Archive for January, 2017
A completed Universal Language
Thursday, January 19th, 2017From the front page:
"Language is one of the biggest barriers that divides us all.
The only solution today if a businessman wants to create a partnership in another country is to hire a translator or spend lots of valuable time learning only ONE specific language. Even if he learned seven languages, he'd still be out of luck for many places. There are literally thousands of languages here on Earth, and many are very different from each other.
I PROPOSE A SOLUTION!!
ZANA ZIKA is a constructed language designed to be as easy to learn as possible to many different language learners. Instead of structured grammar there are concepts, strung together in any order. Instead of massive dictionaries there are less than 150 words. There aren't any confusing sounds, I've combined them and taken them out. For instance, some languages have no different sound for 'p', 'b', and 'v'. ZANA ZIKA has just one 'p', that can be mispronounced, but still understood!
It's super simple to learn and create concepts in ZANA ZIKA, so give it a try!!"
A completed Universal Language
Thursday, January 19th, 2017From the front page:
"Language is one of the biggest barriers that divides us all.
The only solution today if a businessman wants to create a partnership in another country is to hire a translator or spend lots of valuable time learning only ONE specific language. Even if he learned seven languages, he'd still be out of luck for many places. There are literally thousands of languages here on Earth, and many are very different from each other.
I PROPOSE A SOLUTION!!
ZANA ZIKA is a constructed language designed to be as easy to learn as possible to many different language learners. Instead of structured grammar there are concepts, strung together in any order. Instead of massive dictionaries there are less than 150 words. There aren't any confusing sounds, I've combined them and taken them out. For instance, some languages have no different sound for 'p', 'b', and 'v'. ZANA ZIKA has just one 'p', that can be mispronounced, but still understood!
It's super simple to learn and create concepts in ZANA ZIKA, so give it a try!!"
Detail #326: Remnants of the Dual
Wednesday, January 18th, 2017- things that often come in pairs
- socially pairwise things
- With some applicative participles, formerly signifying the use of both hands for carrying out the action, now signifying intensity and without the applicative meaning preserved.
- With applicative participles of verbs of perception, the dual signifies 'with the ears' or 'with the eyes' and thus basically just serves to enhance the fact that the speaker has seen or heard what he's speaking of.
- With some active participles that formerly just signified pairs doing something, now the dual marker signifies reciprocality within socially important structures of two.
- With some gerunds a dual morpheme indicates repetition, whereas plural marks habituality.
#488
Sunday, January 15th, 2017Let’s look at playing around with metrical extensions with “high” and “low.”
First, their superlatives “highest” and “lowest” could easily be extended to mean “top” and “bottom.”
You could always make their positives act like directions and not just states, so “high"and “low” could mean “up” and “down.”
You could get more creätive with the comparatives, and use them for personalities. Like, a “higher” person can have a lot of “charm” and a “lower” person could be “strange.”
This would get the regular looking:
High higher highest
Low lower lowest
To also be the more interesting:
Up charm top
Down strange bottom
Shalts Language Institute
Thursday, January 12th, 2017So yeah, it's German, remade with Latin and Greek or different aspects of use.
Basically I wanted a language that would sound like simplified (read un-Normanized) English to non-native speakers of English, but it sounds more like Dutch to most English speakers. You can find it HERE.
Shalts Language Institute
Thursday, January 12th, 2017So yeah, it's German, remade with Latin and Greek or different aspects of use.
Basically I wanted a language that would sound like simplified (read un-Normanized) English to non-native speakers of English, but it sounds more like Dutch to most English speakers. You can find it HERE.
Conlangery SHORTS #22: Axanar Update
Wednesday, January 11th, 2017Ŋʒädär Cases: Grammatical Subsystems as Bundles of Features pt I
Tuesday, January 10th, 2017The absolute marks subjects and objects. The dative marks recipients. The genitive-comitative marks possessors or accompanying participants. The three locatives - locative, lative and ablative - have similarities, but there is an odd one out among them. The complement case has certain similarities to the absolute case.
participant | directional | central | |
absolutive | + | - | + |
dative | + | + | + |
ablative | ? | - | |
lative | - | + | - |
locative | - | - | - |
genitive-comitative | + | - | - |
complement | - | ? | + |
participant | central | directional | |
dative | + | + | + |
absolutive | + | + | - |
ablative+ | + | + | |
genitive-comitative | + | - | - |
complement+ | - | + | + |
complement- | - | + | - |
lative | - | - | + |
ablative- | - | - | + |
locative | - | - | - |
here, the cases are ordered assuming participant > central > directional
potential participant | active core case/ framing non-core case | "associate" reference | |
dative | + | - | + |
absolutive | + | + | - |
ablative | + | + | |
genitive-comitative | + | + | - |
complement | - | + | - |
lative | - | - | - |
locative | - | + | + |
unabsolutive | - | - | + |
Subordinating Verbs: A Small Blast from the Past
Sunday, January 8th, 2017I was recently thinking about this with regards to writing my New and Improved (tee-em) grammar of Ayeri and my previous post on subordinating verbs. I saw subordinating verbs as posing the problem of putting too much stuff in the constituent that holds the verb. As a solution, I described moving the complement of the main verb into a finite complement clause. When I did some analysis of verbs yesterday to maybe shed some light on the alternation between -isa and -isu in deverbal adjectives, I came across the following example sentence in the entry for pinya ‘ask’, entered October 24, 2008:
- Sa
- Sa
- PT
- pinyayāng
- pinya=yāng
- ask=3SG.M.A
- ye
- ye
- 3SG.F.TOP
- rimayam
- rima-yam
- close-PTCP
- silvenoley.
- silveno-ley
- window-P.INAN
‘Her he asks to close the window.’
Material from 2008 is not quite fresh anymore, but going through my example texts, I also found the following sentence fragment in the 2010/11 Conlang Holiday Card Exchange (interlinear glossing updated to current standards):
- nārya
- nārya
- but
- le
- le
- PT.INAN
- tavisayang
- tavisa=yang
- receive=1S.A
- takan
- takan-Ø
- chance-TOP
- incam
- int-yam
- buy-PTCP
- dagangyeley
- dangang-ye-ley
- card-PL-P.INAN
‘but I got the chance to buy cards’
In both cases, the subordinating verb is transitive: (1) ‘(you) ask her’, (2) ‘I got the chance’; pinya- ‘ask’ in (1) is a raising verb (the logical subject of the subordinate verb is the object of the verb in the matrix clause), while int- ‘buy’ in (2) should simply be an infinite clausal complement. However, in both cases we do neither get the complement awkwardly placed in the middle, nor are the sentences rephrased so as to result in a finite complement clause or a nominalized complement to avoid the infinite verb form:
-
- ??
- Sa
- Sa
- PT
- pinyayāng
- pinya=yāng
- ask=3SG.M.A
- rimayam
- rima-yam
- close-PTCP
- silvenoley
- silveno-ley
- window-P.INAN
- ye.
- ye
- 3SG.F.TOP
‘Her he asks to close the window.’ - Pinyayāng,
- pinya=yāng,
- ask=3SG.M.A,
- ang
- ang
- AT
- rimaye
- rima=ye.Ø
- close=3SG.F.TOP
- silvenoley.
- silveno-ley
- window-P.INAN
‘He asks that she closes the window.’
- ??
- nārya
- nārya
- but
- le
- le
- PT.INAN
- tavisayang
- tavisa=yang
- receive=1S.A
- takan
- takan-Ø
- chance-TOP
- intanena
- intan-ena
- purchase-GEN
- dagangyena
- dangang-ye-na
- card-PL-GEN
‘but I got the chance of a purchase of cards’- nārya
- nārya
- but
- le
- le
- PT.INAN
- tavisayang
- tavisa=yang
- receive=1S.A
- takan,
- takan-Ø,
- chance-TOP,
- ang
- ang
- AT
- incay
- int=ay.Ø
- buy=1SG.TOP
- dagangyeley
- dangang-ye-ley
- card-PL-P.INAN
‘but I got the chance that I buy cards’
Both constructions, (1) and (2) are not widely attested in my materials, and the new grammar doc as it currently is does not rule out cases like (2), insofar I only need to make up my mind about constructions like in (1): continue allowing them as a variant, declare them ungrammatical, or simply ignore them? In the first case I might be required to keep a VP or a functional equivalent of it, after all, since there would be a post-subject position associated with verbs, then.1 In any case, raising and control should be interesting topics to come to terms with in my conlang.
- What with my trying to learn more about syntax lately (LFG specifically because it’s interesting for languages like Ayeri), I was recently wondering if (IP (DP) (I’ (I) (S (NP) (XP) ) ) ) might be a/the appropriate way to describe a basic transitive clause in Ayeri, with DP as the topic marker; the finite verb in I; NP as the subject NP; and XP as whatever is under predication. If we don’t assume empty terminal nodes, everything governing S can be omitted in predicative statements, and the XP position would be filled with an AP – though that alone possibly doesn’t accommodate for the negator, which is located between subject and predicative adjective. This, in turn, triggers the question where to place it if the order of adjective and noun is reversed. ↩
#487
Thursday, January 5th, 2017Your werewolf conlang’s syntax should work strictly off of transformational grammar.