Boustrophedon is pretty cool, and having letters that are rotations and flips of other letters means that you have to make fewer letter shapes, making it easier to create and alphabet, so why not use both together?
Archive for October, 2014
#114
Friday, October 31st, 2014Detail #117: Several Degrees of Definiteness vs. Lexical Distinctions
Friday, October 31st, 2014I look for a car (any car)
I search for a car (a specific car; I know which one it is, you probably don't)
I search for the car (that I mentioned earlier, and thus you know of it now too)Maybe this is done by some change in congruence on the verb - maybe all specific-or-definite verbs have a certain marking, while only definite nouns have a marking, or vice versa. Or maybe only certain verbs where the distinction is felt to be significant enough have pairs where the difference is meaningful. I would imagine the pairs would tend to look similar but not have any regular formation going on.
Detail #116: Some Unusual Things to Grammaticalize
Friday, October 31st, 2014I.e. 'John harvests(small-to-large) the field', 'David killed(medium-to-big) Goliath', 'The villain kicked(medium-to-small) the puppy',
One could also perhaps grammaticalize the amount of premeditation of first person future verbs by some way.
Detail #115: Local Cases
Friday, October 31st, 2014Imagine a case system of about six local cases. In Finnish, these are conventionally arranged as {on/by, in} * {towards, at, from}. However, let us not give them all that clear names yet.
Let's rather go by {A, B} * {1, 2, 3}. Now, we have this set: {A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3}. And now for the fun: let directionality of the different numbers vary with the verb and its aspect!
Type 1 verbs have the perfect aspect cause the cases to map thus: 1 → origin, 2 → location, 3 → direction (and A vs. B maintain the distinction 'in' vs. 'at'/'by'/'on'). The imperfect aspect, however, gets A1 → entirely unused, B1 →direction, A2 → direction, B2 → location , A3 → location, B3 → origin ... and the 'in' vs 'at'/'by'/'on' distinction is only partially preserved, where i.e. B3 conflates origins at/by/on or in the noun thus marked, and so on.
Of course, these mappings may be specific to classes of verbs, even unique to some verb (and most mappings may actually ignore most of the cases entirely), and the mappings may conflate things in various ways - sometimes, location and origin, sometimes location and direction, sometimes in and on/at/by, sometimes maybe even part of the on/at/by gets transferred to in and vice versa.
In part this is an exaggeration of case and adposition usage differences in reality - in some languages, a painting hangs on the wall, in some it hangs in the wall. In some, the mail slot in your door is on the door, in some it is in the door.
In English, the phrasal verbs likewise form a complex of preposition-verb pairs where the meaning is not trivially related to the preposition's usual use, and we can find languages where aspect does change the sense of location/direction - if you were heading somewhere, perfect aspect sort of implies you've gotten there somehow, and if you are coming from somewhere, you have been there.
Grammaticalizing and having a bunch of complications with regards to this is no big stretch, I imagine.
#113
Friday, October 31st, 2014A t-shirt with /ʙað çønɫanɢing ɪðɛas/ written on it.
EN: Hmm…
hill is muiki (revisited)
Friday, October 31st, 2014Word derivation for "hill" :
Basque = muino, Finnish = mäki
Miresua = muiki
My previous Miresua conlang word for hill was moikä. This is another modification to avoid ending a noun in -Ä.
I couldn't find the word hill in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but there are a handful of occurrences in Through the Looking-glass.
"...It's more like a corkscrew than a path! Well, THIS turn goes to the hill, I suppose -- no, it doesn't! This goes straight back to the house!"
Lesson Two
Friday, October 31st, 2014What are they called?
‘Opa haviwme.
‘opa havi ‘öme
hello grandfather GEN/1
Hello, my grandfather.
‘Opa tujöme.
‘opa tujö ‘öme.
hello grandson GEN/1
Hello, my grandson.
Zaj hwa’umuwme. Pawlmiwma.
zajö hö’a ‘umu ‘öme. pa’ö hömi ‘öma.
PROG learn Umu GEN/1. run for 1
I’m learning Umu. You help me
Da. Zaj pawlmiwtiwme.
töta, zajö pa’ö hömi ‘öti ‘ome.
alright, PROG run for 2 GEN/1
Alright, I (will) help you.
Jonazuk nnihaza? ‘Ul ijá nnihaza?
jona zukö nöni haza? ‘urö jöja nöni haza?
how as.such small.thing here? name what small.thing here?
How about this? What is this called?
Hini ‘ul nnihaza.
hini ‘urö nöni haza.
car name small.thing here.
This is called a car.
Jonazuk irömvna?
jona zukö jörö ‘ömö vöna?
how as.such body PL there?
What about those?
‘Aj’ul irövna.
‘ajö ‘urö jörö vöna
horse name body there.
Those are called horses.
Jonazuk irömhaza?
jona zukö jörö ‘ömö haza?
how as.such body PL here?
What about these?
‘A’ajlaza.
‘a’a jörö haza.
cat body here.
These are cats.
‘Ul ijá munövna?
‘urö jöja munö vöna?
name what person there?
What is that man called
‘Ul Kij munövna.
‘urö Kijö munö vöna
name Kij person there.
That man is called Kij.
Kij, ‘ul ijá mariwti?
Kijö, ‘urö jöja mari ‘öti?
Kij, name what mother GEN/2?
Kij, what is your mother’s name?
‘Ul Pal mariwme.
‘urö Parö mari ‘öme.
name Pal mother GEN/1.
My mother is called Bal.
Tagged: conlang, lesson, pseudoghlyphs, umu

Translation Challenge: The Beginning of Tolstoy’s “Anna Kareninaâ€
Thursday, October 30th, 2014Text in English:
The text to be translated in this Translation Challenge is the initial passage of Tolstoy’s 1878 novel Anna Karenina.1 The Ayeri translation here follows the English one by Constance Garnett (1901), which can be found on Project Gutenberg.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning. (Tolstoy 2013)
Ayeri translation:
Kamayon pandahajang-hen mino; minarya miraneri sitang-ton pandahÄng-hen minarya.
Enyareng atauya kÄryo nangaya pandahana Oblonski. Silvisaye sarisa envanang, ang manga miraya ayon yena cÄn-cÄnas layeri Kahani, seri ganvayÄs pandahaya ton, nay ang narisaye ayonyam yena, ang ming saylingoyye mitanyam nangaya kamo kayvo yÄy. Eng manga yomÄran eda-mineye luga bahisya kay, nay tong vakas ten pulengeri, sitang-tong-namoy ayonang nay envanang, nÄrya nasimayajang-hen pandahana nay nangÄnena ton naynay. Ang mayayo nyÄn-hen nangaya, ming tenubisoyrey, mitantong kadanya. Ang engyon vihyam miromÄnjas keynam si sa lancon kadanya apineri kondangaya, nasimayajas pandahana nay nangÄnena Oblonski. Ang saroyye envan sangalas yena, ang manga yomoyya ayon rangya ton luga bahisya kay. Sa senyon ganye nangaya-hen; ang ranye ganvaya Angli kayvo lomÄyaya visam nay ang tahanye ledoyam, yam mya balangyeng pinyan yanoley gumo hiro ye; ang saraya ersaya bahisya sarisa pidimya tarika sirutayyÄnena; ang narisaton lomÄya risang nay lantaya vapatanas ton.
More information
See this PDF file for the whole thing, including interlinear glosses and some commentary: Translation Challenge: The Beginning of “Anna Karenina”.
- Plank, Frans, Thomas Mayer, Tatsiana Mayorava and Elena Filimonova, eds. The Universals Archive. 1998–2009. U Konstanz, 2009. Web. 26 Oct. 2014. ‹http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/intro›.
- Schachter, Paul. “The Subject in Philippine Languages: Topic, Actor, Actor-Topic, or None of the Above?” Subject and Topic. Ed. Charles N. Li. New York: Academic P, 1976. 493–518. Print.
- Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Eds. David Brannan, David Widger and Andrew Sly. Trans. by Constance Garnett. Project Gutenberg. 11 Oct. 2014. Project Gutenberg, 22 Feb. 2013. Web. 26 Oct. 2014. ‹http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1399›.
- Hat tip to Steven Lytle for suggesting it. ↩
#112
Thursday, October 30th, 2014If you see two potential ways to express the same concept, why not make sure your language can do both of them, and call the alternation “stylistic choice.†You need not stop at just two constructions per concept if you know of more!
Discourse deixis
Thursday, October 30th, 2014[Neat, though I don't know where this came from...maybe Nahuatl?]