Random ideas: Morphosyntax

[cybrxkhan]

I think this would be the most interesting part of a system like this.

It's not exactly the same, but something like the multiple vocabulary levels in languages like Javanese could be a way you could implement this in a naturalistic way. You could say, have different lexical items in certain registers for nouns, and agreement would agree with the register. Perhaps there would be a separate adjective but then on verbs you might get an agreement morpheme based on the register being used in a sentence or something.

Could be cool.

I guess it would be vaguely similar, but in the "dynamic noun class politeness system" (that's a shitload of words there), you could also use this with mundane objects or non-human entities to reflect what you feel towards them. For instance, you could refer to your pet dog using the equal noun class, indicating you have a close relationship with it, or you could refer to your laptop using the inferior noun class, indicating that you think it's a shitty laptop. Hell, you could expand this to abstract concepts too: if you describe someone's "melancholy" using the inferior noun class, maybe it means you think they should just man up and stop being so emo, or maybe it means that it's something that's demonic and evil (thus "lowly"), depending on the culture. Although that might get a wee bit complicated...?

Oh hell. I think I might use something like this kind of thing as a semi-artificially constructed feature (or one developed out of natural features in an artificial manner) by the crazy Tibetan-Mongol-Japanese-Christian-Buddhist-Himalaya-dweeling-warrior-monk-fundamentalist-Confucian-wacko conculture in my conworld who use it to reflect their religious beliefs or something.

[roninbodhisattva]

Tibetan-Mongol-Japanese-Christian-Buddhist-Himalaya-dweeling-warrior-monk-fundamentalist-Confucian-wacko

Wonderful compound, really.

So the question is- would words be lexically specified for their class? Or would it be something is is dynamically applied to separate lexical items and then just work with agreement and whatnot? If the second is the case, would you get some kind of marking on the noun to show which class it belongs to when you use it?

Also, would it be obligatory?

[cybrxkhan]

Tibetan-Mongol-Japanese-Christian-Buddhist-Himalaya-dweeling-warrior-monk-fundamentalist-Confucian-wacko

Wonderful compound, really.

[/quote]

They're used by my concultural equivalent of Imperial China as elite troops. And the way I envision them... they're kind of scary. Especially when you're fighting against them WWI style and you see these gigantic dudes with full flamethrower-resistant armor walking at you in a totally serenely badass way.

So the question is- would words be lexically specified for their class? Or would it be something is is dynamically applied to separate lexical items and then just work with agreement and whatnot? If the second is the case, would you get some kind of marking on the noun to show which class it belongs to when you use it?

Also, would it be obligatory?

I think it'll probably be the second case, with a marking on the noun; since this conlang will only have three vowels (maybe one more, but let's just say three for now), theoretically each vowel will correspond to a certain class, and you can switch between them with minimal effort. So in a totally made up on the spot example, if "puakap" is the root meaning "manure", then "puakap-a" would be the superior class, "puakap-o" would be the equal class, and so forth. Something like that.

I think it'll also probably be obligatory to some degree, although a speaker would use it often anyways - probably resorting to the "equal" noun class as the default and neutral one for all objects.

Something like that?

[Micamo]

I just got a batshit crazy idea.

General Evidentials

"John went for a walk."

And how do you know that?

"Well, I just saw him out the window."

Evidentials qualify our reasons for belief. Traditionally, evidentiality is something that applies to sentences or clauses. I am not aware of any natlang (or conlang for that matter) which have evidentials outside of this scope, but it's hardly the only place they can be semantically valid.

"Mary's husband"

Wait wait wait, how do you know he's a husband?

"I saw a wedding ring on his finger the other day."

And how do you know he's Mary's, for that matter?

"Oh, while I was at the salon I heard they got married a few months ago. And they didn't even invite me!"

So you directly saw that he's married to someone, but you only heard that Mary is his spouse?

"Yep. That's right!"

Then we could say Mary=GEN=HSY husband-VIS.

Evidentiality is something that can, in theory, be applied to every aspect and facet of a language. It's by no means semantically restricted to verbs.

[Ear of the Sphinx]

I think about evindentials based on three basic ones: I see, I hear, I feel.

[Micamo]

I think about evindentials based on three basic ones: I see, I hear, I feel.

What about indirect ones, like inferentials and reportatives?

Anyway, I think I've found a way to semantically map every nominal category to verbs (clausal specificity, anyone?) and every verbal category to nominals. Really, any inflectional or derivational distinction from any part of speech can be mapped to any other part of speech. Sort of a generalization of nominal tense and generalized evidentials, if you will.

I also used this method to find a cool way of collapsing adjectives and nouns. Here's how it works: The noun in a noun phrase is replaced with a nominal complex, comprised of one or more instances of the new noun+adjective class I'm calling Ennoies. An Ennoia represents a semantic class and qualifies the referent of the nominal complex as being a member of this class.

Let's take an example: Define the ennoies "pataku" (red things) and "minaru" (balls). A pataku is a red thing, a minaru is a ball. But a pataku minaru is a red ball, and a minaru pataku is a ball-ish red thing. In practice the usage of ennoies is thus not much different from normal adjectives and nouns, but the difference is an ennoia can be entered wherever an adjective or a noun is syntactically required without additional derivation needed.

[Ear of the Sphinx]

Type I - direct, sensory (I saw that she married him; I have direct evidence; I witnessed it.)
Type II - hearsay, reportative (I heard that she married him; somebody told me that; it is said.)
Type III - assumed, inferential, "intuitive" (I feel that she married him; it seems to me that; I deduced that.)

Other ideas:

Tense I - sure, independent, established (She married him - it's irrevocable! I'll marry you - I promise.)
Tense II - unsure, reversible, mostly present and future actions (He'll marry her - but he can change his mind.)

And for nouns:

Class I - beings, I can affect them and they can affect me (I can hurt a cat. A cat can hurt me.)
Class II - things, I can affect them and they can't affect me (I can kill fish. I can move a table.)
Class III - matter, I can't affect it (I can't move Earth. I can't hurt the spirits. I can't touch words.)

Case A - basalis/foreground (I live on the island.)
Case B - locative/background (I live on the island.)
(With transitive verbs:)
Case I - donor, agens (I shoot an arrow to a deer. The cat eats a fish.)
Case II - recipient, patient (I shoot an arrow to a deer. The cat brings me a fish.)
Case III - object, instrument (I shoot an arrow to a deer. The cat bites me /with/ its teeth.)

These cases can be crossed, eg.
1sg-I build tribe-A live town-B-II
I build the town where my tribe will live.

[Micamo]

Actually, permanence inflection's a pretty cool idea, even though it's not really tense. I just might use it somewhere.

Case A - basalis/foreground (I live on the island.)
Case B - locative/background (I live on the island.)

Could you elaborate more on these?

[Ear of the Sphinx]

Case A - basalis/foreground (I live on the island.)
Case B - locative/background (I live on the island.)

They're used mostly in intransitive clauses:
- 1sg-A be-S Miłosz. - I am Miłosz.
- 1pl-A go up-hill-B - We go up a hill.
- IMP stay home-B - Stay at home!
- 23sg-A think-S 1sg-B - Thou/she/he/it thought of me. (Here you have background use of B. And yes, that language don't make difference between 2. and 3. person.)

Then can be also used in transitive clauses and complex sentences.
- cat-I bring fish-III man-A-II [be] house-B - A cat brings fish to a man [who is] in house.
- 1sg-A-I kill-S dog-II - It's me who killed a dog.

Transitive cases (I, II, III) have some common morphic element that is replaced with A, B endings when cases are stacked. So, detailed description would be:

Code: Select all

man-A   [stem]+[class.]+[A morpheme]
man-I   [stem]+[class.]+[epenth.el.]+[I ending]
man-A-I [stem]+[class.]+[A morpheme]+[I ending]

[eldin raigmore]

(PLEASE NOTE: this idea of mine for a conlang and possibly a conculture to go with it, is not reflective of my own ideas about the relative reliability of men vs women.)

I have long been thinking of putting evidentials in one of my conlangs.

Some days ago I thought of having the following distinction among hearsay-evidentials:

(1) "Reliable hearsay (heard from a man)"; the original eye-witness, and every link in the hearsay chain from that eye-witness to the speaker, were all men*.

(2) "Unreliable hearsay (heard from a woman)"; either the original eye-witness, or at least one link in the hearsay chain from that eye-witness to the speaker, was not a man* (e.g. was a woman).

*"Manhood" probably begins at a young age in this culture; maybe at 12 or 13 years old, or maybe even younger.

Men will be taught, in this conculture, to not pass on hearsay unless they can also pass on the entire chain of attribution from the person (or, at least, the man) from whom they first heard it, all the way back to the original source or eye-witness (at least if those all were men).

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What do you guys think?

If you don't like the engrained males-trustworthy-but-females-untrustworthy prejudice that was once engrained in the conculture and is still fossilized in its language, maybe you'd like some other system where there's a distinction between hearsay for which the speaker can reproduce the entire chain of attribution back to the soource, and hearsay for which the speaker has lost knowledge of at least one link of the chain? IMO the former kind of hearsay is likelier to be reliable and also likelier to be trusted than the latter kind.

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As many of you know, lots of natural languages with more than one kind of hearsay-evidential distinguish between hearsay heard from an eye-witness ("first-hand hearsay") and hearsay heard from someone else to whom it was already hearsay ("second-hand or later hearsay; a well-traveled story"). Lots of them also distinguish between first-hand hearsay from a reliable eyewitness and firsthand hearsay from a less-reliable eyewitness. And lots of them distinguish between the well-traveled stories that are considered general cultural knowledge and those that are rumors rather than basically "they say"/"everybody knows"/"we've long believed" type of stories.

So I don't think my idea is too farfetched. In fact, I unfortunately wouldn't be shocked to find out ANADEW, even including the males-vs-females thing.

[Micamo]

I think it's a lovely idea, linguistically speaking. Bits of culture baked into languages fascinate me, and evidentials having agreement with the information source is something I'd like to do more of. (I once flirted with the idea of making the information source a core argument in every clause, but this didn't work out too well.)

[roninbodhisattva]

Bullet points for an idea I just had:

Verbs are lexically classified as having or not having duration (lexical aspect). Those verbs that do have duration must appear with an auxiliary, to which any kind of TAM inflection attaches. The auxiliary classifies the subject based on the position/shape of the object; they originate from grammaticalized positional verbs 'sit', 'lie', 'stand'. For motion verbs, there is a general motion auxiliary (maybe gets compounded with a positional one in some cases).

[cybrxkhan]

Bullet points for an idea I just had:

Verbs are lexically classified as having or not having duration (lexical aspect). Those verbs that do have duration must appear with an auxiliary, to which any kind of TAM inflection attaches. The auxiliary classifies the subject based on the position/shape of the object; they originate from grammaticalized positional verbs 'sit', 'lie', 'stand'. For motion verbs, there is a general motion auxiliary (maybe gets compounded with a positional one in some cases).

Maybe because I'm kind of tired to comprehend, but that sounds a bit similar to the static/dynamic distinction.

[roninbodhisattva]

How d'ya mean? This distinction would actually cross-cut the distinction between stative and dynamic verbs. Stative verbs are inherently durative, but dynamic verbs aren't necessarily so.

[cybrxkhan]

How d'ya mean? This distinction would actually cross-cut the distinction between stative and dynamic verbs. Stative verbs are inherently durative, but dynamic verbs aren't necessarily so.

I really dunno what I was thinking last night. But it just really reminded me of the stative/dynamic distinction.

[eldin raigmore]

I think it's a lovely idea, linguistically speaking. Bits of culture baked into languages fascinate me, and evidentials having agreement with the information source is something I'd like to do more of. (I once flirted with the idea of making the information source a core argument in every clause, but this didn't work out too well.)

Thank you! I am greatly encouraged. (I mean "courage" literally in this case. I'd have been afraid to try it if I got too many "what a sexist you are!" comments.)

[Micamo]

It should be obvious to conworlders that a society's values need not reflect the values of the conworlder: Making Mary Suetopias, where everybody has the same values as the conworlder (*cough Tolkien cough*), is boring as hell.

[eldin raigmore]

It should be obvious to conworlders that a society's values need not reflect the values of the conworlder: Making Mary Suetopias, where everybody has the same values as the conworlder (*cough Tolkien cough*), is boring as hell.

This is a tangent; sorry about that.

Have you read the book of Job?
Have you considered the character Elihu in that book?
Are you aware that many Biblical scholars consider Elihu a "Mary Sue" character?

I am thinking of re-writing the Book of Job, and of inserting, after Elihu's last speech, something like:

Then Miriam-Shoshanna did open her mouth, and, turning to Elihu, spake:
"STFU, Elihu".

There may be some trouble translating it into ancient Hebrew, though.

[Czwartek]

I'm not an active conlanger, and this idea is rather vague and hazy even in my mind. I've been toying with the idea of 'mapping out' sentences graphically, similarly to how Ilaksh does, but simply to show two different but related morphological categories; modifier-dependency (whether a modifier serves as a container for what it refers to, or whether it's just incidental), and modifier-attachment (which specific part of the sentence the modifier refers to. I'm thinking of an idea which would be the very foundation of a conlang, if I had one.

To explain modifier-attachment, take the sentence I danced with the prettiest girl in the room. The modifier can be a location, as 'in the room' is in this sentence, but it could just as easily be an adjective. For the purpose of illustration, I'll also use the sentence 'I danced with the prettiest Taiwanese girl'. Here, 'in the room' and 'Taiwanese' are treated as the same word type. If word order is completely free and irrelevant, and verbs and nouns are treated as the same word type, there are a few different meanings it could take by changing the modifier attachment;

I-in.the.room: I, who was in the room, danced with the prettiest girl.
I-Taiwanese: I, who was Taiwanese, danced with the prettiest girl.
Dance-in.the.room: I did a dance in the room with the prettiest girl.
Dance-Taiwanese: I did a Taiwanese dance with the prettiest girl.
The.prettiest.girl-in.the.room: I danced with the prettiest girl who was in the room.
The.prettiest.girl-Taiwanese: I danced with the prettiest Taiwanese girl.

To explain modifier-dependency, contrast the last sentences with I danced with the prettiest girl, who was in the room and I danced with the prettiest girl, who was Taiwanese. In the first two sentences, 'the room' and 'Taiwanese' define the sets of all girls considered, and you're referring to the prettiest of the lot. But with the comma inserted, there's a larger, unspecified set, possibly containing all the girls who have ever existed in the universe, and the prettiest just happens to be in the room referred to, or just happens to be Taiwanese.

If this distinction is treated morphologically, then it can theoretically be applied to the other two sentences where 'I' and 'dance' are referents of 'in the room'. Applying the distinction to the 'I' sentences would be meaningless, since there can be only one 'I', but applying it to 'dance' would tell you whether the dancing was because there was already dancing going on in the room, or whether you would have been dancing anyway and the room just happened to be where it was happening.

So we have two things to be categorised morphologically. Graphically, I'd like the nouns and verbs to be written in a row in any order on the page, with their modifiers above the word modified if it serves as a containing set, and under the word it modifies if it's incidental.

The problem is how to represent this system phonetically. Any ideas? Please tell me if any part of this doesn't make sense.

[Micamo]

Lemme get this straight: You want modifiers to be completely syntactically free from their heads, yet make the system have no ambiguity as to what dependent goes to which head?