowing the rafsi in question. I agree that it would be nice to have more texts aimed at beginners, but people don't write such texts. My statement about use of rafsi applied to the experiences we have had here in LIVE conversation, both conversation sessions, and at LogFests. Very few lujvo, and the ones that are used are composed of rafsi that are well known (like 'sel-' for se conversion, etc.), and I myself use some expanded lujvo, when creating them on the fly - OR, if I get a blank look, I expand it immediately for the listener. I think the conversations on the IRC have also minimized lujvo. A lujvo based on klama in final position should have something to do with 'klama'ing. Now the language won't always be under prescriptive control, but while it is, I suspect that no 'sapphire' ending in 'klama' words will get into the dictionary. Indeed, at the moment within the community, there remains a very strong literalism trend that objected to the relatively lesser sloppiness of JCB, who used 'zmadu' (x makes why from z) for causals in a very malglico manner. The standard that we teach is that a lujvo should represent one specific meaning from among the possible meanings that the associated tanru would have, recognizing that some amount of tanru modification could take place to bring places fromt he modifier terms into the lujvo. The primary debate has actually been whether the determination of such place structures should be more or less algorithmic from the source tanru, which practice has NOT been accepted. But Nick's writings on lujvo making are promoting a standard only one step less drastic. Loglan pre-GMR was very much like what you suggest would be better - allowing jbama and klama to both be represented by -ama in a compound. It was not as you say - people had to memorize every word they wanted to use, and to rely on the dictionary for every little thing they did. The result was that there was far less Loglan text written than you see these days being posted to Lojban List. And people DIDN'T like it, and they complained. And one noted linguist (Zwicky) was especially critical of this. lojbab >From fschulz@pyramid.com Sat May 22 22:29:15 1993 Message-Id: <9305222029.AA01204@pyrps5.eng.pyramid.com> Subject: self-segregating morphemes To: conlang@diku.dk (constructed lang) Date: Sat, 22 May 93 13:29:01 PDT From: fschulz@pyramid.com Reply-To: fschulz@pyramid.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] I like self-segregating morphemes. When I read a lojban text, I make a separate pass where I expand the rafsi into gismu form without knowing any meanings. Ambiguous morphemes like 'ama' for both 'jbama' and 'klama' would totally disrupt my decoding process ( which involves using a computer to do the lookup ). I do want the relationship between rafsi and gismu to be algorithmic. One way to do this is to restrict gismu to CCVCV form, insist on uniqueness in the first 3 letters, and strip off the last 2 letters to form the rafsi. That is: jbama -> jba klama -> kla This does require generating lots of CCV forms. I would rather learn to generate and recognize new phoneme patterns, than to deal with the complex lojban morphology. Easy C form additions are velar nasals and voiced velar fricitives. -- Frank Schulz ( fschulz@pyramid.com ) >From jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu Sat May 22 23:40:41 1993 Date: Sat, 22 May 93 14:38:49 -0700 From: jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero) Posted-Date: Sat, 22 May 93 14:38:49 -0700 Message-Id: <9305222138.AA03597@glia.biostr.washington.edu> Received: by glia.biostr.washington.edu (911016.SGI/Eno-0.1) id AA03597; Sat, 22 May 93 14:38:49 -0700 Apparently-To: conlang@diku.dk | One way to do this is to restrict gismu to CCVCV | form, insist on uniqueness in the first 3 letters, and strip | off the last 2 letters to form the rafsi... I suggested this to Jim Brown during GMR, and his objection at the time was lack of sufficient CCV forms. I failed to respond that by promoting some 'effective' vowel such as 'r' to C status, and shifting to CC*V (any number of Cs followed by a V) as the affix form, one could have an indefinitely last (large) space of trivially resolvable morphemes... I'm not sure if he would have been swayed, he tends to stick with his own ideas, and he's very fond of classifying Loglan words using his lenghth-mod-3 schemes, but the idea remains workable. >From EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Sun May 23 02:03:31 1993 To: conlang@diku.dk, ez-as-pi@cup.portal.com From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Subject: Ido - new(?) dictionary/grammar Lines: 27 Date: Sat, 22 May 93 17:06:48 PDT Message-Id: <9305221706.2.10714@cup.portal.com> X-Origin: The Portal System (TM) I just received in the mail today a newly published booklet (36 pp. about 1/2 normal page size) entitled: "Basic Grammar and Vocabulary of the International Language Ido." It is put out by the International Language (Ido) Society of Great Britain (ILSGB) and I got it since I am on the mailing list, but I believe anyone can get it from them c/o Terry Minty, 44 Woodville Rd., Cathays, Cardiff, Wales CF2 4EB. The high quality of this publication clearly shows that the Ido movement, though not very active in the US, is quite vital in Britain. The booklet contains a short (about 7 pp.) grammar, and both an English-Ido and Ido vocabulary. The vocabulary is surprisingly detailed; three Ido words are given for English "child" with the distinction made very precisely. (infanto = under 7 yrs.; puero = 7-15 yrs.; filio = son or daughter) I must state that considering its size this is probably the best thought-out conlang dictionary I have seen. Bruce >From EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Sun May 23 02:20:10 1993 To: conlang@diku.dk, ez-as-pi@cup.portal.com From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com Subject: Ambiguity Lines: 33 Date: Sat, 22 May 93 17:23:28 PDT Message-Id: <9305221723.1.10714@cup.portal.com> X-Origin: The Portal System (TM) While Everson's examples show an odd (to English speakers) word whose meaning overlaps a series of words in English which seem to have nothing in common, I would have to maintain that it would not be possible to find a xcorresponding example given any pair of languages. The German "Zug" can mean anything from a train to a suit of clothes (apparently the only thing common to all the meanings is that they are either pulled into place or pull something else, since the etymol- ogy is from a Germanic root that means "pull"). The English verb "carry" has a bewildering number of equivalents in Chinese, and even "know" has two in French, German, or Spanish. Any conlang designer is likely to be somewhat blind to the ambiguities in his native language, and I suspect therefore that almost every one has inherited ambigu- ities in consequence. (Perhaps Lojban has avoided them. I know that someone in the Lojban group has pointed out some in JCB's Loglan, so that has not; in this context if a word can be shown to have two meanings that are different to ANYONE, it is an ambiguity even if nobody else sees it as such!) I would not be surprised, however, if they can be found in Lojban as well. Bruce >From jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu Sun May 23 03:54:15 1993 Date: Sat, 22 May 93 18:46:38 -0700 From: jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero) Posted-Date: Sat, 22 May 93 18:46:38 -0700 Message-Id: <9305230146.AA04842@glia.biostr.washington.edu> Received: by glia.biostr.washington.edu (911016.SGI/Eno-0.1) id AA04842; Sat, 22 May 93 18:46:38 -0700 Apparently-To: conlang@diku.dk | if a word can be shown to have two meanings that are different to ANYONE I would very much appreciate someone providing a precise, formal definition of what it means for a word to have "two meanings" in this sense. Even proper nouns refer, in general, to a large and fuzzily delimited set of spacetime events; vanilla nouns and verbs ('predicates', if you prefer) denote enormously infinite collections of potential referents, which may be subsetted or supersetted essentially without limit. Can we truly come up with a meaningful (heh) definition of what it means for a word to have a single meaning, which yet allows us anything but proper nouns in our language? Loglan and its descendents have traditionally distinguished between semantic and syntactic ambiguity; periodic flames from newcomers on the importance of "single meanings" not withstanding, Loglanfolk have contented themselves with attempting to eliminate >syntactic< ambiguity. I'd like to see conlangfolk take on "meaning", actually, but I think the first step would be to specify the meaning of a sentence in terms of its parts and structure, not to formally analyse the meanings of the words in the predicate vocabulary. Professional linguists, mathematicians, and computer scientists have been formally describing the meanings of languages of various sorts for varying numbers of decades now; it is not too soon for conlangs to begin to specify not just what sentences are allowed, but what they are supposed to mean. Yes, I'm aware of some honorable steps in this direction *grin*. >From lojbab@grebyn.com Sun May 23 20:59:31 1993 Date: Sun, 23 May 93 14:59:27 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9305231859.AA08724@grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: self-segregating morphemes Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu The problem with Frank Schulz's suggestion is that you would either have to greatly expand the selection of permissible initial consonant clusters, or you would only have something like 240 gismu with combining forms. Part of the reason for 'all that complexity' is the requirement that ALL gosmu have combining forms, not just some of them, and that the gismu/rafsi list have some (if not a lot) expansibility, so that new gismu can be added when new concepts arise. On this subject, though. I was thinking last night, and I realized that there is another system that has two-level segregation, and which people seem to learn without too much trouble: the chemical elements and their symbols. You effectively have some 100 'gismu', the full element names, and their atomic symbols, as rafsi. People studying chemistry have to learn both to effectively learn material. While the numbers are smaller, I do not recall any particular difficulty in learning atomic symbols as I needed them, and thus being able to identify the components of a chemical compound (a 'lujvo'), even though several of the symbols are not even mnemonic. What happens, and I think it happens with Lojban as well, is that you learn a few of them because they occur all of the time. Then as you see most compouns, you know where to look up what you don't know, but you ususally know at least part of the compound (and sometimes, just as in language text, context can tell you what a symbol means). Even though I have studied no chemistry for some 20 years, i still recall most of the chemical elements, and probably could recognize 80% of the chemical symbols, and recall at least 50%, yet we only run into a few of the symbols in 'everyday life'. I presume that most chemists, or chemistry students (i.e. comparable to people who are serious about learning Lojban) get close to 100% long before they understand a fraction of the syntax (things like valences and whatever) that controls what formulaes are plausible and/or likely (though I seem to recall that we could learn to make good guesses in that area too by the end of 1st year high school chem). Whether this means Lojban's sytem is learnable, i can't say. I know I have had no particular trouble, though I am not good at languages (my Russian vocabulary is growing much slower than my Lojban vocabulary did, and I use Russian far more often). lojbab >From fschulz@pyramid.com Sun May 23 22:47:25 1993 Message-Id: <9305232047.AA13421@pyrps5.eng.pyramid.com> Subject: semantic ambiguity To: conlang@diku.dk (constructed lang) Date: Sun, 23 May 93 13:47:16 PDT From: fschulz@pyramid.com Reply-To: fschulz@pyramid.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Semantic ambiguity of words is a very difficult issue. Take "blue" for instance. This separates an arbitrary region of color space and some culture could split the space in half and have words for two kinds of blue. Colors are an easy case because we have obvious metrics for distance. Coming up with metrics for semantic space in general is not obvious. Take the case Bruce gives, where Chinese breaks "carry" into several meanings. A language could split "carry" into "carried by male" and "carried by female". This is not ok and carry should not be regarded as ambiguous because of this. I do not know the Chinese meanings but suspect they show legitimate problems with the English usage. I believe conlang designers should check multiple languages to verify that a word list cleanly partitions semantic space. The attempt to cleanly partition is so difficult that it will probably fail, but I still believe a best effort should be made. Another aproach would be a set of partitioning huristics which would give clues to bad partitioning. It would be nice to at least have some set of guidelines which would reject the Irish word with lots of meanings. Compound words have their own set of semantic ambiguity problems. Say we have the following set of morphemes: bla = blue zda = house lba = wolf pre = person Consider 3 ways to form compounds with the following markers: a = semantic restriction e = semantic extension i = poetic semantic association Now "bla-a-zda" is a word whose domain is a subset of the core meaning "zda". "lba-e-pre" (werewolf) has domain which is formed by going outside the domain of "pre" but staying nearby using a direction suggested by "lba". For "bla-i-zda" anything goes. In this case, dancing is taking place in a house, the dancers covered with red paint. Historically, the dancers were covered with blue paint, but no longer. New we have a mechanism to build the Irish word, using -i- form compounds. -- Frank Schulz ( fschulz@pyramid.com ) >From j.guy@trl.oz.au Mon May 24 02:11:26 1993 From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9305240010.AA16831@medici.trl.OZ.AU> Subject: semantic ambiguity To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Mon, 24 May 1993 10:10:28 +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: 1197 Language, having a finite number of phonemes, finite number of structures, and being spoken by mortal beings, is necessarily finite. Hues of meaning, on the other hand, are amenable to infinite hair-splitting. Hence semantic ambiguity is unavoidable. I'd rather tackle the problem from the angle of semantic domains. Where a word (or a syntactic structure, for that matter) covers *disjunct* semantic domains, let us speak of semantic ambiguity. For instance, the English word "bill" covers at least two clearly disjunct domains: 1. beak of bird, 2. list of payments required. Generally, I'd say that, when semantic ambiguity of that kind arises, it is far better to have a word cover semantic domains as distant from one another as possible: disambiguation by context ought to be easier in that case. It seems to me to boils down to partioning the whole, undifferentiated semantic universe into well-defined clusters/groups/taxa such that the distance between any two members of one group/domain/cluster is recognizably less than their distance from any member of another group. The problem is: what metrics to use? How to discover an efficient metrics (objective function, if you prefer)? >From jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu Mon May 24 07:12:58 1993 Date: Sun, 23 May 93 22:14:21 -0700 From: jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero) Posted-Date: Sun, 23 May 93 22:14:21 -0700 Message-Id: <9305240514.AA12252@glia.biostr.washington.edu> Received: by glia.biostr.washington.edu (911016.SGI/Eno-0.1) id AA12252; Sun, 23 May 93 22:14:21 -0700 Apparently-To: conlang@diku.dk | Where a word (or a syntactic structure, for that matter) covers | *disjunct* semantic domains, let us speak of semantic ambiguity. | For instance, the English word "bill" covers at least two | clearly disjunct domains: 1. beak of bird, 2. list of payments | required. This has intuitive plausibility, but I'm not sure a practical metric for this can be established... does "vehicle" cover disjunct semantic domains, or not? Some might argue that they are all much of a muchness, and others might see little in common between trucks and cars... or perhaps bicycles and space shuttles... ? >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Mon May 24 16:24:33 1993 Date: Mon, 24 May 93 16:24:32 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9305241424.AA18019@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Archive available, administrivia Folks, I have finally gotten around to making the archive available. Try the command 'index conlang' to listserv@diku.dk (*NOT* to conlang@diku.dk, please!) If you don't know how to get the files, say 'help'. In other news, I am setting 100063.344@compuserve.com and David Wolff to POSTPONE, as their bounces are filling my mailbox. If anybody knows how to get word to these worthies, please tell them to contact me --- from a replyable address, mind you! Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) >From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Mon May 24 20:52:31 1993 Message-Id: From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: Cowan on morphology To: conlang@diku.dk (conlang) Date: Mon, 24 May 1993 12:24:21 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <9305202144.AA00518@relay1.UU.NET> from "Mr Andrew Rosta" at May 20, 93 10:42:37 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 2052 Mr Andrew Rosta writes: > Whereas > if one knows the meanings of the words in a Lojban sentence one > may be sure of the sentence's meaning, if one knows only the meanings > of the morphemes in a Lojban word one cannot be sure of the word's > meaning: the meaning of the compound word has to be stipulated in > a dictionary just like any monomorphemic word; the meanings of > the morphemes simply serve as possible but not necessary indicators > of the sort of meaning the word might have. This claim is both too strong and too weak. In fact, knowing the meanings of all words is not enough to know sentence meaning, due to the (specified) sources of semantic ambiguity: content-word open compounding, ellipsis, and names. I believe that the best word to characterize the relationship between morpheme meaning and compound-word meaning is "motivated", in more or less Lakoff's sense: the meanings of morphemes do not determine the meanings of compounds, but do give excellent general guidelines to that meaning. Not everything in the world can be fitted into a dichotomy of "arbitrary" vs. "predictable". > Since the meaning of Lojban compounds is not predictable, the > unambiguous morphology is not really very useful, and it adds > extraordinary complexity to the language and to the task of > acquiring vocabulary. I don't see this. If you treat the compound words as beyond useful analysis, they are no harder to acquire than any other system of construction, including the most arbitrary. We acquire English words easily, but have to learn morphemic analysis painfully -- and in many cases, even the learned may be in doubt. I agree that the complex morphology makes words more difficult to invent on the fly. > A more rational design would make words self-segrating, but not > morphemes. Even if morphemes fail to self-segregate, they would > still serve as clues to the word's meaning. Yes, but the collision problem would remain. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From lojbab@grebyn.com Tue May 25 07:09:06 1993 Date: Tue, 25 May 93 01:08:55 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9305250508.AA05098@grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Cowan on morphology Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu I disagree with John that Lojban's word-making system makes ad hoc lujvo making difficult, based on first person experience. Even though I never memorized more than 50% of the rafsi (and I'm the only one I know who made enough of a systematic effort to even give a percentage), I was able to make words on the fly with no trouble, and for the most part, others were limited in understanding only when I used rafsi that they didn't know, and they learned the ones that I used most often rather quickly through ad hoc analysis in conversation (I am speaking of Sylvia and Athelstan especially in this regard, since neither had finished even mastering the gismu list at the time I was in my heyday of lujvo-making in converswation). Similarly, the people who have been producing Lojban text in quantity - especially Nick - seem to have had no inhibitiions abobout making and using lujvo. Where he din;t know, he sometimes guessed, and sometimes was even caught in his guesses, but many of the people who reviewed Nick's writing were able to understand and translate his results even though there were some rafsi errors and invalid forms, which shows that even for new people that HAVEN'T memorized the word lists, they can take apart lujvo on the fly, and presumably use context and guessing on the source gismu to interpolate meaning (I admit that I am worse at this than most - having formally memorized some of the rafsi, I am less tolerant of errors in rafsi because I reconstruct the word based on my knowledghe rather than guessing and hence get the wrong answer). Dozens of lujvo made it through the text reviews with errors, only to be caught mor erecently when Nora's glosser allowed us to be able to analyze lujvo in text for validity of form and to check to see if expansions were what the speaker intended. IN short, what I am saying is that the language WORKS in practice, with not very well-studied speakers, writers, and listeners/ readers. Hence arguments that the morphology is 'too complex' for ad hoc use are demonstrably false. ni'o Nora reminded me this evening, when I first mentioned this thread to her, that at one point she facetiously suggested a method of achieving perfect separation of words with no complex rules - just end all words with the same vowel, one that does not occur in the middles of words. This came up when we considered briefly changing the Lojban morphology as part of the spl split from JCB. Suppose, for example, that the final vowel of a Lojban word, whatver it was, was changed to the reduced (always unstressed) schwa, and some other means was found for hyphenating - probably the syllavbic r/n/l that is used for le'avla and some lujvo already. Yeah, the language would be simpler, and the rules would be too, but I don't think it would still be Loglan - too much of a different feel. And we still would have had to come up with rules for lujvo (even if they would have been simpler) le'avla (likewise), and cmavo (which would have a real problem if they also had to end in a schwa). In effect, of course, this silly idea of Nora's DOES occur in Loglan/Lojban - in names, where as a result there is almost no rules for internal structure (but of course no 2nd level of segregation, or even a way to tell a word turned into a name from a Lojban root as opposed to Lojbanized from another language). Lojban names alll end in a way that makes them distinct - consonant followed by pause. lojbab >From ucleaar%ucl.ac.uk@mail-b.bcc.ac.uk Wed May 26 19:50:33 1993 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Message-Id: <9305261703.AA15496@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Cc: conlang@diku.dk, lojban@cuvma.earn Subject: Re: Cowan on morphology In-Reply-To: (Your message of Sat, 22 May 93 14:47:09 EDT.) <9305221847.AA21970@grebyn.com> Date: Wed, 26 May 93 18:03:16 +0100 Sender: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk > I don't see how our morphology for compounds has anything to do with > learnability of >gismu<. You can learn gismu without learning either > rafsi or lujvo. By "gismu" I meant "the grammar of gismu", i.e. meaning, phonological structure, morphology. There is a distinction between morphological gismu & "lexical" gismu. I don't know what the proper term is for the category that includes a gismu & its associated rafsi. > I can't speak for Nick or Colin, but I suspect that most often, people > arew writing without particular regard for their audience, or perhaps > to write at an audience that they know will be using the word lists, > or to write for their peers in the use of the language, who have a > reasonable chance of knowing the rafsi in question. I agree that it > would be nice to have more texts aimed at beginners, but people don't > write such texts. I agree. I meant simply that although it is *possible* for peopleto use 5-letter rafsi, they don't in practise. I'm not suggesting people *ought* to use 5-letter rafsi. > My statement about use of rafsi applied to the experiences we have had > here in LIVE conversation, both conversation sessions, and at LogFests. > Very few lujvo, and the ones that are used are composed of rafsi that > are well known (like 'sel-' for se conversion, etc.), and I myself use > some expanded lujvo, when creating them on the fly - OR, if I get a blank > look, I expand it immediately for the listener. I think the conversations > on the IRC have also minimized lujvo. But is the use of expanded rafsi due to speakers being considerate, or to speakers not being fluent enough to *use* shorter rafsi? > A lujvo based on klama in final position should have something to do with > 'klama'ing. Now the language won't always be under prescriptive control, > but while it is, I suspect that no 'sapphire' ending in 'klama' words will > get into the dictionary. Indeed, at the moment within the community, there > remains a very strong literalism trend that objected to the relatively > lesser sloppiness of JCB, who used 'zmadu' (x makes why from z) for causals > in a very malglico manner. The standard that we teach is that a lujvo > should represent one specific meaning from among the possible meanings that > the associated tanru would have, recognizing that some amount of tanru > modification could take place to bring places fromt he modifier terms into > the lujvo. The primary debate has actually been whether the determination of > such place structures should be more or less algorithmic from the source > tanru, which practice has NOT been accepted. But Nick's writings on lujvo > making are promoting a standard only one step less drastic. I'm just going by what the grammar says. If the above paragraph represents official policy, the rules on lujvo formation should be tightened. > Loglan pre-GMR was very much like what you suggest would be better - > allowing jbama and klama to both be represented by -ama in a compound. > It was not as you say - people had to memorize every word they wanted to use, > and to rely on the dictionary for every little thing they did. The result > was that there was far less Loglan text written than you see these days > being posted to Lojban List. And people DIDN'T like it, and they complained. > And one noted linguist (Zwicky) was especially critical of this. I think this would depend on the compounding rules, & also on how phonologically distinct gismu are from each other. I didn't actuallysuggest that allowing -ama to represent _jbama_ & _klama_ would be better; I suggested that regular compounding rules would be better, & cited -ama as an example. In Zwicky's 1969 _Language_ review I cannot find a criticism of Loglan's morphotactics. I can, however, find a criticism (p448, top) of the lack of semantically regular, grammatically prescribed word formation rules. ---- And >From ucleaar%ucl.ac.uk@mail-b.bcc.ac.uk Wed May 26 19:50:51 1993 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Message-Id: <9305261720.AA44994@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: semantic ambiguity In-Reply-To: (Your message of Sun, 23 May 93 23:19:13 O.) <9305232047.AA13421@pyrps5.eng.pyramid.com> Date: Wed, 26 May 93 18:20:31 +0100 Sender: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Frank Schulz: > Consider 3 ways to form compounds with the following markers: > a = semantic restriction > e = semantic extension > i = poetic semantic association I think this is a good idea. --- &. >From ucleaar%ucl.ac.uk@mail-b.bcc.ac.uk Wed May 26 19:50:54 1993 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Message-Id: <9305261727.AA44907@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: lojban@cuvma.earn, conlang@diku.dk, Chris Handley Subject: Re: Cowan on morphology In-Reply-To: (Your message of Mon, 24 May 93 13:37:31 Y.) <9305240226.AA133624@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 26 May 93 18:27:30 +0100 Sender: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Chris writes: > After some 'discussion' between And and lojbab, lojbab wrote: [I hope the scarequotes aren't really necessary.] > > Loglan pre-GMR was very much like what you suggest would be better - > >allowing jbama and klama to both be represented by -ama in a compound. It > >was not as you say - people had to memorize every word they wanted to use, > >and to rely on the dictionary for every little thing they did. > > > Apart from anything else, recognising a word from its ending is phenomenally > difficult. If you don't believe me, try a little test. Take twenty words at > random (all about the same length) and divide them into two groups. For one > group supply a definition and the initial syllable, for the other group > supply a definition and the last syllable. Now test your friends and see how > many they get right. I know what I expect, I would like tio see what results > you get. (a) I wasn't advocating this system. I agree word-beginnings are easier to recognize. (b) even this system wold be more learnable than present lojban rafsi. --- And >From ucleaar%ucl.ac.uk@mail-b.bcc.ac.uk Wed May 26 20:56:51 1993 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Message-Id: <9305261855.AA26801@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: lojban@cuvma.earn, conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Cowan on morphology In-Reply-To: (Your message of Mon, 24 May 93 21:19:15 O.) Date: Wed, 26 May 93 19:55:53 +0100 Sender: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk John Cowan writes: > Mr Andrew Rosta writes: > I believe that the best word to characterize the relationship between > morpheme meaning and compound-word meaning is "motivated", in more or > less Lakoff's sense: the meanings of morphemes do not determine the > meanings of compounds, but do give excellent general guidelines to that > meaning. Not everything in the world can be fitted into a dichotomy > of "arbitrary" vs. "predictable". (a) The grammar at present does not require compounds to be motivated. (b) Compounds can be motivated without self-segregating morphology. > > Since the meaning of Lojban compounds is not predictable, the > > unambiguous morphology is not really very useful, and it adds > > extraordinary complexity to the language and to the task of > > acquiring vocabulary. > > I don't see this. If you treat the compound words as beyond useful > analysis, they are no harder to acquire than any other system of > construction, including the most arbitrary. We acquire English words > easily, but have to learn morphemic analysis painfully -- and in many > cases, even the learned may be in doubt. Lojban compounds have lots of 'allologues' (I don't know the technical term, if there is one): the same word may be spelt & pronounced in numerous different ways. This makes them especially tough to learn. ---- And. >From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Thu May 27 00:05:11 1993 Message-Id: From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: Cowan on morphology To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Wed, 26 May 1993 17:00:41 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <9305261855.AA26801@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> from "Mr Andrew Rosta" at May 26, 93 09:32:24 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1205 Mr Andrew Rosta writes: > (a) The grammar at present does not require compounds to be motivated. I'm not sure what it means to "require [something] to be motivated". Compounds are motivated because that is the way in which the language designers have built them, and recommend to language users (as a part of teaching the language) that they be built. > (b) Compounds can be motivated without self-segregating morphology. Yes; these are independent issues. We use self-segregating morphology primarily to avoid collisions in word-making. > Lojban compounds have lots of 'allologues' (I don't know the technical > term, if there is one): the same word may be spelt & pronounced in > numerous different ways. This makes them especially tough to learn. Agreed. However, there is an algorithm that assigns figures of merit to the different allologues, and the one with the highest merit is the unmarked variant. This algorithm is still being refined and hasn't been published, but generally it favors 1) brevity, 2) minimizing consonant triples 3) minimizing epenthetics ("hyphens" in Loglan jargon). -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From lojbab@grebyn.com Thu May 27 05:37:39 1993 Date: Wed, 26 May 93 23:37:18 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9305270337.AA10239@grebyn.com> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu Subject: John Hodges on "Why Lojban?" John Hodges submitted the following essay, and asked that I post it to the net for comment. He is interested in comments from non-Lojbanists as well as Lojbanists, hence I am posting it to conlang as well. As will be obvious from the posting, John is among other things a student of philosophy/ethics, and is especially interested in philosophical issues of conlangs. lojbab Consider Klingon. Noticeable numbers of Star Trek fans are teaching themselves to speak Klingon. You commented, "They have certain marketing advantages." Certainly they do- publicity, media exposure, celebrity endorsement, support of a major publishing giant. Fans learn it to associate and identify with these great adventure stories on TV. (We should tell SF and fantasy writers that this other strange, simple, carefully-worked-out language is available, public domain.) We have to think about marketing ourselves. Consider also Esperanto. One (by no means the only) approach to ethics regards it as the practical question of how to maintain peaceful and cooperative relations with your neighbors. By this approach, the ultimate goal of ethics would be World Peace. (You expand your circle of neighbors until you are maintaining peaceful and cooperative relations with all the people there are.) This is the moral crusade that the Esperantists set out on over 100 years ago. Dr. Zamenhof saw his neighbors (in eastern Poland) divided into hostile groups largely along lines of language. He reasoned that a constructed language, culturally and politically neutral (i.e. not the property of any contending party), and easy to learn, would provide a way for people divided by language to meet each other halfway. The International Language movement, having begun with Volapk, switched en masse to Esperanto. Later came the Ido split, which divided this movement for World Peace into quarreling factions and thereby took a lot of wind out of their sails. Then came World War 2; The Nazis (of course) saw them as undesirables and killed many. Since WW2 there have been other problems... by sheer persistence the Esperantists have accumulated ~10,000 books translated or written in their language, have built a network of organizations spanning ~100 countries, and have taught ~2,000,000 people. On the one hand, this is only 0.04% of the world's population; on the other, it is far beyond the accomplishments of other constructed languages, which typically number their active membership in the dozens. I believe their persistence owes much to their moral idealism; it is not just a hobby to them. Soon Lojban will have printed, bound books to sell. How shall we sell them? What reasons shall we give, when people ask "Why Lojban?" What is our point? What useful function do we serve? What moral crusade do we offer, what hope for making the world better? I have a proposal for discussion. We can give five reasons. 1) The hope for beneficial Sapir-Whorf effects. 2) The potential for computer applications. 3) Future potential as an international common tongue. 4) A game, a personal mind-expander. 5) The Elephant. The original and still primary goal of Lojban is to serve as an experimental vehicle for scientific research into the interaction of language, thought, and culture. In particular, we hope to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which states that the structure of a language constrains the thinking of people using it. Lojban has a grammar built around predicate logic, and is designed to be exceedingly flexible in expression, to minimize constraints on thought. We hope that people who think in Lojban will think more logically and/or more flexibly than they do in a natural language. I have a personal fondness for this goal. The early pioneers of aviation had a dream: "Someday, people will fly." The Esperantists have a dream: "Someday, people will not be divided by language." I have a dream: "Someday, people will think logically." Even if there is no effect on thinking, Lojban can be used as a teaching vehicle for logic and language. Somebody (Perhaps me- any others?) would have to write teaching material with that orientation. Is this in any way a moral cause? Science is a method of inquiry, of seeking increased understanding. There are certain virtues necessary to the practice of scientific inquiry... beginning with the admission that we are not infallible and may not already know the complete truth. (Including the complete truth about ethics.) Honesty, willingness to learn from all sources, giving a fair hearing to original thinking and diverse views, willingness to admit error, care and attention to detail, being observant, subordinating your own theories and wishes to the evidence. The pursuit of understanding is certainly a moral goal, beneficial both to the individual and to society. The attitudes and virtues of science, when carried over to dealing with other people, create a non-authoritarian and democratic sort of society. (For more on this, see John Stuart Mill, ON LIBERTY, and Jacob Bronowski, SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES.) A second major goal influencing the design of Lojban was to make it "computer-friendly." The grammar, pronunciation, and word- forms of Lojban are unambiguous. Lojban words have no homonyms and no multiple unrelated meanings. Computers can transcribe, parse, analyse, and translate it far more easily than any other human language. There may be many computer applications of Lojban, for databases, AI work, etc., but my favorite dream here is the translator-box. Travelers could carry a box, into which they speak (or type) Lojban, and out of which comes an automatic translation that may be wordy and stilted but WILL say what they intended to say. Given such boxes, people would have a reason to learn Lojban even if no one in the country they are to visit speaks it. The usefulness of Lojban to travelers would not depend on the number of other speakers but on the number of plug-in languages available for the translator-box. Also, those studying another natural language could use the box as an interactive teacher, for any of the available plug-in languages. Machine translation seems to me the project most likely to give tangible results within a small number of years. It is a project that can be worked on by a small number of widely scattered people. It is a project that is academically respectable, suitable for theses and grants. It can be done by people who are not terribly fluent in anything but their native tongue. Intermediate results, software that gives bad but decipherable translations, can still be useful, as research and as teaching tools. People who are not AI programmers can still contribute to the development of translator boxes. By searching out "How would you say X", and adding to the vocabulary, you are adding to the translation algorithm/database between Lojban and your native tongue. You thereby contribute to the future fluency OF all Lojban speakers IN your native tongue. A third goal is future use as an international common tongue. The obvious first question is "What about Esperanto?" Do we wish to challenge the Esperantists for this particular niche? In my opinion, not just now. But, maybe later. Chapter 3 of David Richardson's Esperanto textbook begins "Early schemes for an international language were rather more the work of philosophers than linguists. These inventions seem to have been intended to promote logical thought as much as to facilitate universal communication." Descartes and Leibnitz, for two examples, worked on inventing such a language, but the state of the art in relevant fields was insufficient. Lojban is the modern- day incarnation of that dream. Esperanto, by contrast, was invented by a linguist (polyglot) for ordinary people to use in mundane life, and he focused on making it simple, functional, and easy to learn. If Esperanto is the peacemaker's language, and Lojban the philosopher's, they may coexist. But if they both aim at being a global common tongue, conflict seems inevitable. Relations between Lojbanists and Esperantists are a complex subject. I have great admiration and respect for the Esperanto movement, and I would like to see some accomodation, even alliance, made. To start with, I think for the time being anyone whose major interest is an international common tongue should learn Esperanto, either "in addition" or just plain "instead." We should also have an Esperanto translation of our teaching material. The field of "constructed languages intended to serve as an international common tongue" is a natural monopoly. You only need one; you only want one. Whatever the virtues or flaws of Esperanto, the relevant question for any alternate candidate is not "Is it better?" but "Is it ENOUGH better to justify abandoning all the work that the Esperantists have already done?" To answer "yes", an alternate language would need to have radical advantages. I think that well-functioning, cheap, portable translator-boxes would provide one. At present, it is far easier in most parts of the world to find a speaker of English or French than of Esperanto. To use Esperanto, not only YOU have to speak it, but those you are speaking TO must also. But given translator- boxes, you could make yourself understood in places where no one else spoke Lojban. That, and a few dozen words of the local tongue, would suffice for most travelers. If such boxes became common, local people who do business with travelers would be constantly hearing Lojban followed by translations in their own tongue; they might learn Lojban themselves that way, or study it just to eliminate the middlebox. The boxes would provide the entering wedge, to give everyone learning a second language a practical reason to choose the same one. Once started, the forces of "natural monopoly" would take over, and eventually the boxes would no longer be needed. Significant Sapir-Whorf improvements in thinking, if any occur, would also give a reason for preferring Lojban to Esperanto. So, AFTER we get tangible results in the areas of Sapir-Whorf or machine translation, we may have grounds for invading the Esperantist's turf. Even in that event, cooperation may be possible. There is much work being done on computer analysis and translation of Esperanto. Once experiment shows that good T-boxes are possible, rather than take either language as it stands, perhaps what has been learned can be used to make a new language, adding cmavo to Esperanto perhaps, to make a language both speakable and machine-friendly. "T-box E-o" might be a superset of existing E-o, with added logical operators, scope delimiters, and spoken punctuation. Even if not, if Lojban "as is" wholly displaces Esperanto, we would be offering an alternate route to the same goal. If the goal of fostering world peace by means of an international common tongue was achieved, I think Zamenhof would not much mind that the language was not his. A fourth reason is as a game, a personal mind expander. A speakable form of logic, extremely flexible in expression, offers a good chance of learning SOMETHING from every exercise in translation or composition. The effort of saying things in Lojban, "in the Lojbanic spirit", involves getting beyond familiar structures and idiom, stating what you mean clearly in a culture- transcending way. You see more deeply into logic, language, AND the subject of which you are speaking. There are also varieties of wordplay not found elsewhere, to compensate for some that are lost. Every completed composition contributes to the other goals of Lojban as well. Finally, the Elephant. The Blind Men and the Elephant by John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887) It was six men of Indostan to learning much inclined, Who went to see the Elephant (though all of them were blind), That each by observation might satisfy his mind. The first approached the Elephant, and happening to fall Against his broad and sturdy side, at once began to bawl: "God bless me! but the Elephant is very like a wall!" The second, feeling of the tusk, cried "Ho! What have we here So very round and smooth and sharp? To me 'tis mighty clear This wonder of an Elephant is very like a spear!" The third approached the animal, and happening to take The squirming trunk within his hands, thus boldly up and spake: "I see," quoth he, "the Elephant is very like a snake!" The fourth reached out an eager hand, and felt about the knee. "What most this wondrous beast is like is mighty plain," quoth he; " 'Tis clear enough the Elephant is very like a tree!" The fifth who chanced to touch the ear, said: "E'en the blindest man Can tell what this resembles most; deny the fact who can, This marvel of an Elephant is very like a fan!" The sixth no sooner had begun about the beast to grope than, seizing on the swinging tail that fell within his scope, "I see,' quoth he, "the Elephant is very like a rope!" And so these men of Indostan disputed loud and long, Each in his own opinion exceeding stiff and strong, Though each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong! MORAL So oft in theologic wars, the disputants, I ween, rail on in utter ignorance of what each other mean, and prate about an Elephant not one of them has seen! To the question "Why Lojban?" we can answer, "There are many possible uses for Lojban, and different people will focus on different aspects. But all the uses interact. Beyond all the particular uses, there is a larger whole." There is an elephant beyond the six blind men. Yes, Lojban is fun. Yes, it offers potential for computer applications. Yes, it may help people to think more flexibly and/or logically. Yes, it offers hope as an international language. But these can be seen as parts of a grander whole. The discipline required to write for computer translation forces clear and non-culturebound expression. This is mind-expanding for the individual and enriching to the world. This is the human side of machine translation; computers may someday translate from Lojban to natural languages, but only what people have expressed in Lojban to start with. Writing prose, letters, diaries, and drama in Lojban, in the spirit of Lojban, is therefore writing them for the ages, for all people and cultures. The formal language, and the literature therein, is what we wish to share with the world. (For a cover illustration for the textbook, how about an elephant standing behind an open-eyed Englishman, Chinese, Hispanic, Russian, Hindu, and Arab? Perhaps with R2-D2 down in front.) (For a logo, a small stylized elephant.) a'o ro le prenu cu cilre la lojban .i co'omi'e John Hodges. === EOT >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Thu May 27 13:49:47 1993 Date: Thu, 27 May 93 13:49:46 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9305271149.AA19214@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Archive syntax I have received copies of a number of error messages for get requests, so I thought I'd be more explicit. To get the current list archive, send the command get conlang current This will send all the parts (currently 8). The file is *not* split at message boundaries, each part contains as many lines as fit in 64KB. If you want to update the file at some future time, perhaps when it has gotten to 11 parts, you can use a command with part numbers, to avoid getting the first seven parts again: get conlang current 8 9 10 11 Hope this clarifies matters. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Thu May 27 18:10:12 1993 Date: Thu, 27 May 1993 17:09:43 +0100 Message-Id: <5492.199305271609@atlantis> From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Concise description: (was: Lojban (data-base of conlang descriptions)) Robin Gaskell said (a couple of weeks ago): " I think that the essential details for each conlang shouldbe able to be summarised in one page - two at the outside - and that a more or less standardised format for the descriptions be decided upon." I think that this is a common misconception, fostered by the claims of Esperanto. In one sense it is probably true - there are probably ways of expressing the essential structure/grammar of any language fairly concisely. The trouble is that in general this will not mean anything to anybody who does not understand the basis the language works on. Esperanto only achieves it because it is assumed that the readers have an understanding of things like verbs, adverbs, plurals and accusatives - which is broadly true for most Europeans. (I am not so much thinking of the labels 'verb', 'adverb' etc, which people do not know unless they have learnt them, as whether the concept translates into their own experience). But for speakers of languages which lack, for example, the categories of number or definiteness, or which pattern ergatively rather than nominatively, or which distinguish inclusive and exclusive first person morphology, or which cross-reference objects as well as subjects in their verbal forms, or which inflect for aspect but not for tense - for all these, the familiar (basically latinate) description of Esperanto and other languages will be considerably less clear, and need significant expansion. It probably is true that the vast majority of constructed languages have been fundamentally Western European in structure and assumptions, and so can be concisely expressed (for English readers). (I think it is less true this century). It would be possible to present Lojban in the way that many languages have been presented, and even to choose examples that made it appear to behave rather like many natural languages: but this would be no more describing the language than Diego da Landa's Mayan 'alphabet' expressed the writing system of Maya. It is also possible to express much of Lojban fairly concisely - the current BNF syntax takes three or four pages, but chunks of it could be omitted or contracted for a simplified account; but there are fundamental things about the way the language works which would not be expressed. If you came to it from a background of Loglan, say, much of that could be assumed (not all). But if you came to it only from English - or from Georgian, Chinese, Cherokee or Esperanto - you would either not understand or would misconstrue, without much more explanation. ======================================================================== There's a monkey on my shoulder | Colin Fine and it's telling me lies | Dept of Computing Just to stop me ever seeing | University of Bradford what's in front of my eyes. | Bradford, W. Yorks, England It tells me what the world is like| BD7 1DP and how I ought to be, | Tel: 0274 733680 (h), 383915 (w) And just what's gonna happen | c.j.fine@bradford.ac.uk if I ever dare be me. | 'Morris dancers do it with bells on' ======================================================================== >From urban@cobra.jpl.nasa.gov Thu May 27 20:52:46 1993 Message-Id: <9305271852.AA17866@odin.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: John Hodges on "Why Lojban?" Date: Thu, 27 May 1993 11:52:32 PDT From: Michael P Urban It is not clear to me that it is possible to `sell' Lojban (nor Esperanto, which is my own primary interest) on a grand scale. Americans are a people who pride themselves on NOT speaking other languages; we expect everyone else to learn English, in other countries as well as our own (hint: where is diku.dk? What language are we using?). Unless you show someone that there is MONEY to be made in it, few people will want to spend their time on something that so much resembles work. The successful sale of the Klingon language is exceptional, but may be instructive. The first question that comes to my mind is, `how many people who buy the book actually read it?' From my own experience, these things are purchased by Trek completists, or as `the perfect gift for your favorite Trekkie,' as the store ads might put it. Of those who actually get past the first few pages, how many actually will actually put any effort into memorizing anything past a few good tourist-book phrases? Some schoolkids with free time and some genuine Trekkian intensity, but hardly the sort of critical mass that one wants with Esperanto, Lojban, or . Even linguistic hobbyists may never _learn_ the language, although they may learn _about_ the language. I found M.A.R. Barker's Tsolyani language interesting, but never took the trouble to commit even useful tourist phrases like `how much is that slave?' to memory. An interesting thought question: if Star Trek had featured Esperanto as `Galactic Standard', and it had appeared as often and prominently as Klingon, and given the considerable existing Esperanto literature and community, would there be a _significantly_ larger number of nontrivially competent Esperanto speakers today than there are? I cannot say, but I think that the answer is `no'; there would be a considerably larger number people who know _about_ Esperanto, and who could say `saluton' and `dankon', but few real speakers. And it would _still_ be widely considered as an eccentricity, like going to Star Trek conventions. (a `parallel world' in which large numbers of Trekkers are also novice Esperantists -- or Lojbanists or whatever -- is rather fascinating to contemplate, though, isn't it?) The question that has to be answered first, and which neither the Esperantists nor mainstream educators have solved, is, `why should I spend time and effort to learn something other than English?' Until someone finds an answer to that question that will appeal to large numbers of Americans, it will be extremely hard to get a large speaking population of Klingon, Lojban, Esperanto, Ido, Glosa, Volapuk, Sindarin, Tsolyani, or any other conlang, regardless of their linguistic, literary, social, or scientific merits. (What is Volapuk for `He's Dead, Jim'? Oh, never mind...) Mike >From LAWCROWN%NUSVM.NUS.SG@vm.uni-c.dk Fri May 28 15:41:08 1993 Message-Id: <9305281341.AA06391@odin.diku.dk> Date: Fri, 28 May 93 21:13:43 SST From: Barry Crown Subject: LEARNING A CONLANG To: CONLANG@DIKU.DK Mike Urban takes the view that, unless they see a clear (preferably, financial) benefit, few people will be interested in learning a conlang. To the extent that he is writing about his experience as an Esperantist in the United States, I am in no position to comment. However, looking at the problem from a global perspective, the experience of the Esperanto movement itself suggests that Mike is far too pessimistic. Scattered around the world today are several million people who have attended - and even completed - an Esperanto course. Of course, hardly any of these people can say more than a few words of Esperanto now. That fact alone has surely deterred many, who would otherwise be interested, from attempting to learn learn Esperanto. However, to me these figures suggest that there is potentially a high level of interest in the idea of learning a conlang. The reason why so few of these former students can actually speak Esperanto is because, as Ken Miner wrote recently, it takes almost as much work to learn Esperanto well as it does to learn a natural language. In a recent article in the "Esperanto" magazine, Donald Broadribb, a member of the Esperanto Academy, spoke about the need to study the language for *several years* at a level equivalent to that of university study in order to speak it well. There have been numerous attempts to simplify Esperanto or to create similar Euroclones. Some of these may well be a little easier to learn than Esperanto, but from what I have seen, nobody has yet succeeded in creating a language, which is as expressive as Esperanto, but which can be learnt to an equivalent level in less than 10% of the time. What is needed is to reduce Broadribb's several *years* of study to several *months*. Can one create a conlang, which can be learnt in such a short space of time, but which still gives one a range of expression equivalent to that available in Esperanto? In his IAL-desiderata Rick Harrison said that experience shows that some languages can be learnt easily and I think he referred in particular to pidgins and creoles. How quickly can such languages be learnt and how effective are they as a means of communication? Do they serve as useful models for a conlang? Barry >From paul.hoffman@um.cc.umich.edu Sat May 29 17:51:48 1993 Message-Id: <9305291551.AA24680@odin.diku.dk> Received: from by um.cc.umich.edu via MTS-Net; Sat, 29 May 93 11:50:24 EDT Date: Sat, 29 May 1993 11:56:06 -0400 To: conlang@diku.dk From: paul.hoffman@um.cc.umich.edu (Paul Hoffman) X-Sender: heq3@um.cc.umich.edu Subject: Re: directional info, schemas Zack Smith writes, >Recently I've decided to look at the problem of adding directional information >to my language, beyond the few easy words such as to, from, upon, surrounding, >comprising, etc. I've been putting off this task literally for years, because >I knew that it might be a bit of a pain. Now that I'm feeling fully up to it, >I have to admit that there appear to be a large number of such words. Some of >them can't be adequately described without a diagram or with a short phrase. >Many require the use of verbs. > >I was wondering, has anyone come up with a complete list of such concepts? > >Does anyone involved with psycholinguistics know if there might be, say, a >set of well-known schemas that most humans tend to possess concerning object >placement, motion, connection, etc.? Here I'm kind of wondering whether a >minimal list of directional words has been identified that all humans tend >to use, (as with people using only 11 or so basic colors) or whether the >number of such words in use tends to be highly variable. > . . . >Any comments? Good luck! Directional words are a definite challenge. It's nice to be exhaustive but it's easy to just mimic (insert your first language here). * Annoyingly enthusiastic reading recommendation follows * There's a terrific article by Leonard Talmy in the work cited below (in volume 3, I believe) about different ways of "packing" information about motion and position -- path, manner and cause of motion, figure, ground, etc. -- in natural languages. In it, he gives examples of three different strategies of "conflation" of semantic content in the lexicon -- some languages he uses are English, Spanish, and Atsugewi. Russian is also prominently featured, though I think that's mostly in another part of the article -- it goes into aspectual matters and "verb satellites" too (the 3 parts are all related, but each is worth reading individually if you're short on time). The article is *very* stimulating and supplied me with plenty of "Wow! -- I never thought of a language doing *that*!" moments. Moreover, it's *not* difficult reading and it has copious examples. I've forgotten the exact title of the article, but it contains the phrase "patterns of lexicalization" or something like it. In my opinion it's a must-read for anyone devising a sophisticated language who wants to go beyond a simplistic construct of motion, position, and path. There, is that a strong enough recommendation? >Note that I'm not looking for conceptually similar but semantically >mixed words; I'm looking for words that offer directional information >only, not other information e.g. social or emotional data. Hmm, I'm not sure it's possible to partition a language's semantic space into and sub-spaces... Aspectual, intentional and other stuff always seems to creep in. In English directional/positional constructions are normally thought to be unmarked for (i.e., neutral with regard to) the figure (the person or thing moving or having-position) and the ground (what their position/motion is being related to). But that's not necessarily true of other languages -- Atsugewi provides lots of fascinating examples, none of which I can clearly remember at this time. English frequently "conflates" (combines) fact-of-motion and manner/cause of motion in a single lexeme -- for example, The bottle _floated_ into the cave. Whereas Spanish doesn't normally do this sort of conflation: La botella _entro'_ a la cueva (flotando). *La botella _floto'_ a la cueva. Well, that's really peripheral to what you brought up. Here are some more apposite examples to think about: I stood on the ground. *I stood in the ground. ?I stood on the parking lot. I stood in the parking lot. (Asterisks and question marks are my own English -- your mileage may vary...) The semantic distinction between ground/parking lot here has an effect on the choice of preposition. Also: I threw the ball to Felicia. [intending her to catch it] I threw the ball at Felicia. [intending to strike her with it] Here the nature of the "directedness" of the throwing (_at_ vs. _to_) relates to the nature of the thrower's intentions. She punched the sign. [she struck it: unambiguous for intent] She punched at the sign. [she didn't strike it: ambiguous for intent?] John sat on the chair. [ambiguous for motion/lack of motion] John sat down on the chair. [unambiguous] (Admittedly the use of sit/stand/lie in examples tends to be a little forced, since English speakers normally disambiguate with "down" or the participial, "progressive" form...) My point (and part of Talmy's) is that words used to indicate motion/direction are commonly used with other meanings as well, and it's not possible to "sift" out one meaning from the other. Looking on the positive side, this is a terrific opportunity for richness in a language. Well, just read the article -- you won't regret it! Here's the bibliographic info: Title: Language typology and syntactic description / edited by Timothy Shopen. Published: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1985. Contents: v. 1. Clause structure -- v. 2. Complex constructions -- v. 3. Grammatical categories and the lexicon. ISBN: 052125700X (v. 1) 0521276594 (pbk. : v. 1) Again, I'm quite sure the Talmy article is in volume 3, but I don't have the books handy. Paul. ------------ paul.hoffman@umich.edu . . . "Dragons do not enter into this message" >From lojbab@grebyn.com Sun May 30 02:45:27 1993 Date: Fri, 28 May 93 04:04:10 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9305280804.AA13586@grebyn.com> To: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk Subject: Re: John Hodges on "Why Lojban?" Cc: conlang@diku.dk, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu I tend to agree with you Ivan, than 't-boxes' are in general a matter for the very distant future. But note that John is specifically proposing that the translation direction be from Lojban to nat lang, and not the reverse direction. He also specifically notes that crude, if syntactically straightforward, translations, are an acceptable result. That combination is PROBABLY, if not definitely, readily achievable with current trnsaltion technology, given that Nora's earlier Loglan subset and current Lojban glosser are almost up to that standard with relatively minimal work on a to-English basis. The more obvious criticism, though, is how the Lojbanist/traveller will understand the native's responses, which would presumably not be in Lojban unless it really achieved universal language-hood, in which case the t-box isn;t needed. Otherwise the t-box has to go both directions, and getting a computer in a t-box to unambiguously handle Enfglish or Russian speech is a distinctly more difficult problem (not to mention the translation problem). lojbab >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Mon May 31 10:02:11 1993 Date: Mon, 31 May 93 10:02:10 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9305310802.AA05298@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Conlang learning time Barry Crown writes: >Can one create a conlang, which can be learnt in such a short space >of time, but which still gives one a range of expression equivalent >to that available in Esperanto? My impression of the situation in Esperanto is that the language was somewhat underspecified originally, and that the current state is the result of a century-long convergence towards an accepted usage, pieced together from a myriad of small pieces of native-language syntax and idiom brought in by various authors, Zamenhof not excepted. Of course it takes a lot of time to master such a tradition. In the context of a ``hobby'' IAL, as Esperanto currently is, I do not think that the existence of a complex ``normal'' usage is a problem in itself. It only becomes one if a learner is brought to feel like a second-rate member of the language community until the usage has been mastered, and my impression is that this does not happen very much in the Esperanto world. There are very few people who speak the language ``well,'' by Broadribb's definition, and most people are happy just to find someone who can speak it intelligibly. (A level that should be reachable in a few weeks.) However, for a true IAL, to be used in high-level negotiations, international treaties, Nobel-winning literature, and so on, the problem has to be addressed. Human nature is such that if something is difficult to master, prestige will be attached to its mastery. So how can the emergence of a complex norm be avoided? I can think of three: 1) The language definition can fix the usage for all the constructs needed in the language, in a logical and easy-to- learn way, so that no ad-hoc extensions arise. 2) The basic language can be made flexible enough that it is easy to find one or more logical ways to express anything, and a rule imposed that there is to be no preferred construct and no semantic difference when such a logical choice exists. 3) Somebody could be given a large stick with which to hit anybody who perpetrates a usage flame. Right. Can anybody think of way that has a chance of working? Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked)