Zompist Bboard Again

malloc wrote: ↑Wed Oct 03, 2018 7:36 pm Perhaps, but it feels intuitively weird to treat "the man pushes the broom" and the "water erodes the riverbed" as fundamentally different constructions.

It feels intuitively weird to you because you are a monolingual Indo-European.

In fact, these two circumstances are extremely different!

In one, there's a definite event, in which an agent performs an action that moves an object.
In the other, there is no event - there's a process. And it's not a definite process, but a generalisation. There is no agent. There is no action, properly speaking. And the object is not moved. On the other hand, the object IS altered, which it isn't in the first case. Semantically, these two propositions are utterly unalike.

And your second case is still at the more 'transitive' end of what inanimates can do - it's part of why many languages have animate words for 'water' (or two different words, one animate and one inanimate). It gets worse!

Consider instead: "water dissolves limestone". Here we have an additional point of overwhelming different: both objects are fundamentally altered by the process. This is very different from a prototypical intransitive (neither object is altered) and from a prototypical transitive (one object is altered while the other is unaltered). So really there's three kinds of relation: pure transitives like "the man smashed the skull", pure intransitives like "the man observes the rabbit", and what we might call 'symmetricals' like "the ink dissolves into the water". Indo-European languages tend to want to compress all three semantic forms into a single syntactic pattern - so, for instance, "the man observes the rabbit" is more grammatically similar to "the man eats the rabbit" than it is to "the man observes". But many languages remain truer to the semantics, and don't conflate all dyadic relations into a single prototypically transitive construction! Particularly languages with a concept of animacy...

And in the particular case of these 'symmetricals', it's worth noting a real peculiarity: subject and object are arbitrary. If the semantics are purely symmetrical, they're completely arbitrary: "the handle is glued to the case" and "the case is glued to the handle" are semantically equivalent. But even in asymmetrical reations, the subject and object can just be flipped by using the opposite verb: "the wall supports the roof" and "the roof burdens the wall" are semantically equivalent, they just have verb suppletion to invert subject and object.

English happens to often prioritise one verb in each pair. So in English, the moat encircles the castle, but the ocean subsumes the raindrop. But that's arbitrary: neither argument is semantically more the subject or object than the other, and other languages can use the opposite verb.

Similarly, in "the electron absorbs the photon", it's misleading to think of the electron as agent and photon as patient, because both are equally affected by the action, and neither is more responsible for it. It's a semantically balanced process (maybe 'balanced' is a better word than 'symmetrical'). A different language could just as easily have "the photon enters-and-utterly-pervades the electron". Or could use an entirely different sort of construction.

This is unintuitive for you because you are a monolingual Indo-European

The ease with which English expresses notions like "the electron absorbed the photon" makes it well-suited to scientific writing. Without that ease of use, I feel like writing about physics or any field where inanimate objects regularly interact would become rather onerous.

The "ease" that arises from English using the construction that is natural to use in English arises entirely from that construction being natural to use in English. Speakers of languages where you just say "photon electron qua", where "qua" is a posposition meaning "two uniting as one that acts as the second while the former appears to disappear", will find that the weird rigmarole with which English first pretends there's an action taking place, then requires a verb for it, then requires one item to be prioritised over the other, then requires the 'superior' item to be treated as though it were a person and the 'inferior' item as though it were an object that was altered but not removed from existence by the 'action', to be a ridiculously un-easy and misleading metaphorical construction for an ultimately simple event!

Well, those are actually some pretty good points that I hadn't really considered before. It sounds like you are suggesting that humans are fundamentally different from other entities in their interactions with the world. We have the capacity for agency that distinguishes us from inanimate things like water and photons.

Another problem is that my conlang handles pretty much everything through verbs. Even the equivalent of adpositions derive from transitive stative verbs with the subject as a particular entity and the object as its location. For instance, the sentence "he worked from home" would translate as "he worked, being at his house". This makes it quite possible and common for nouns to appear in subject position without having any particular agency. It seems a shame to abandon this principle given the simplicity and flexibility it allows. Introducing adpositions would mean introducing previously unnecessary rules just to handle them while losing the ability to apply existing derivational morphology to them. Furthermore, adpositions would still need to indicate their object. If they follow the same head-marking principles as verbs, then the problem of two inanimates in one clause remains.

-

Dont know if this is the right place but i just had to share this language related thing on facebook

https://footballbatsandmore.wordpress.c ... ogoglyphs/

At 350 glyphs...working on more

Oh good. Old Wenthish strong verbs apparently could have up to at least seven different vowels in alternation in their paradigms. This will end well for my sanity...


[reof ec - I rip sth.; rief tū - you rip sth.; rāf ec - I ripped sth.; rūn ui - we ripped sth.; ruibi ec - I would have ripped sth.; robena - ripped (passive participle); rēfn - ripping (verbal noun). And yes, there's also grammatischer wechsel.]


..oh, wait, the verbal noun should probably match the 2nd singular, come to think of it. Although I'm pretty sure that it'll turn out that in some verb classes the imperative has its own vowel...

masako wrote: ↑Sat Oct 06, 2018 9:21 amhttps://footballbatsandmore.wordpress.c ... ogoglyphs/

At 350 glyphs...working on more

Very nice. Put your glyphs into a font, because this is inspiring me to make a simple online input method editor for conlang logograms. Copy-paste the key:value pairs of romanization:unicodecharacter, specify your logogram font in your computer (just the name, no need to upload it), and bam!, instant input method editor.

Update: yup, there we go, that was quicker than I thought. Seven different vowels in cōena, "to chew":

cōe ec - I chew
cī tū - you chew
ca ec - I chewed
cūnn ui - we chewed
cūi ec - I would have chewed
cōnna - chewed (participle)
ceo! - chew!

(there's also the diphthongs in cōead ui ('we chew') and cōē tū ('you would chew'), but those are from the suffixes, and predictable).

Ser wrote: ↑Sat Oct 06, 2018 12:45 pmVery nice.

Thank you.

Ser wrote: ↑Sat Oct 06, 2018 12:45 pmPut your glyphs into a font...

I really think that would be cool, but even with your very easy to follow instructions, I wouldn't know where to begin. I'm barely savvy enough to display the images on my blog.

masako wrote: ↑Sat Oct 06, 2018 2:37 pm

Ser wrote: ↑Sat Oct 06, 2018 12:45 pmPut your glyphs into a font...

I really think that would be cool, but even with your very easy to follow instructions, I wouldn't know where to begin. I'm barely savvy enough to display the images on my blog.

Yeah, I was assuming you had learned to make fonts in recent years, so all you needed was a way to type the many logograms. I don't know anything about making fonts either.

Ser wrote: ↑Sat Oct 06, 2018 3:06 pm Yeah, I was assuming you had learned to make fonts in recent years, so all you needed was a way to type the many logograms.

Well, thank you. But I'm not really technically inclined enough for such things, and typically find myself fairly busy with other things.

A while ago I had this ridiculous idea where every single noun and pronoun occupies a unique place on the animacy hierarchy, meaning sentences can always have totally free word order without any additional marking since the higher-ranking NP is always assumed to be the agent unless inverse marking is applied

Or a milder version, where there’s like 50 categories on the animacy hierarchy and most of the time agenthood can be presumed

missals wrote: ↑Sat Oct 06, 2018 10:09 pm A while ago I had this ridiculous idea where every single noun and pronoun occupies a unique place on the animacy hierarchy, meaning sentences can always have totally free word order without any additional marking since the higher-ranking NP is always assumed to be the agent unless inverse marking is applied

Or a milder version, where there’s like 50 categories on the animacy hierarchy and most of the time agenthood can be presumed

Totally free word order is impossible. In Nahuatl, you can't put possessor before possessed except when pied-piped because of wh-movement. And if that pied-piping occurs, you can't put the possessor after possessed, now.

Also this system is extremely unstable because there is too much pairing that consists 2 nouns. Child speaker never had time to learn them all. They had enough problem with pronoun.

masako wrote: ↑Sat Oct 06, 2018 9:21 am https://footballbatsandmore.wordpress.c ... ogoglyphs/

At 350 glyphs...working on more

Is it japonic?

Free word order is possible, it's just very unnatural. Some experimental conlangs of the lojban type have prefixes indicating each word's role in a sentence .... e.g. imagine " 1boy 4flowers 2bought 3girl" ... bam, totally free word order. A conlang somewhere on the continuum between this setup and what's attested in nature would probably work quite well.

The 50 levels of animacy would work, too .... it's ok if kids get it wrong a few times since in most cases it'll be syntactically obvious .... the few exceptions will likely be e.g. whether dogs outrank cats, boys outrank girls, etc. And although that is a problem, for a conlang some permissivity in guidelines like this helps keep it interesting.

Akangka wrote: ↑Sun Oct 07, 2018 9:11 am

masako wrote: ↑Sat Oct 06, 2018 9:21 am https://footballbatsandmore.wordpress.c ... ogoglyphs/

At 350 glyphs...working on more

Is it japonic?

The language or the writing system?

missals wrote: ↑Sat Oct 06, 2018 10:09 pm Or a milder version, where there’s like 50 categories on the animacy hierarchy and most of the time agenthood can be presumed

Maybe the system could interact with discourse prominence? Like, if the two arguments are in the same animacy class, the one that's more discourse-prominent gets treated as more animate. To avoid or clear up ambiguity, you could always use a passive or antipassive or whatever.

What non-SAE language that has comparative infection of adjective. I thought it is exclusively European. When I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European, it says that it is more common that particle comparative. That is despite that particle comparatives is also used as strategy by Austronesian languages like Indonesian, Madagascar, and Illocano.

One thing the Wikipedia page doesn't mention is that in the article it's based on, Haspelmath distinguishes particle comparatives from ones based on locatives---so "bigger from X" wouldn't count as a particle comparative, for example. Seems a bit dubious to me, to be honest. (The article's online here.)

(I don't know about non-European languages with comparative inflections.)

I thought of an interesting case. In Mandarin, to avoid a comparative sense you'll often add hén 很, which is conventionally but not really accurately translated as "very." (You do the same thing in Cantonese but with hó 好.) So it can seem that the basic meaning is comparative, while the non-comparative sense is derived. (I don't mean to imply that hén 很 is an inflection.)