Categorizing Etihus

[qwed117]

The only vibe I get from you is "I'm still not listening". This is really irritating. Really irritating. It seems like your only purpose is to go on and input a "thought-provoking idea" that's just awfully wrong.

Second of all, (based on your reference to AUI) I think your language has morphemes that are a single phoneme long, and they combine to form larger words. Unfortunately I can't confirm this because of your increasing obtusity.

Clearly I listen because I have interacted discussions with some of the members with whom I not only agree with, but get excited when proposals are made that do fit and make sense. I consider ignorance (refusal of information) a sin. But since I'm interested in the truth here, I'm doing my best to sort through the information given to me and see if it applies to the conlang in question. I'm not gullible and I have to verify that the information you give me is correct.

If it is not correct, I have to do my best to explain why it doesn't work that way. If my explanations don't make sense, or they mean something other than what I'm trying to communicate, then it might appear that I'm not listening, but not listening and not understanding are 2 different things.

No, you haven't been listening/reading. We are trying to explain to you that writing is completely different than language, yet you aren't listening. Writing can be easily separated from language. You haven't even looked at the title of the page. It says "Writing"

---

Let's translate some more. It seems like translating individual words would work better than translating phrases.
How would you translate
"fish" "whale" "leviathan"
"blue" "cerulean" "aqua"
"danced" "dance" "will dance" "cannot dance" and "couldn't dance" (If you have trouble with the last two, don't worry, do the first three though)

[Keenir]

I consider ignorance (refusal of information) a sin.

and this applies to everyone, yourself included?

But since I'm interested in the truth here, I'm doing my best to sort through the information given to me and see if it applies to the conlang in question. I'm not gullible and I have to verify that the information you give me is correct.

and what method do you use to verify?

If it is not correct, I have to do my best to explain why it doesn't work that way. If my explanations don't make sense, or they mean something other than what I'm trying to communicate, then it might appear that I'm not listening, but not listening and not understanding are 2 different things.

this is why, over on the other thread, I wanted to be sure we were using the same meanings, so we weren't talking past one another.

[cntrational]

I'm at about the end of my rope here, so expect this to be harsh.

Sew'Kyetuh, you're not listening to us. You're cherry picking things that you like, and putting it into your mind -- while discarding everything that you don't like, that contradicts your ideas of what you want to believe in. Unfortunately, believing really hard doesn't change reality.

Your idea, for example, that Ethius is ideographic, is bullshit. You think it's ideographic, but it's not. It's a language with spoken and signed realizations. It has a written form in a native logographic system, and an external Latin script alphabetic system.

But, you might object, it uses ideas directly! But it doesn't! I repeat this, Ethius does not use ideas directly! Every idea here is basically an idea used in English! You only know English, and each and every one of your words is defined by English semantics.

You can, you know, find out what other languages use, but you've premptively declared that linguistics is wrong, without knowing anything about it! You've declared it crap, much as a creationist declares biology crap, because it contradicts your ideas of what you want Ethius to be. You are the one refusing to learn here, and you cannot create something that will be accepted by us until you create linguistics. You'll inenvitably realize that many of your goals and ideas for and about Ethius, and about English, and about all language are wrong, but it's better to learn and accept the difficult truth than it is to wallow in comfortable ignorance forever.

You cannot progress in conlanging and talk with us and be understood until you learn linguistics. Look at this thread, everybody is arguing against you! Not a single person has actively agreed with and defended your ideas! You might think you're a misunderstood genius, but it's more likely that you're just wrong.

[HoskhMatriarch]

But, you might object, it uses ideas directly! But it doesn't! I repeat this, Ethius does not use ideas directly! Every idea here is basically an idea used in English! You only know English, and each and every one of your words is defined by English semantics.

Yes, I also find it very Englishy. It doesn't matter if you say "dog big the" in Etihus, most of the semantics and pragmatics are the same as English. In my conlang, you'd say "the big dog" in that order, but it's not particularly like English because it divides up semantic space quite differently with its words and the grammar is generally, although definitely not always, quite different (ever heard of internally-headed or correlative relative clauses? Probably not. What about applicatives, polypersonal agreement, noun incorporation, root serialization... On the other hand, I based a decent amount of my compounding on West Germanic languages, such as English, and Sanskrit, but eh, I don't need to make everything super alien, I just need a lot of words that contain a lot of information and are often quite long... I have written out a gloss for a word that I'm going to be able to write with my grammar once I have more morphemes that translates as "but it could not completely eliminate the state of being at odds with the world for him". How about you translate that into Etihus, since you actually have morphemes?).

[Keenir]

It just hit me: there is one group who are presently the same culturally and linguistically, as they were 400 years ago (which is nearly half the distance involved with Etihus)

The Piraha, if I remember the historical portions of don't sleep, there are snakes correctly.

[clawgrip]

Just to be clear here, no one is defending "linguistics" against the novelties of Etihus. Linguistics is a science, just like any other, and the introduction of novel information will lead to a revision of the science. It's just that in order to discuss linguistics, you need to actually understand it. You still have not even shown us clearly that you understand the difference between writing and speech. This is akin to someone claiming that biology is wrong, yet being unable to tell the difference between a person and a photograph of a person.

Until you can demonstrate sufficient basic knowledge in the subject, you do not really have any base from which to argue against what people are saying here. While verifying the accuracy of information is in principle a good thing, asking us for advice and then repeatedly claiming we may all just be wrong about everything we say is just an excuse for you to preserve your predetermined analysis by hunting down someone, somewhere who appears to support your position.You are willing to accept what we say only so long as it doesn't eliminate the perceived "weirdness" of Etihus, and I suspect you mainly came here to receive praise on how weird you believe your language to be, not to receive an actual analysis. Until you either acknowledge or clearly refute this, there's little else to say.

[HoskhMatriarch]

Just to be clear here, no one is defending "linguistics" against the novelties of Etihus. ... You are willing to accept what we say only so long as it doesn't eliminate the perceived "weirdness" of Etihus, and I suspect you mainly came here to receive praise on how weird you believe your language to be, not to receive an actual analysis. .

...But it's Etihus! It's completely alien to all human languages! It's not just similar to English but more consistently head-initial and with tons of portmanteau words, clitics, a flap rhotic, and a glottal stop!

That aside, I still want him to post more actually about his language and translate longer, relatively complex things like "but it could not completely eliminate the state of being at odds with the world for him" instead of just translating things like "the dog ducked". It would give a nice chance to look at the phonology, morphology, and syntax all at once, as long as he posted break-downs of it. He seems to have his language worked out enough to translate these things...

[Ahzoh]

He seems to have his language worked out enough to translate these things...

That's probably because it's a relex.

[HoskhMatriarch]

He seems to have his language worked out enough to translate these things...

That's probably because it's a relex.

Yes, but I want to see how he translates some complex things before I just tell him "dude, it's a relex"...

[Khemehekis]

Let's see what Kankonian has words for . . .

"bootstrap", -- no word for this
"Hawking radiation", -- no word for this
"sandhi", -- nethudas (native Kankonian/Tze*ethik)
"binomial theorem", -- bavedam edkun (bavedam is native Kankonian/Tze*ethik, edkun is from the Ciladian, ed (two) + kun (name))
"Linux distro", -- they don't have Linux on Kankonia, so no word for this
"kaiju", -- no word for this
"cheddar cheese", -- tsheda (borrowed from English; Kankonians haven't domesticated the cow so they don't make cow's milk cheeses)
"Zeitgeist", -- goraya (native Kankonian/Tze*ethik)
"terminal emulator", -- no word for this
"non-standard analysis", -- maybe they can just say sughu (analysis) + tekliu (nonstandard)?
"Currywurst", -- no word for this
"tau", -- zhorah (arbitrary coinage) for the lepton, harozh (the tau lepton backwards) for the neutrino, tau (from Greek) for the Greek letter
"d-pad", -- no word for this
"poutine" -- no word for this
"dungeonpunk"? -- no word for this

You could coin conworld-external terms for some of these -- what the conworlders or yourself would use if they existed. Verdurian has a list of vocab for stuff like computers and Earth places, but they're obviously not "canon", as such.

Also, that's tau the number. I added links with every word so that there wouldn't be any disputes of what I mean in particular.

Oh, "no word for this" just means I haven't created a word yet. In-world, I'm pretty sure that the Kankonians have a word for Hawking radiation.

[Creyeditor]

I don't want to revive anything that already died, but I think it is possible to have a language1 which (independently of it's writing system) could have the sound-meaning correspondence that was descriped in the OP. Let's consider some morphemes from a potential language:
[æɾɪ]
[ɪh]
[ʁø]
[ɸɥʊ]
[əʝʘ]
[ɛʔɔ]

You could try to do a phonological analysis with this data, but you would be forced to posit a lot of phonemes for this small amount of data. Or an arbitrary set of phonological rules that only aply once. Basically a language is possible without Double articulation. This is just an idea of mine, that would allow the description in the OP to be true. Sentences can be subdivided into meaningful units, but these meaningful units cannot be subdivided into meaningless units.



1 Or something similar? Probably a languoid.

[Sumelic]

I don't want to revive anything that already died, but I think it is possible to have a language1 which (independently of it's writing system) could have the sound-meaning correspondence that was descriped in the OP. Let's consider some morphemes from a potential language:
[æɾɪ]
[ɪh]
[ʁø]
[ɸɥʊ]
[əʝʘ]
[ɛʔɔ]

You could try to do a phonological analysis with this data, but you would be forced to posit a lot of phonemes for this small amount of data. Or an arbitrary set of phonological rules that only aply once. Basically a language is possible without Double articulation. This is just an idea of mine, that would allow the description in the OP to be true. Sentences can be subdivided into meaningful units, but these meaningful units cannot be subdivided into meaningless units.



1 Or something similar? Probably a languoid.

Well, more than a couple of languages exist that have been analyzed as having "phonemes" that only occur in one or two morphemes. But once the vocabulary gets large enough, there will have to be some repeats.

[Creyeditor]

I don't want to revive anything that already died, but I think it is possible to have a language1 which (independently of it's writing system) could have the sound-meaning correspondence that was descriped in the OP. Let's consider some morphemes from a potential language:
[æɾɪ]
[ɪh]
[ʁø]
[ɸɥʊ]
[əʝʘ]
[ɛʔɔ]

You could try to do a phonological analysis with this data, but you would be forced to posit a lot of phonemes for this small amount of data. Or an arbitrary set of phonological rules that only aply once. Basically a language is possible without Double articulation. This is just an idea of mine, that would allow the description in the OP to be true. Sentences can be subdivided into meaningful units, but these meaningful units cannot be subdivided into meaningless units.



1 Or something similar? Probably a languoid.

Well, more than a couple of languages exist that have been analyzed as having "phonemes" that only occur in one or two morphemes. But once the vocabulary gets large enough, there will have to be some repeats.

What if all 'phones' only occur in some words? What if there are no minimal pairs? What if it is not possible to have generalizations like 'Phonem X is phone y in context Z'?
The idea of phoneme is not only about repetition of phones. It is also about distributional variants and minimal pairs. What if we have the words above, but none of the words below is possible (as an example)?

Spoiler:

*[ɪɾɪ]
*[øɾɪ]
*[ʊɾɪ]
*[əɾɪ]
*[ɛɾɪ]
*[ɔɾɪ]

*[æhɪ]
*[æʁɪ]
*[æɸɪ]
*[æɥɪ]
*[æʝɪ]
*[æʘɪ]
*[æʔɪ]

*[æɾæ]
*[æɾø]
*[æɾʊ]
*[æɾə]
*[æɾɛ]
*[æɾɔ]

[cntrational]

Modern Standard Arabic has a velar l only in the word "Allah" and its derivatives, the sole remaining example from Classical Arabic.

Such a language is impossible by humans without either making it extremely limited like Toki Pona, or making it a true written-only that can create arbitrary symbols.

[Keenir]

Modern Standard Arabic has a velar l only in the word "Allah" and its derivatives, the sole remaining example from Classical Arabic.

Such a language is impossible by humans

wait, what?

[Creyeditor]

Modern Standard Arabic has a velar l only in the word "Allah" and its derivatives, the sole remaining example from Classical Arabic.

Such a language is impossible by humans without either making it extremely limited like Toki Pona, or making it a true written-only that can create arbitrary symbols.

As I told you before, I think it is possible, that every sound in a language acts in a way similar to the velar lateral in arabic. I agree with you, that we probably would not call it a human language.
Concerning the creation of an infinite amount of arbitrary phonetic gestures, this might be possible, because phonetics is actually gradual, not categorial. Let's say we are only talking about alveolar stops and voicing onset time. We could create an infinite amount of phonetic gestures which have different VOTs. Now take into account, that you can do something similar for every phonetic parameter.

[cntrational]

Modern Standard Arabic has a velar l only in the word "Allah" and its derivatives, the sole remaining example from Classical Arabic.

Such a language is impossible by humans

wait, what?

badly written reference

"Such a language" refers to Creyeditor's idea.

[qwed117]

I hate to necro a disastrous thread like this, yet I feel like there is something about this language that we can determine further. I'm going to focus on an aspect that I think we ignored too much: Sew'Kyetuh's claim that there are no verbs in his language. Now that I am looking back on his sample, I think it's clear that both of us were making mistakes, us in our omission of it, and him in his ignorance of it.

-hm appears to be an aspectual marker for the progressive or a verb class marker. This I think tripped Sew'Kyetuh up. In reality all of his sentences contain verbs, just different aspects. This is what I was trying to get to here.

This means that Etihus has two types of participles based on the sentences that he has given, a progressive participle, and a perfective participle (I think. There may be another explanation though). Both forms are technically identical to the verb but who cares!

Secondarily, ablaut can be used by the Etihans to differentiate sentences and make life more fun for us. Look at
Syh rabrhm sygh
Sygh rabrahm syh <Gender Ablaut>
and
Syh loba
Syh lobo cuffari <Transitivity Ablaut>

(Unless this is a mistake, which I don't think is likely)

Passivization is more or less complex
There are two passive constructions, the progressive and the perfective (don't ask me how this works!). In theory, they can be manipulated, like my P-Dishashta reconstruction, to be relative clauses and adjectives
The perfective construction is of the form DET + VERB - NOUN.
The progressive consturction is of the form NOUN + VERB. (I'm using this to explain why "Cuffari-tikhm" appears even though it shouldn't be allowed)
This model has one failing though: it can't explain stuff like "Syh-loba" when we would expect "Sec loba-syh", unless it is a naturally both monovalent and divalent.
HOWEVER: There might be a simpler way to explain why "Cuffari-tikhm" works. It's reflexion. If "tikhm" and "loba" are reflexive (in that context), then it is possible that this is simply a strategy for showing reflexion. Therefore forms like "Syh tikhm cuffari" would work, meaning approximately "the girl tripped the dog", and "Sec lobo-cuffari", which roughly means "the dog was walked".
Another explanation is that these function like English's ergative verbs, like bake, which have mediopassive meanings in monovalent states, but active meanings in polyvalent states.

So here's a question for Sew'Kyetuh, should he still lurks this site: What do "Syh-loba", "Sec loba-syh", and "Sec lobo-cuffari" mean?

[Khemehekis]

Let's see what Kankonian has words for . . .

"bootstrap", -- no word for this
"Hawking radiation", -- no word for this
"sandhi", -- nethudas (native Kankonian/Tze*ethik)
"binomial theorem", -- bavedam edkun (bavedam is native Kankonian/Tze*ethik, edkun is from the Ciladian, ed (two) + kun (name))
"Linux distro", -- they don't have Linux on Kankonia, so no word for this
"kaiju", -- no word for this
"cheddar cheese", -- tsheda (borrowed from English; Kankonians haven't domesticated the cow so they don't make cow's milk cheeses)
"Zeitgeist", -- goraya (native Kankonian/Tze*ethik)
"terminal emulator", -- no word for this
"non-standard analysis", -- maybe they can just say sughu (analysis) + tekliu (nonstandard)?
"Currywurst", -- no word for this
"tau", -- zhorah (arbitrary coinage) for the lepton, harozh (the tau lepton backwards) for the neutrino, tau (from Greek) for the Greek letter
"d-pad", -- no word for this
"poutine" -- no word for this
"dungeonpunk"? -- no word for this

I recently rediscovered this thread, 8 years later. I thought it would be interesting to see how much Kankonian's "niche" vocabulary has grown over two presidential-term-length units of time.

"bootstrap", -- tangi (native Kankonian/Tze*ethik) for the strap on footwear, koang (onomatopoeia) for starting a computer. I also now have the idiom uhu tlakaming ("go government-free") for "pull oneself up by one's bootstraps".
"Hawking radiation", -- no word for this
"sandhi", -- nethudas (native Kankonian/Tze*ethik)
"binomial theorem", -- bavedam edkun (bavedam is native Kankonian/Tze*ethik, edkun is from the Ciladian, ed (two) + kun (name))
"Linux distro", -- Linux is Linouks. Distro is skanshakelto (Javarti borrowing). So: skanshakelto id Linouks.
"kaiju", -- pshepgar (Deksadian borrowing). Deksadians have jatis, which is Lehola's equivalent of anime (despite looking nothing like anime visually), and they also have this kind of monster movie.
"cheddar cheese", -- tsheda (borrowed from English; Kankonians haven't domesticated the cow so they don't make cow's milk cheeses)
"Zeitgeist", -- goraya (native Kankonian/Tze*ethik)
"terminal emulator", -- no word for this
"non-standard analysis", -- maybe they can just say sughu (analysis) + tekliu (nonstandard)?
"Currywurst", -- no word for this
"tau", -- zhorah (arbitrary coinage) for the lepton, harozh (the tau lepton backwards) for the neutrino, tau (from Greek) for the Greek letter, ked (Achel borrowing) for the number.
"d-pad", -- no word for this. I'm not sure how much Kankonian video game controllers would look like Terran ones. I do have a native Kankonian word for "joystick", though, LOL.
"poutine" -- putzin (Terran borrowing, of course)
"dungeonpunk"? -- still no word for this. I do now have Kankonian words for steampunk, cyberpunk, steelpunk, atompunk, seapunk, nanopunk, and biopunk, though, and a number of these are Terran borrowings (such as sipank).

[Arayaz]

"Hawking radiation", -- no word for this

Somewhat surprised, given that it's a scifi setting...

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But holy cow, this was a vicious thread. Don't belive any major battles have happened here during my time, though, fortunately.