archives of the CONLANG mailing list ------------------------------------ >From cbmvax!uunet!village.boston.ma.us!tlhIngan-Hol-request Tue Jan 5 06:08:21 1993 Return-Path: Message-Id: <19930104213152.4.ACW@PALLANDO.SCRC.Symbolics.COM> Errors-To: cbmvax!uunet!village.boston.ma.us!tlhIngan-Hol-request Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" From: Allan C. Wechsler To: "Klingon Language List" Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 16:31-0500 Subject: Klingon pronunciation and tonogenesis. Supersedes: <19930104200634.7.ACW@PALLANDO.SCRC.Symbolics.COM> Comments: Retransmission of failed mail. Content-Length: 2354 Status: RO I had the pleasure of listening to Okrand's Conversational Klingon tape; it has Michael Dorn as narrator, but all the actual Klingon is spoken by Okrand. (Dorn, I understand, is not comfortable speaking Klingon. A pity; he's got a good voice for it.) So at last we've got some extended samples of guaranteed-correct pronunciation. I was pleased that I had already gotten most of it right. I'll restrict my comments to two areas: ' and -rgh. I was disappointed that there were no examples of "glottal echo" (see the last paragraph of TKD 1.1) on the tape. All the word-final glottal closures were unreleased, as far as I could tell. Okrand says in TKD 1.3 that syllables that have glottal stops in them can steal dynamic stress from the syllable that would ordinarily recieve it. But the tape makes it obvious that something else is going on. Glottal syllables, especially syllables with glottal coda, regularly get raised in pitch. This never seems to happen in non-glottal stressed syllables. So Klingon certainly has tone, although it is not phonemic yet. But it would be easy to imagine glottal codas getting lost in a couple of generations, leaving the high tone behind; if this were to occur, Klingon would have evolved a true tone distinction. Speakers who have trouble with glottal codas should always remember to use high tone; I'd bet the result would be easily understood by a native. (I should point out for our linguistically-naive participants that our current best theory of how Earth languages acquire phonemic tone is extremely similar to what is happening in Klingon. It's also at various stages of happening in quite a few Oceanic languages on Earth. Once a language has two tones, the floodgates are open and intricate multitone systems can evolve.) (As another digression, it is intriguing to remember that the Klingon being spoken now, in the 20th century, is four centuries prior to the language described in TKD.) Regarding the syllable coda -rgh: TKD 1.1 says that r is lightly trilled or rolled, and that it is not the American r (a grooved corono-postalveolar voiced approximant). Apparently -rgh is an exception; Okrand always pronounces -rgh with an approximant, and a lax one at that. This is additional support for the theory of the origin of -rgh that I advanced in my article in HolQeD 1 last March. >From cbmvax!uunet!ctr.columbia.edu!shoulson Wed Jan 6 16:56:59 1993 Return-Path: Date: Tue, 5 Jan 93 20:26:10 -0500 Message-Id: <9301060126.AA20776@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu, jbaltz@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu Subject: PLS: Just when you thought it was safe Status: RO Just posting a bit of good news. The Planned Languages Server has managed to find itself a new home at Columbia University, thanks to the tireless efforts of its (other) manager and founder, Jerry Altzman. He's managed to wheedle a chunk of space from yet another Columbia machine, and we hope to effect the move in about 2 weeks. I expect the new address to be langserv@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu, but that may be incorrect. The new spot ought to be good for another year or two, and we'll see about the next move when we come to it... ~mark o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o N2KOT Mark E. Shoulson: shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Co-manager, Planned Languages Server >From cbmvax!uunet!staff.tc.umn.edu!dsg Wed Jan 6 16:57:52 1993 Return-Path: Date: Tue, 5 Jan 93 21:50:57 CST From: () Message-Id: <78657.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Status: RO These are the kinds of language I know exist (excluding written and other representations of languages): Spoken. Sign -- mostly used by Deaf people and those they associate with. Whistled. Tactile -- deaf-blind sign languages. What other kinds are there, if any? Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu >From cbmvax!snark!cowan Wed Jan 6 01:30:45 1993 Return-Path: Message-Id: From: cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan (John Cowan) Subject: Re: Klingon alphabet To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu (conlang) Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 23:13:14 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 4624 Status: RO The following messages were posted to the Klingon list, and are being reposted back to conlang by me. Apologies to those who receive both lists. James Jones writes: > Computer-generated text needn't reflect the original implements used to > make characters--but OTOH, terrestrial print still in large part has the > width variations and serifs that reflect the tools used originally to > create letters. The first thing we tera'ngan try to do with printers > and displays with sufficient resolution is mimic type, which mimics > pen-drawn letter forms in large part. > > That's not to say that things couldn't be different in the Empire, to > be sure, but I'd think that there'd be an interesting story behind > the evolution of pIqaD if they were different. Mark Mandel writes: > Why need the original form of pIqaD have been drawn with a > line-drawing implement? > > Consider the Hero's Tongue, the language of Larry Niven's kzinti > (and never mind the animated ST version of them in the adaptation > of his story "The Soft Weapon"). The kzinti are hunting > carnivores, vaguely like bipedal quarter-ton tigers, and their > five-digit hands (4 fingers + opposable thumb, like ours) have 4 > retractable claws. Their script is always described as looking > to a human like "dots and commas". I assume that it originated > with punctures and scratches made with the points of the claws in > some soft surface like clay, mud, or tree bark. As their > technology developed they might have used ink pads to ink the > claw-tips before pressing them to or raking them across some > paperlike material. Now that they are spacegoers with a high > technology they may be using pressure-sensitive tablets -- even > though they CAN hold a pen and manipulate it almost as well as a > human. > > Suppose the earliest ancestor of pIqaD was blots and smears made > with a hand wet with some pigment. (Perhaps the first Klingon > "writing" was made with the blood of the prey, or victim, on the > body itself, to identify the killer/owner.) The marks would be > broad and areal, not linear. Even if modern Klingons do use > pen(like implement)s, pIqaD may maintain a conservative tradition > of shaped solid areas. > > - Mark (marqem ?) > > Mark A. Mandel > Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200 > 320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA > > ngImlI'jaj jaghpu'lI' tlhonDu' Jeff Lee writes: > Actually, the pIqaD *can* be written with a calligraphic pen; I've found > that an Osmiroid B3 nib with a glyph height of 10mm produces approximately > the correct height-to-thickness ratio. > > The trick to writing the Klingon characters lies in rotating the pen as > the curves are drawn. (This technique is used in the execution of several > historical Terran scripts, albeit to a much lesser degree. Insular > majuscule and minuscule and Luxeuil minuscule are fairly good examples > of this method.) > > Some of the characters do require an overlapping stroke, which is also > not without precedent in Terran calligraphy (for instance, the Lombardic > capital forms). > > +------------------------------------------------------------------------+ > | Net: Jeff Lee / jlee@smylex.uucp / jlee%smylex.uucp@tscs.tscs.com | > | SCA: Lord Godfrey de Shipbrook / Wyvernwood, Trimaris | > | Per pale azure and argent, a clarion counterchanged or and gules | > +------------------------------------------------------------------------+ > "The only thing that helps me maintain my slender grip on reality > is the friendship I share with my collection of singing potatoes." Mark Mandel further writes: > Mark Shoulson writes: > > ... Besides, whatever bizarre method was used, > >I'm sure modern Klingons would use something pen-like ... > > Why? Japanese and Chinese have been written with a brush for > thousands of years. The "modern" fountain, ballpoint, and > fibertip pen are, so far, just a blip in history, boosted by > the dominance of the cultures that developed them, whose script > developed with linear strokes. If history had gone differently > we might now all be writing our English with cartridge-fill or > disposable brushes, except for the traditional calligraphers who > would be still using metal- or quill-pointed pens. > > Marqem > > Tlhingan khol daghojbe'chugh vaj bikhegh. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From cbmvax!uunet!well.sf.ca.us!dasher Wed Jan 6 20:26:12 1993 Return-Path: Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 23:53:01 -0800 From: D Anton Sherwood Message-Id: <199301060753.AA04354@well.sf.ca.us> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu Subject: language modes Status: RO Talking drums -- but, I understand, they are just imitations of tone languages (avoiding homonyms by periphrasis). *\\* Anton >From cbmvax!uunet!extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU!robin Wed Jan 6 21:09:03 1993 Return-Path: Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 23:27:56 +1100 From: Robin F Gaskell Message-Id: <199301061227.AA26570@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Scientific American: September Cc: 100113.1107@compuserve.com Status: RO From: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au (Robin Gaskell) 15 Dec 92 To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu (Conlang Mail List) Subject: Sci Am - Sept `92 Hello Friends, In the antipodes, we often get our news a little late. This notwithstanding, I thought I should ask if you had seen the September issue of `Scientific American.' This edition was a SPECIAL ISSUE with the title of `Mind and Brain' "Brain and Language" on pages 63-71 might be of interest to others on the List. The article is by Antonio R. Damasio and Hanna Damasio, who have been researching the subject for twenty years. I thought their findings might be relevant to people considering designing languages ... that are supposed to flow through the brain as smoothely as possible. They basically said that, using the evidence from people with brain lesions - in identifiable locations, they have found three distinct areas, dealing with three different aspets of language. In brief:- i Expeiential events and our store of concepts are in one area - no words are attaced to these here. ii The second area carries phonemes, phonemic combinations and syntactic rules for combining words. iii The third, and lesser known, area mediates between the other two areas, i.e. matching concepts with syntactic sequences of sounds. This seems to be the area that constructs sentences by combining elements from the other two. If all this is true, then what are the consequences for Language Construction Theory: funny thing I am racking my first area, but cannot find a concept for `conlang-ology'; and when I play around with the sounds of words, in the second part, I can't seem to hear a word for the `science of constructing languages'. Maybe that's why my third area is having so much trouble in forming sentences to describe the new science we are forging on Conlang. Please get a back copy, and check it out (Scientific American, September 1992). Although I will have to read all of the references in the short reference list given at the end of the article, I have already gained some very strong impressions. Accepting that we will percieve things and develop a rich tapestry of concepts, then, concerning the 'language' we will use to communicate these ideas, my first impression was that the sounds we use to represent these concepts are of primary importance; my second impression was that the combination of these sounds into sequences to make words, and then, as words, into phrases, to make syntactical units, was a fairly basic level of language activity. Actual written words did not get a mention in the article, nor did the sort of grammar that involves word changes. Perhaps I should read all the references before saying too much about the primacy of spoken language and of the syntactic elements of grammar. However, that these were basic building blocks of language, was the main impression I got. ---------------KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKC(ZYYn.)x Robin >From cbmvax!uunet!extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU!robin Wed Jan 6 21:09:52 1993 Return-Path: Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 23:33:18 +1100 From: Robin F Gaskell Message-Id: <199301061233.AA26702@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: POS Interchangeability Cc: 100113.1107@compuserve.com Status: RO From: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au (Robin Gaskell) 3 Jan 93 To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu (Conlang Mail List) Subject: re POS Interchangeability, Primitives Hello Conlangers, I wish to comment briefly on the Interchangeability of parts of speech and the use of part of speech affixes ... brought up recently by Bruce Gilson. Although the use of special suffixes to denote the different part of speech brings a lot of economy to communication - saving us from using a lot of unnecessary words - it has the disadvantage of excessive brevity. And so, even though the logics of the situation are taken care of, the whole utterance can have been run through so quickly that it is over before we have caught all of the suffixes. This fault in a language, when it results in a number of significant ideas in close proximity, is described as by the idea of "concept clusters"; alternatively, I might say, the listener (or reader) suffers 'mental constipation' when the concepts rush into his brain so quickly that they are not processed at the rate at which they are received. Another way of of seeing it is to say that the communication has not given sufficient TIME for the recipient to sort out the functions of the concept-words before they become a tangle of ideas. This method of seeing the concept cluster problem came to me when I was pondering the way in which Glosa is inclined to become "dense" if the Glosa concept/words - having no Part Of Speech markers - are run together with insufficient padding of 'glue words.' So, one alternative to the interchangeability of parts of speech is to have no marking of the words to indicate their POS function, at all, and to let the syntax sort their funtion out, as occurs in Glosa. Thus, the job of :he POS suffixes is done by the small words in the sentence, between the concept-words. In Dan Maxwell's example of the interchangability available in Esperanto, he demonstrated the availability of alternative grammatical forms; I will show the equivalents in Glosa using its "syntax-based grammar," (which often looks like English construction). > > Bruce says that interconversion between parts of speech leads to some > interesting consequences. I agree, but what he suggests has been used > already, at least in Esperanto, probably Ido and perhaps also Lojban and > Vorlin, though Ileave comments on these languages to those who know them > better than I do. -- There appear to be a few minor differences between > what Bruce suggests and the system in Esperanto, though the basic idea is > the same, and Esperantists use property in arguing for the flexibility of > their language. Here is a summary of thius sort of thing in Esperanto. > > La domo grandas/estas granda =the house is big. > La domo verdas/estas verda=the house is green. > La granda domo verdas/estas verda=the big house is green. > La verda domo grandas/estas granda=the green house is big. > La grandaj^o domas/estas domo=the big this is a house. > La granda verdaj^o domas/estas domo=the big green thing is a house. Using the first of the Esperanto alternatives and adding the Glosa, this is what it looks like:- * La domo grandas =the house is big =u domi habe mega metri. * La domo verdas =the house is green =u domi habe kloro koleri. * La granda domo verdas =the big house is green =u mega domi habe kloro koleri. * La verda domo grandas =the green house is big =u kloro domi habe mega metri. * La grandaj^o domas =the big this is a house =u mega ra es u domi. * La granda verdaj^o domas =the big green thing is a house =u mega kloro ra es u domi. In spoken Glosa the _properties_ "metri" and "koleri" are often lost through ellipsis. Ken Beesley comments on primitives, using the example uf "death" and the variety of ways of dying: > Your metalanguage might group these into one category meaning something > like "die from natural causes" and another meaning something like "die > from injury or accident," or it could make even more distinctions. Other > groups might overlap or cut across various of these boundaries. The > point is, each language must define what its primitives are--there are no > obvious ways to cut up the real world of experience. Quite so, and the national languages formed their primitives in ancient times, possibly in ways that are not very relevant to-day. It is my guess, that in the process of creating Planned Languages, authors put considerable time into defining the criteria on which their primitives will be selected. In the case of Glosa, primitive selection seems to have been based on a combination of the psychological factors related to 'ease of use', and the scientific requirement of accuracy. Have we, in fact, discovered another element in the statement of the criteria for a language suitable for adoption as the IAL, i.e. BASIS FOR THE SELECTION OF SEMANTIC PRIMITIVES? Cheers, Robin >From cbmvax!uunet!watsun.cc.columbia.edu!jbaltz Wed Jan 6 21:09:56 1993 Return-Path: Date: Wed, 6 Jan 93 8:48:23 EST From: Jerry B. Altzman To: Cc: jbaltz@watsun.cc.columbia.edu, conlang@buphy.bu.edu, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu, jbaltz@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu Subject: Re: PLS: Just when you thought it was safe In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 5 Jan 93 20:26:10 -0500 Message-Id: Status: RO Just so you all know--it's still running on hebrew for now, we'll let you all know when it's really moved for sure. We're holding off installing anything or putting in any changes, and the server will probably be down for a full day before the move. We're both (Mark and I) glad that the server is so useful to so many of you. //jbaltz jerry b. altzman +1 212 650 5617 jbaltz@columbia.edu jauus@cuvmb (bitnet) NEVIS::jbaltz (HEPNET) ...!rutgers!columbia!jbaltz (bang!) >From cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.bitnet!LOJBAN Wed Jan 6 15:38:41 1993 Return-Path: Message-Id: <9301061351.AA05277@relay1.UU.NET> Reply-To: "Jerry B. Altzman" Sender: Lojban list From: "Jerry B. Altzman" Subject: Re: PLS: Just when you thought it was safe X-To: shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu X-Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu, jbaltz@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 5 Jan 93 20:26:10 -0500 Status: RO Just so you all know--it's still running on hebrew for now, we'll let you all know when it's really moved for sure. We're holding off installing anything or putting in any changes, and the server will probably be down for a full day before the move. We're both (Mark and I) glad that the server is so useful to so many of you. //jbaltz jerry b. altzman +1 212 650 5617 jbaltz@columbia.edu jauus@cuvmb (bitnet) NEVIS::jbaltz (HEPNET) ...!rutgers!columbia!jbaltz (bang!) >From cbmvax!uunet!ucl.ac.uk!ucleaar Wed Jan 6 18:19:34 1993 Return-Path: Via: uk.ac.bcc.mail-a; Wed, 6 Jan 1993 20:34:46 +0000 Message-Id: <9301062033.AA23315@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, dsg () In-Reply-To: (Your message of Tue, 05 Jan 93 21:50:57 CST.) <78657.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu> Date: Wed, 06 Jan 93 20:33:53 +0000 From: cbmvax!uunet!uk.ac.bcc.ts.link-1!And.Rostatled. Sender: cbmvax!uunet!ucl.ac.uk!ucleaar Status: RO Tactile -- deaf-blind sig > These are the kinds of language I know exist (excluding written and other > representations of languages): > > Spoken. > Sign -- mostly used by Deaf people and those they associate with. > Whistled. > Tactile -- deaf-blind sign languages. > > What other kinds are there, if any? > > Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu Is this whistled language as in Solresol, or as in 'whistle speech' found in, say, some parts of Central America? Whistle speech, I believe (perhaps wrongly) reproduces the tune of normal speech (which, in a tone language, carries quite a lot of information). In Solresol, by contrast, tones function as allophones of syllables with segmental content. ---- And. >From cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Thu Jan 7 04:26:25 1993 Return-Path: From: cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 16:20:00 PST Subject: (reply to message) In-Reply-To: "@mail-a.bcc.ac.uk!ucleaar@ucl.ac:uk:Xerox's message of 6 Jan 93 12:33 PST" To: Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu Message-Id: <93Jan6.162115pst.11891@alpha.xerox.com> Status: RO And. >Is this whistled language as in Solresol, or as in 'whistle speech' found >in, say, some parts of Central America? Whistle speech, I believe >(perhaps wrongly) reproduces the tune of normal speech (which, in a >tone language, carries quite a lot of information). In Solresol, >by contrast, tones function as allophones of syllables with segmental >content. I once stumbled on a little book called "Whistled Languages" or something like that. My memory is a little dim now. The author(s) was/were best acquainted with the whistled medium of Gomera, in the Canary Islands. Shepherds there actually whistle the local Spanish dialect, with whistled equivalents for spoken phonemes (much modified, to be sure, by the whistling medium). The book also examined a whistled dialect of French in the Pyrenees and a whistled form of Turkish, both also used by isolated shepherds to communicate over considerable distances with other isolated shepherds. None of these three is a tone language. It appears that quite arbitrary messages can be whistled and understood. (In Gomera, they report that some birds have been heard repeating commonly used "addresses" starting the messages, such as "A Mari/a de los A/ngeles.") The author actually learned to whistle Gomerese, and he found it far easier to produce it acceptably than to understand it. He once arranged a demonstrations with two whistlers communicating in town, within sight of each other, and the locals found it humorous in the extreme. One whistled language in Mexico, I think it is Tojolabal, is conveyed by whistling the tones of the language rather than phonemes. With tones, glides between tones, rhythm, and volume, this phoneme-less form of whistling is apparently sufficient to communicate satisfactorily, just as with the "talking drums" used to convey messages in some African tone languages like Jabo and Yoruba. This whistled form of the language is apparently used by vendors in the marketplace, and may therefore have some features of "play languages" like Pig Latin, but especially like Carny-talk, which is used by carnival people to hide messages from us rubes. Communication may be much aided by the fact that the whistled form of the language is used for conveying fairly conventional messages in a limited domain. There is also a report of a whistled form of Mazateco (Oaxaca, Mexico), also used by vendors but apparently by customers as well. Reportedly men are more likely to whistle than women, but women can understand the messages. In David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, he cites an article by G.M. Cowan, 1948, "Mazateco whistled speech." in Language 24, 280-6. Does anyone know of others? Ken Beesley beesley.parc@xerox.com >From cbmvax!uunet!ctr.columbia.edu!shoulson Thu Jan 7 13:35:05 1993 Return-Path: Date: Thu, 7 Jan 93 10:07:55 -0500 Message-Id: <9301071507.AA24124@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu In-Reply-To: 's message of Tue, 5 Jan 93 21:50:57 CST <78657.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu> Status: RO >Date: Tue, 5 Jan 93 21:50:57 CST >From: () >These are the kinds of language I know exist (excluding written and other >representations of languages): >Spoken. >Sign -- mostly used by Deaf people and those they associate with. >Whistled. >Tactile -- deaf-blind sign languages. >What other kinds are there, if any? Hard to say; I'm not sure I understand your definition of a "kind of language." It's not by sense used to receive it; because "whistled" and "spoken" both use hearing. Nor is it by means of production: "sign" and "tactile" both use hands (and other body-parts). It could be argued that facial expressions constitute a "language" of sorts: you can certainly understand them and transfer information, but the content is severely limited and "language" is usually understood to be something that can transmit arbitrary data. ~mark >From cbmvax!uunet!compuserve.com!71174.2735 Fri Jan 8 03:57:31 1993 Return-Path: Date: 07 Jan 93 18:20:52 EST From: Rick Harrison To: Subject: (long) IAL desiderata, 3rd draft Message-Id: <930107232052_71174.2735_DHQ40-1@CompuServe.COM> Status: RO Proposed guidelines for the design of an international auxiliary language (3rd draft) by Rick Harrison contents: 1. Introduction 1.1 synopsis 1.2 premise 1.3 the "ease of learning" question 1.4 terminology 2. Orthography 2.1 writing system 3. Phonology 3.1 phoneme selection 3.2 phonotactics 3.3 tones 4. Morphology 4.1 compounding 4.2 allomorphy 4.3 Zipf's Law 4.4 self-segregating (auto-isolating) morphemes 5. Vocabulary 5.1 vocabulary sources 5.2 word allocation 6. Grammar 6.1 universality and simplicity 6.2 syntax 6.3 gender 6.4 transitivity 7. Computer Tractability 8. Conclusion 9. Bibliography 1. Introduction 1.1 synopsis This essay advocates the creation of an auxiliary language for the entire world according to objective criteria, and discusses how such criteria can be specified. 1.2 premise When people who speak different languages need to communicate, they often choose to use an "interlingua" or "lingua franca." Latin served as Europe's interlingua for several centuries and is still used this way by the Catholic church. Citizens of Israel, who have many different mother tongues, use deliberately-revived Hebrew as their common language. Malay-Indonesian is the national language and common means of communication in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, even though it is the "native" or "home" language of a minority of their people. Pidgins -- simplified versions or mixtures of languages -- often arise to bridge the gap between groups of people who need to communicate across a language barrier. The adoption of an interlingua for the entire world appears to be desirable. Such a language would make it easier for scholars and scientists to gain access to information, and to participate in conferences and journals. A world lingua franca would facilitate commerce and make it easier for businesses to participate in the international marketplace. Diplomats, tourists and others would benefit. (I will not repeat the dubious claims that a global interlanguage could end famine and eliminate wars. In the long run, increased availability of information might improve the production and distribution of food, and face to face inter-cultural communication might reduce the tensions between ethnic and political groups. But there is certainly no guarantee that an auxiliary language will create a global utopia.) It is possible that a "natural" language such as English could play the role of auxiliary language to some extent. However, natural languages (and particularly English) have some characteristics which make them difficult to learn: unpredictable spellings, grammatical irregularities, sounds that are difficult for people from different language backgrounds to pronounce, etc. Many persons of average or above average intelligence do not have the time and/or special talent needed to master English (or some other natural language) as a second tongue. They can learn to "get the gist" of texts and to have simple "how are you" conversations, but cannot expect to gain the ability to confidently express themselves after a moderate amount of study. Also, there are political and cultural objections to granting any given natural language the status of world interlingua. For these reasons, the intentional creation of a suitable planned language is desirable. This international auxiliary language (IAL) would be designed so that it will be relatively easy for most of the world's people to learn, based on characteristics of the world's predominant languages and on information gathered from the fields of linguistics and language teaching. This IAL would be as culturally neutral as possible; it would not extract most of its words and grammar from European languages or from any single family of languages. I am postulating that an optimal IAL can only be created by following objective linguistic guidelines (as opposed to guesswork or the whims of an individual language designer). An IAL designed in this manner would probably be different from any of the universal language projects which have gotten a little publicity during the past two centuries. 1.3 the "ease of learning" question Assuming that we want to design a language which is neutral and relatively easy for most humans to learn, exactly how do we go about it? I don't claim to have all the answers, so I've assembled this list of proposed guidelines to stimulate further discussion. I have included some comments which I received in response to earlier versions of this article, as well as quotations from various linguists that shed light on these topics. One of the most important questions to consider is: can we objectively specify some or all of the characteristics which make a language easy or difficult to learn? (Some partisans of existing invented languages have responded to this essay by asserting that it is impossible to specify the characteristics which would make a language easy for most humans to learn. I will not speculate on their motives.) The distinguished linguist Frederick Bodmer wrote: "The primary desiderata of an international auxiliary are two. First, it must be an efficient instrument of communication, embracing both the simple needs of everyday life and the more exacting ones of technical discussion. Secondly, it must be easy to learn, whatever the home language of the beginner may be... We can best see what characteristics make it easy to learn a constructed language if we first ask what features of natural languages create difficulties for the beginner. Difficulties may arise from a variety of causes: structural irregularities, grammatical complexities of small or no functional value, an abundance of separate words not essential for communication, unfamiliarity with word forms, difficulty of pronunciation or auditory recognition of certain sounds or sound groups, and finally conventions of script." Jacques Guy comments: "There definitely are languages that are simpler than others, and by a long shot, too. If you don't believe me, just try learning Navaho, or French, for that matter. If learnability is one thing we are looking for, we ought to examine those simple, that is, easily learnt, languages, and draw lessons from them. How do you tell them? Easy: round up all the Pidgins for which data is available. Beach-la-mar, New-Guinea Pidgin, Police Motu (an Austronesian-based Pidgin of New Guinea), Chinook Jargon, Sabir... Let's round them up and ask ourselves: what have they got in common? And what is it that they don't have? So far, I haven't found one with tones, I haven't found one with cases, I can't think of one with inflected verbs." Willem Verloren van Themaat observes: "There are strong indications that different languages are not equally easy to learn even for children learning them as native languages. According to Slobin, a Russian child needs several years longer than an English child to master the morphology of his own language." This applies to writing systems as well as to grammars. Because Chinese children need to learn thousands of logograms, they have to spend much more of their school time learning to read and write than children in nations which use alphabetic writing systems. Rick Morneau adds: "Ease-of-learning is definitely measurable. A lot of work has been done that, although not aimed at (language) design, can certainly be applied to judging whether a language is easy to learn. As one of many examples of such work, several studies have been sponsored by the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Department about the problems encountered by teachers in teaching certain languages to students of different linguistic backgrounds. For instance, Chinese students have a difficult time with English tenses, because they are not used to having to indicate tense all the time (in Chinese, tense is usually indicated only when it cannot be determined from context). Conversely, English speakers have difficulties with Chinese tones, because they are not used to using pitch contours to make phonemic distinctions. Yet English speakers have no difficulty at all in learning to use verbs without marking them for tense. "Language educators would agree unanimously and without reservation that it always comes down to this: a language becomes more difficult to learn when the student must learn to make distinctions that he is not used to making. That's why students have difficulties with things like accusatives, mandatory tenses, tones, noun/adjective agreement, honorific inflection, consonant and vowel harmony, mandatory gender distinctions, polysynthesism, ad nauseam. And that's also why a language like Indonesian is so easy to learn for everyone, because it does not have any of these obstacles." In summary, there is much testimony available from language teachers, trained linguists, and amateur polyglots indicating that some languages _are_ more difficult for most humans to learn than other languages, and that many of the characteristics which cause such difficulty _can_ be specified. 1.4 terminology The phrase "the world's predominant languages" in this essay generally refers to Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Hindi (with Urdu), Malay-Indonesian, and Japanese. Estimates vary widely but it seems approximately half of the world's people speak these languages. The abbreviation TWML refers to the book _The World's Major Languages_. "Conlang" is a contraction of "constructed language," and "natlang" is a contraction of "natural language." 2. Orthography 2.1 writing system The four most widely distributed writing systems are: the Latin/ Roman alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, the Arabic alphabet, and the system of logograms common to Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The IAL should use one of these systems without adding any unique characters or symbols from other alphabets which could cause typographical difficulties. The Roman alphabet is the most widely distributed and is probably preferable; it is used by many languages all over the world (not only by Indo-European languages); it contains fewer characters than the Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets, and far fewer than pictographic writing systems such as Chinese. Some language inventors have believed that creating a unique new alphabet would put all students on an equal footing. However, the resulting difficulties (in producing books and magazines, in using word processors and transmitting text via computer networks, etc.) would probably out-weigh the gain in "equality." Proposed IALs equipped with unique new alphabets have never succeeded in gaining adherents. Simplicity and regularity are desirable in the orthography of an IAL. Therefore, in alphabetic writing systems, each letter should represent only one phoneme, and each phoneme should be represented by only one letter. Digraphs are generally undesirable, although some digraphs such as "sh" and "ng" are so widespread that they might be acceptable if they do not cause ambiguity. 3. Phonology 3.1 phoneme selection As the prominent linguist Edward Sapir pointed out, an optimum interlanguage should not use any sounds that would cause serious difficulties to large groups of speakers. {Sapir et al. 1925} The IAL should only use phonemes which most people in the world already know or can easily learn to pronounce. A demonstration of how this selection process can be performed follows. There is evidence that the phonetic structure advocated here and in section 3.2 closely approaches the built-in, instinctive linguistic tendencies of the human brain -- in other words it approximates what is 'burned into the ROM chips' of our computers. The particular phonemes and combinations which are learned relatively late by children also tend to be relatively rare in the world's languages, tend to be among the first sounds to disappear in aphasia, and tend to be absent from glossolalia. If we assemble a chart that shows which phonemes occur in which of the world's important languages {Morneau 1991}, we see that some sounds are nearly universal while others are quite rare. Morneau surveyed data on 25 major languages and indicated that the following phonemes are used in at least 22 of the 25: /a, e, i, o, u, b, d, k, l, m, n, p, s, t, y/ ("y" represents the semi-vowel [j] as in "yo-yo"). If we limit ourselves to CV (consonant-vowel) syllables and use "y" as a consonant, this inventory of phonemes is sufficient to produce 50 one-syllable words, 2500 two-syllable words, etc. If we allow a greater variety of syllable shapes, more words can be made. If we include some phonemes which are not quite as widely distributed as the ones above (but still quite common), even more words become possible. Sapir et al. recommended an even smaller array of phonemes: /a, i, u, p, t, k, s, l, m, n, v/. Jason Johnston responds: "My proposal is that the inventory should encompass phonemes that are considered phonologically _unmarked_. I realise that phonologists do not agree on a definition of markedness, but yet they seem by and large to come up with the same classifications for particular sounds, and these classifications tend by and large to agree with research on the order of acquisition in children, the common errors of foreign learners, the loss of distinctions in various sorts of aphasia, etc. From this very large body of work we can get a pretty clear picture of which sounds are unmarked (and therefore should be easy for the learner even if his/her native language doesn't contain them). The most unmarked phonemes would be these: /a, i, u, p, t, k, m, n, s, l/. A second rank of slightly more marked, but still generally manageable phonemes would be: /e, o, b, d, g, f, h, y, w/. A third rank of dubious but possible phonemes would be: /v, z, r, ch, sh/." Diphthongs should be chosen carefully or avoided altogether; speakers of some languages tend to pronounce certain vowels as diphthongs (for example, many English speakers do not produce a pure "o" and instead tend to say "ou"), therefore the use of diphthongs as elements of an IAL could make correct pronunciation unnecessarily difficult. Rick Morneau responds: "I might agree to avoid diphthongs articulated at two very close vowel positions, as in your example 'ou'. However, other diphthongs are easy to pronounce, highly distinctive, extremely efficient, and very common. Thus, I would definitely include diphthongs such as /wa/, /aw/, /ay/, /ya/, /oy/, /yo/, /we/, /wi/, and perhaps /ew/ and /iw/ (where /w/ and /y/ are semivowels)." 3.2 phonotactics For many of the world's people, consonant clusters such as /str/, /spl/, and /kt/ are difficult or impossible to pronounce. Therefore the structure of syllables in the IAL must be controlled. Consonant clusters should be totally eliminated, or limited to those which are almost universally easy to pronounce. Linguists have varying opinions as to which consonant clusters are easy for most humans to pronounce, but many consider the following guideline acceptable: A syllable may begin with a vowel, or with any single consonant, or with a consonant followed by a semi-vowel or a liquid (w, y, l). A syllable may end in a vowel (or diphthong), or a nasal consonant (such as n). The morphology should also prevent sequences of multiple (>2) vowels from occurring; words such as "ouokivuia" can be tongue-twisters to most speakers of the world's major languages. 3.3 tones Some languages use tones phonemically (i.e. to distinguish syllables which are otherwise identical; for example, in Chinese _ren_ means "a person" when pronounced with a rising tone, but means "to recognize / identify" when it has a falling tone). This sort of tonal distinction does not occur in many of the world's predominant languages, and learning to use tones in this way is difficult for many people; therefore, the IAL should not use tones in this manner. 4. Morphology There are many reasonable ways to design the structure of morphemes in a planned language. Should a language use special endings, or the arrangement of consonants and vowels, to indicate whether a given word is a verb or noun? Should the creation of compound words be allowed? Should bound affixes be different in some obvious way from free roots? Reasonable persons might disagree on these matters. However, the following guidelines seem desirable. 4.1 compounding If the IAL permits the creation of compound words, the meaning of any compound must be deducible, on the basis of logic and pragmatics, from the meanings of the individual formatives. Compounds such as "cranberry," in which one formative has no independent meaning, should not exist. {Maxwell 1989} The language should be designed so that all compounds can be unambiguously divided into their constituent root-words. Confusion can occur if such auto-analysis is not designed into the language; for example, the Dutch word _kwartslagen_ can mean "quarter beats" (kwart + slagen) or "quartz layers" (kwarts + lagen); the Esperanto word _sukero_ might mean "sugar" (suker + o) or "a drop of juice" (suk + er + o). 4.2 allomorphy Allomorphy refers to one morpheme having two or more variant forms; for example, the plural indicator in English is -s in "books," -es in "boxes," -en in "oxen," and is represented by a vowel shift in "men." Allomorphy is an unnecessary irregularity which increases the difficulty of memorizing a language's vocabulary; therefore allomorphy is undesirable in an IAL. 4.3 Zipf's Law In natural languages, the most frequently used morphemes tend to be the briefest morphemes; seldom-used morphemes tend to be longer. It seems desirable that an IAL should exhibit the same tendency, not only because it is natural but also because it is efficient. 4.4 self-segregating (auto-isolating) morphemes This criterion is controversial; many advocates of a posteriori conlangs oppose it, while many proponents of computerized language processing support it. In a language which has self-segregating morphemes, there is only one possible way to dissect a stream of speech-sounds into its constituent root-words and affixes. For example, if all words in a hypothetical conlang are two syllables long and end in vowels, then if you hear someone hurriedly say "hemotakyoflue" you can be certain they said "hemo takyo flue" and not "he mot akyof lue" or some other combination. I believe a compromise is desirable with regard to auto-isolationism; the IAL can be designed so that most phrases can be unambiguously disassembled, but the borrowing of a few words which would occasionally interfere with auto-isolationism need not be forbidden. A relatively high percentage of auto-isolationism can be achieved rather simply, for example by designing the language so that the vast majority of root-words are two syllables long. 5. Vocabulary 5.1 vocabulary sources Most proposed IALs have vocabularies that are almost entirely a priori (artificial) or a posteriori (borrowed from natlangs). Compromise or mixed-type vocabularies are relatively rare. In a priori "philosophical" languages, words are arranged in categories according to their meanings. For example, in the language Ro, _lugalab_ means "broccoli," _lugalap_ means "parsley," and _lugalat_ means "lettuce." It is relatively difficult to memorize a vocabulary of this type; even the inventors of these languages cannot use them without frequently consulting their dictionaries. Words with similar meanings have similar sounds, which can cause dangerous misunderstandings if there should be a typographical error in a piece of text or a loud bit of background noise during a conversation. Most of the a posteriori languages that we know of are based entirely on European natlangs. Hundreds of these Eurocentric a posteriori language designs have been published, and thousands more have probably been invented but not published. There are three valid objections to this type of proposed IAL. Firstly, European vocabularies contain high consonant-to-vowel ratios, difficult consonant clusters, and some relatively rare phonemes, all of which make them hard for many non-Europeans to pronounce. (Even Europeans and English-speakers have trouble with some Eurocentric conlangs; for an Esperantic example, the kv- in "kvin," the "uj" in "tiuj" and the /sts/ sound in "scii" create difficulties for many would-be speakers of Esperanto.) A purely European vocabulary usually brings with it other features which will cause difficulties to many, such as relatively complex verb conjugations. From a linguistic point of view, languages built from exclusively European materials are less than ideal as whole- world auxiliary tongues. Secondly, it is chauvinistic to assume that a _world_ language should draw its vocabulary entirely from European languages. If the purpose of using an a posteriori vocabulary is to make memorization of words easier for the IAL's proposed users, and if these proposed users are all the people of the world who need to communicate internationally, then it is self-defeating to use a purely Eurocentric vocabulary. At the very least, an a posteriori IAL suitable for global use would take most of its vocabulary from the world's predominant languages (as defined in section 1.4), limiting itself to words which conform to its phonological and morphological constraints. There are important difficulties involved in such borrowings; for example, Hindi distinguishes between aspirated, non-aspirated, and retroflex "t"; Chinese uses tones phonemically; vowel length is phonemic in Japanese; and a near-optimal IAL will not use such distinctions. English and Arabic contain consonants which are not likely to be included in a well-designed auxiliary language. Still, an a posteriori conlang must make some effort to take material from a variety of sources if its claims of suitability for worldwide use are to be taken seriously. {Some language inventors have made claims about the "international scientific vocabulary" (ISV) as a justification for Eurocentric lexical practices. In reality, the root-words of the ISV (in which hetero- and allo- mean "other," meso- means "middle," tele- means "far," necro- means "death" and so forth) have not really travelled far beyond the West European languages. Many of the world's predominant languages have no need to adopt ISV terminology, as they are perfectly capable of expressing new ideas by forming compounds from their own rich stock of root-words; for example, the Chinese word for telephone is _dianhua_, and German has _Fernsprecher_ as a synonym for _Telefon_. Even in nations where the ISV is used, its roots are only recognized by a small pecentage of the most educated people; few English-speakers could tell you that the leuko- root in "leukemia" and "leukocyte" means "white" or "colorless." While scientific terms might indeed be one worthwhile source of words for an IAL, it is highly inaccurate to assert that the scientific terminology of European languages is known all over the world.} The third major objection to proposed IALs based exclusively on European languages is the matter of competition. Any conlang with a European vocabulary is likely to vanish into the mass of hundreds of nearly-indistinguishable competitors. Even the names of these projects tend to be monotonously similar: Mondal, Mondial, Mondyal, Mondialo, Europal, Europan, European, Europeo -- ad infinitum. Furthermore, it is doubtful that any conlang which substantially resembles English or Spanish would be able to lure students away from those natural languages; and any conlang which resembles Esperanto is likely to repel both those who are fond of Esperanto and those who are not attracted to it. In addition to the approaches explored above, there are other ways to create a vocabulary. One is an a priori, non-classificational approach; words can be created by onomatopoeia and other somewhat whimsical means. Alternatively, words can be created randomly, by writing letters on pieces of paper and drawing them out of a hat, or by programming a computer to randomly generate words having the desired syllable structure. This method has the advantage of cultural neutrality; no student of the language will have an inherent advantage over others when it comes to memorizing the lexicon. It is also possible to create a vocabulary having a mixture of a priori and a posteriori qualities; several notable conlangs, including Volapu"k and Loglan, have taken this mixed approach. 5.2 word allocation One factor which complicates the learning of many natural languages is their large supply of synonyms. A newcomer to the English language can have trouble deciding whether to say "start," "begin" or "commence"; whether to refer to a small publication as a "leaflet," "brochure," "flyer," "handbill," "circular" or "broad- side"; whether to say "quick," "fast" or "rapid," and so forth. On the other hand, some common words have so many different meanings that they can be hard to interpret; for example, "get" can mean "obtain" ('get a pencil'), "bring" ('get me a dictionary'), "impart a quality to" ('don't get your feet wet'), "cause to do" ('she will get them to clean up their rooms'), "become" ('don't get sick'), and other meanings. "Ball" can mean "a round or roundish object" or "a formal gathering for social dancing." Obviously, an easy-to-learn IAL will not put such obstacles in a student's path. Anyone who has learned the grammar should be able to pick up a natlang-IAL dictionary and begin confidently assembling sentences immediately. Therefore, a near-optimal IAL must have a general rule of "one root-word per meaning" (no synonyms) and should strive to avoid the sort of homonymy and extreme polysemy mentioned above. It is also desirable that the IAL permit people to communicate using a relatively small vocabulary. This reduces the burden of memorizing the lexicon. In view of projects such as Ogden's Basic English and the Voice of America's Special English, it seems that a vocabulary of fewer than 2000 carefully chosen root-words is sufficient for news broadcasts, personal correspondence and mundane (non-technical) conversation. The German and Chinese languages illustrate that a few thousand basic roots can be amplified through the creation of compound words to express myriads of concepts. 6. Grammar 6.1 universality and simplicity The grammar of the IAL should be a streamlined distillation of those features which are nearly universal in the world's predominant languages. (A constructed language with a grammar which is totally different from the grammar of any natural language might be a useful experimental tool, but is not a worthy candidate for the role of global auxiliary language, because grammatical bizarreness increases the difficulty of learning a language.) As the great linguist Otto Jespersen observed, "That language ranks highest, which goes farthest in the art of accomplishing much with little means, or in other words, which is able to express the greatest amount of meaning with the simplest apparatus." 6.2 syntax There are formal (objective) techniques for specifying the number of ways in which words can be combined to create grammatical phrases in any given language. A description of a typical natural language's syntax, complete with all of its irregularities and variations, would contain thousands of production rules. It is possible to design a planned language capable of performing all the communicative tasks needed in a human language with fewer than two dozen context-free production rules specified in modified BNF notation {Morneau 1992}. Although that is an extreme example, it is desirable that the IAL have a relatively simple, regular and well-described syntax. Linguists have attempted to classify natural languages based on the arrangement of subject (S), verb (V) and object (O) in simple declarative sentences. "There are six possible orderings: VSO, SVO, SOV, VOS, OVS, and OSV. It turns out that a very large majority of the world's languages fit within the first three categories; i.e., where the subject comes before the object." {Morneau 1992} In fact, most languages which have significant numbers of speakers are classified as SOV or SVO. SVO is the most common word order in the world's predominant languages, and is notably common in natural languages which are used as interlinguas between different language groups (e.g. English, French, Swahili, Indonesian). A language with a relatively strict SVO ordering is efficient because it does not require the use of inflections or marker words to distinguish subject from object. The SVO word order of English has been offered as one possible reason for the relatively widespread diffusion of English (in addition, of course, to the large quantity of news broadcasts, technical journals and other important forms of communication available in English). Some linguists feel there is a link between grammatical structures and the cerebral processes involved in language comprehension. "The claim is that SVO languages are perceptually simpler than languages whose basic orders are SOV or VSO. It is pointed out that, even granted their sociological and political statuses, it is noteworthy that Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish, all of which are SVO, are languages of wide diffusion, as is the spoken form of Arabic that is spreading. The perceptual advantage of SVO languages is the ready identification of subjects and objects, which are separated (by verbs) in SVO but not SOV or VSO languages. It might also be mentioned that English tends to have topics in sentence-initial position... Subject and topic will often coincide, a coincidence that apparently enhances processibility, especially when the subject is also the semantic agent." {Edward Finegan in TWML}. Therefore, I believe the IAL should either allow both common sequences (SOV and SVO) to be used, or should adopt an SVO order. This gives us a demonstrably useful syntax which will be somewhat familiar to a large part of the world's population. It should be noted that there are some natural languages which cannot accurately be described by the SOV-type classifications. For example, the placement of verbs in German sentences is highly variable. Some highly inflected languages have relatively free word order. Certain languages can most accurately be described as having "topic, comment" syntax; first a speaker identifies the topic of discussion, and then he imparts new information about it. (See the descriptions of Italian, Russian and Hungarian in TWML.) Topic, comment syntax is also evident in English equational sentences; we say "cats are mammals," not "mammals are cats." 6.3 gender One factor which complicates the learning of languages such as French and German is the need to memorize the gender of every noun. The IAL should either treat all non-living things as neuter or should entirely discard grammatical reflection of gender. 6.4 transitivity In some constructed languages, it is necessary to memorize whether a verb is inherently transitive or intransitive, and affixes are used to convert transitive verbs to intransitive and vice versa. Having to memorize a verb's transitivity is an unnecessary burden, just as having to learn the gender of a noun would be. Therefore the IAL should either form transitive and intransitive verbs in some completely regular and predictable manner, or should permit unvarying verb morphemes to have variable transitivity (as is the case with most English and Chinese verbs). 7. Computer Tractability To what degree should an IAL be designed to facilitate computerized processing? There is some disagreement among constructed language enthusiasts about this issue. Fortunately, many of the qualities enumerated above which make a language easy for humans to learn and use also facilitate computerized processing. A conlang designed in accord with the criteria specified in this essay will be more computer-tractable than any natlang. However, the needs of computers should not be an over-riding factor in the design of an IAL, for many reasons. The whole purpose of an IAL is to facilitate human-to-human communication without the expensive and unreliable mediation of human or electronic translators. Computerized processing of linguistic material is still in its infancy, and a language designed to accomodate current technology would seem absurdly constrained 20 or 30 years from now. Also, let's not forget that most people in the world do not own or have ready access to computers. 8. Conclusion This essay is not meant to be a detailed specification of a particular language design. Instead, think of it as a first tentative step toward establishing a set of criteria by which interlinguists could possibly design a language which would be nearly optimal for the role of IAL. Why should we settle for solutions that are significantly sub-optimal when we could create a language that would be close to optimum for its designated task? In addition to language design criteria, we should also consider means of gathering support for an IAL and persuading significant numbers of people to use such a language. But that's a topic for another essay. 9. Bibliography Bodmer, Frederick. _The Loom of Language_ (W. W. Norton, 1985) Comrie, Bernard (editor): _The World's Major Languages_ (Oxford University Press, 1990) Jespersen, Otto: _Language. Its nature, development and origin_ (London, 1922) Maxwell, Dan: Principles for constructing planned languages. in: _Interlinguistics_ edited by Klaus Schubert; (New York & Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989) Morneau, Rick: Designing an artificial language, part 1. September, 1991. Distributed by electronic mail. (contact: mnu@inel.gov ) Morneau, Rick: Designing an artificial language -- Syntax. August, 1992. Distributed by electronic mail. Sapir, Edward, et al. Memorandum on the problem of an international auxiliary language. in: _Romanic Review_ 16: 244-256 (1925) Slobin, D. I.: The acquisition of Russian as a native language. in: _The genesis of language -- a psycholinguistic approach_, edited by Smith et al. (1966) -fin- >From cbmvax!uunet!staff.tc.umn.edu!dsg Fri Jan 8 03:58:41 1993 Return-Path: Date: Thu, 7 Jan 93 18:18:45 CST From: () Message-Id: <65942.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: whistled languages Status: RO On Wed, 06 Jan 93 20:33:53 +0000, writes: >> These are the kinds of language I know exist (excluding written and other >> representations of languages): >> >> Spoken. >> Sign -- mostly used by Deaf people and those they associate with. >> Whistled. >> Tactile -- deaf-blind sign languages. >> >> What other kinds are there, if any? >> >> Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu > >Is this whistled language as in Solresol, or as in 'whistle speech' found >in, say, some parts of Central America? Whistle speech, I believe >(perhaps wrongly) reproduces the tune of normal speech (which, in a >tone language, carries quite a lot of information). In Solresol, >by contrast, tones function as allophones of syllables with segmental >content. > >---- >And. I was thinking of what you call "whistle speech" -- which I first read about as used in the Canary Islands. Another kind is used, as I recall, in a mountainous part of Turkey. Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu >From cbmvax!uunet!staff.tc.umn.edu!dsg Fri Jan 8 03:58:43 1993 Return-Path: Date: Thu, 7 Jan 93 18:27:44 CST From: () Message-Id: <66465.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: whistle while you work Status: RO On Wed, 6 Jan 1993 16:20:00 PST, writes: >And. >>Is this whistled language as in Solresol, or as in 'whistle speech' found >>in, say, some parts of Central America? Whistle speech, I believe >>(perhaps wrongly) reproduces the tune of normal speech (which, in a >>tone language, carries quite a lot of information). In Solresol, >>by contrast, tones function as allophones of syllables with segmental >>content. > >I once stumbled on a little book called "Whistled Languages" or something like >that. My memory is a little dim now. I've come across the same book, in the University of Minnesota library -- shelved, oddly enough, with books on sign language. I think I originally read about this in a magazine; I suspect the authors had an article some time back in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu >Does anyone know of others? > >Ken Beesley >beesley.parc@xerox.com >From cbmvax!snark!cowan Fri Jan 8 16:40:49 1993 Return-Path: Message-Id: From: cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan (John Cowan) Subject: Re: (long) IAL desiderata, 3rd draft To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu (conlang) Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 10:39:31 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <930107232052_71174.2735_DHQ40-1@CompuServe.COM> from "Rick Harrison" at Jan 7, 93 06:20:52 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 2885 Status: RO Overall comments: I am much more satisfied with this version of the IAL document than with any of its predecessors, and I complement Rick on a job that is overall extremely well done. I still have a few comments, given below. > A > syllable may begin with a vowel, or with any single consonant, or > with a consonant followed by a semi-vowel or a liquid (w, y, l). This is too weak: syllables like " w ", " y ", " wu", " yi" are quite easy to confuse with their non-semivowel-bearing relatives. > At the very least, an a posteriori IAL suitable for global use would > take most of its vocabulary from the world's predominant languages > (as defined in section 1.4), limiting itself to words which conform > to its phonological and morphological constraints. There are > important difficulties involved in such borrowings; This paragraph seems to suggest that the IAL must borrow words unmodified if at all. This seems too restrictive; all a-posteriori conlangs I know of modify words as they borrow them, precisely to fit "phonological or morpho- logical constraints". I suggest rewording: limiting itself to words which can be made to conform to its phonological and morphological constraints without excessive distortion. > For example, the placement of verbs in German sentences is highly > variable. Mild flame: I get very tired of seeing variants of this assertion. In fact, the rules of German verb placement are extremely lucid: 1) in yes/no questions and commands, the verb stands first; 2) in all other top-level sentences, the verb stands second; 3) in embedded sentences, the verb stands last. I would not propose those rules for an IAL, but they are arguably simpler than the rules of English verb placement. > One factor which complicates the learning of languages such as > French and German is the need to memorize the gender of every noun. > The IAL should either treat all non-living things as neuter or > should entirely discard grammatical reflection of gender. I believe this is too strong, as I said in my comments on the last draft. Suggested compromise wording: One factor which complicates the learning of languages such as French and German is the need to memorize the gender of every noun. On the other hand, grammatical gender can make it easier to disambiguate the reference of pronouns; in utterly genderless languages, it can be hard to make out who "he/she/it" refers to. Therefore, the IAL should take one of the following positions: a) determine the gender of a noun solely from its meaning (e.g. animate vs. inanimate); b) determine the gender of a noun solely from its form (e.g. its ending or its beginning); c) entirely discard grammatical reflection of gender. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From cbmvax!uunet!VKPMZD.KPH.Uni-Mainz.de!KNAPPEN Fri Jan 8 16:40:25 1993 Return-Path: Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 19:27 GMT +0100 From: J%org Knappen Subject: Re: (long) IAL desiderata, 3rd draft To: 71174.2735@CompuServe.COM Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Message-Id: <01GTACTZ50RK8WW7TS@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> X-Envelope-To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu X-Vms-To: VZDMZA::IN%"71174.2735@CompuServe.COM" X-Vms-Cc: GATEWAY"conlang@buphy.bu.edu" Status: RO Dear Rick, the third draft has improved very much, I'm impressed. Here is just a small argument on the writing system of an IAL: If you want a writing which can be easily reproduced at every place of the world, the character set may contain standard latin alphabet, greek alphabet an a small set of common symbols, most of them mathematical, few others (#$%&\pounds\S). The drawback of this approach is that it restricts the phonology of the IAL. For example if you want to implement a seven vowel system (a, open e, e, i, open o, o, u), which is the second most popular vowel system of the world, you run short of vowel symbols... . Assigning unused consonants to vowels is (at lest) unsatisfactory. Yours, J"org Knappen. >From cbmvax!uunet!VKPMZD.KPH.Uni-Mainz.de!KNAPPEN Fri Jan 8 16:41:04 1993 Return-Path: Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 21:48 GMT +0100 From: J%org Knappen Subject: ISV To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Message-Id: <01GTAHR1M40G8WW8FQ@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> X-Envelope-To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu X-Vms-To: GATEWAY"conlang@buphy.bu.edu" Status: RO Comment on International Scientific Vocabulary (ISV) ISV is much more anarchic than one usually assumes. It has many -- and quite arbitrary -- sources. To cite just a few examples out of physics: Zitterbewegung (german), yrast (swedish), rishons (hebrew/arab) \footnote{Despite the very apealing name, the rishons are no longer considered a good model. What a pity}, eigenvalue (german-english mixture), quark (Joycian/german, The quotation is ``Three quarks for muster Marks'' out of Finnegans Wake). Different disciplines may use the same term for quite different concepts. On the other hand, there are several ISVs in different regions of the world, greaco-latin in Europe (where latin is prefered by western europe and US, but greek in eastern europe, see astronaut vs. kosmonaut), arabic in the islamic world, sanskrit in India and parts of Asia. Many languages also have own devices to create scientific and technical vocabulary. Standardisation of ISV (like E. W"usters `Terminologieschl"u\3el') have failed upto now. Another problem is, that even the european languages use very different pronounciation schemes for ISV, which leads to the fact, that written papers in some foreing language can be read, but actual speach based communication fails. J"org Knappen. >From cbmvax!uunet!compuserve.com!71174.2735 Sat Jan 9 03:28:42 1993 Return-Path: Date: 08 Jan 93 19:39:36 EST From: Rick Harrison To: Subject: re: IAL desiderata Message-Id: <930109003936_71174.2735_DHQ68-1@CompuServe.COM> Status: RO J%org Knappen writes: > The drawback of this approach is that it > restricts the phonology of the IAL. For example if you want to implement > a seven vowel system (a, open e, e, i, open o, o, u), which is the > second most popular vowel system of the world, you run short of vowel > symbols... Thanks for the comments. It is true that the Greek alphabet is available in most typesetting systems, but on the other hand you cannot send Greek letters in a 7-bit ASCII channel (like this one), and you cannot get Greek letters out of an American typewriter. I suppose typewriters and 7-bit ASCII communications channels will soon be extinct, a thing of the past, so I guess we can make the alphabet guideline more flexible. ======================================================================== Rick Harrison 71174.2735@compuserve.com ...tarpit!bilver!jwt!bbs-hrick >From cbmvax!uunet!compuserve.com!71174.2735 Sat Jan 9 03:28:44 1993 Return-Path: Date: 08 Jan 93 19:41:52 EST From: Rick Harrison To: Subject: re: IAL desiderata Message-Id: <930109004151_71174.2735_DHQ68-2@CompuServe.COM> Status: RO John Cowan skribas: >> A syllable may begin with a vowel, or with any single consonant, or >> with a consonant followed by a semi-vowel or a liquid (w, y, l). > > This is too weak: syllables like " w ", " y > ", " wu", " yi" are quite easy to confuse > with their non-semivowel-bearing relatives. That is a good point. I will incorporate a warning about this in the next version. >> At the very least, an a posteriori IAL suitable for global use would >> take most of its vocabulary from the world's predominant languages >> (as defined in section 1.4), limiting itself to words which conform >> to its phonological and morphological constraints. There are >> important difficulties involved in such borrowings; > >This paragraph seems to suggest that the IAL must borrow words unmodified >if at all. This seems too restrictive; all a-posteriori conlangs I know >of modify words as they borrow them, precisely to fit "phonological or >morphological constraints". I suggest rewording: > > limiting itself to words which can be made to conform to its > phonological and morphological constraints without excessive > distortion. Unmodified borrowings are preferable when you can find suitable words to borrow. A potential problem with your suggested re-wording is that it causes us to fall into the bottomless pit of subjective arguments about how much distortion is "excessive." Vorlinists and Volapu"kists are willing to accept more distortion than, say, Interlinguaphiles and Glosites. >> For example, the placement of verbs in German sentences is highly >> variable. > > Mild flame: I get very tired of seeing variants of this assertion. > In fact, the rules of German verb placement are extremely lucid: > > 1) in yes/no questions and commands, the verb stands first; > 2) in all other top-level sentences, the verb stands second; > 3) in embedded sentences, the verb stands last. Perhaps the wording of my statement was not precise enough. It seems to me that your list of rules actually supports what I was trying to say... I'll send that sentence to the re-phrasing laboratory. I didn't mean to imply that there are no rules of syntax in German. On the topic of gender... You once gave us an example of a French sentence in which "he took a (whatever) from his briefcase and threw it into the sea," and the difference in pronoun gender reveals which "it" went into the sea. But what if both the briefcase and the (whatever) have the same gender? Maybe what a conlang needs for these situations is a pair of pronouns or pronoun-affixes, one meaning "the former referent" and one meaning "the latter." It's interesting to note that written Chinese distinguishes between "he," "she" and "it" but spoken Mandarin does not. Personally, I favor a third-person distinction between a) sentient or animate beings, and b) non-sentients or inanimates. I'm not sure this can be called a "gender" distinction, can it? ======================================================================== Rick Harrison 71174.2735@compuserve.com ...tarpit!bilver!jwt!bbs-hrick >From cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Sat Jan 9 03:56:53 1993 Return-Path: From: cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 18:31:00 PST Subject: re: IAL desiderata In-Reply-To: "71174.2735@compuserve:com:Xerox's message of 8 Jan 93 16:41 PST" To: 71174.2735@compuserve.com Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Message-Id: <93Jan8.183152pst.11870@alpha.xerox.com> Status: RO Rick Harrison: >On the topic of gender... You once gave us an example of a French sentence in which "he took a (whatever) from his briefcase and threw it into the sea," and the difference in pronoun gender reveals which "it" went into the sea. But what if both the briefcase and the (whatever) have the same gender? < Gender and gender-agreement rules typically have the effect of adding redundancy to a language. And, contrary to the usual assumptions, a certain amount of redundancy in a natural language is useful and appropriate. Natural language communication occurs in "noisy" environments, where little bits of the message get lost or garbled; redundancy improves the success rate of communication. In cases like the briefcase example above, otherwise redundant gender-marked pronouns can resolve a potential ambiguity. They are certainly not perfect--you can, as pointed out, create examples where the briefcase and the object pulled out of it are of the same gender. But it could still be argued that gender-marked pronominal reference, often redundant in simpler examples, improves the success rate of communication overall. The ultimate in gender marking is usually called classification. In a classifying language, such as Navajo, Bantu (a whole family of languages), or American Sign Language, it is as if all nouns were once assigned by some linguistic committee, once and for all, to one of perhaps dozens of classes. Whereas European languages may make a distinction between masculine and feminine nouns, or masculine/feminine/neuter, or human/non-human, or animate/non-animate, Bantu distinguishes (according to Crystal) human beings growing things body parts liquids inanimate objects animals kinship names abstract ideas artefacts narrow objects As with European gender, assignment of particular nouns to the available classes may appear arbitrary or at least idiosyncratic. As with gender assignment, you may simply have to learn that object X, which is obviously an animal, is always referred to as being of the class "inanimate object." Foreigners may be classified as animals rather than human beings. You just shrug and try to memorize it. And the number of classes can vary widely among classifying languages, reflecting the fact that there are no objective ways to divide up the universe of human experience. (It's much like the vain search for objective semantic primitives.) I believe that Navajo has classes like the above, but also some like "long stringy things," "grain-like things," "small roundish objects," "stick-like things," "fuzzy things," etc. Perhaps someone can help out here. I do recall that Navajo verbstems undergo morphological distortion to agree with the class of the direct object. The "it"-like pronoun is typically the name of the class. The more classes you have, the more likely you are to avoid gender or class ambiguities in the briefcase examples. The cost of gender/classes, with their useful redundancy, if of course that users have to learn the gender or class of each noun. And any classification scheme is subjective, sure to be objected to by somebody. >Maybe what a conlang needs for these situations is a pair of pronouns or pronoun-affixes, one meaning "the former referent" and one meaning "the latter."< Portuguese appears to have such a distinction between "que" (which) and "o qual" (like "which", but usually referring to the next to last possible referent). I think that this example is ambiguous: "o livro do professor, que e/ velho" (the book of the teacher, which/who is old) as opposed to the following, where "o qual" references back to the book, not the teacher: "o livro do professor, o qual e/ velho" ^------------------------| Ken Beesley beesley.parc@xerox.com >From cbmvax!uunet!well.sf.ca.us!dasher Sat Jan 9 12:42:45 1993 Return-Path: Date: Sat, 9 Jan 1993 04:51:07 -0800 From: D Anton Sherwood Message-Id: <199301091251.AA17208@well.sf.ca.us> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: relative pronouns in Romance Status: RO Ken Beesley: > Portuguese appears to have such a distinction between "que" (which) and "o > qual" (like "which", but usually referring to the next to last possible > referent). > I think that this example is ambiguous: > "o livro do professor, que e/ velho" > (the book of the teacher, which/who is old) > as opposed to the following, where "o qual" references back to the book, > not the teacher: > "o livro do professor, o qual e/ velho" > ^------------------------| The corresponding form in French, "lequel", is used when the simplest relatives won't do the job: la fille QUI m'accompagne au cinema the girl who accompanies me to the cinema la fille QUE j'accompagne au cinema the girl that/whom I accompany to the cinema la fille DONT j'ai perdu le livre the girl whose book I lost [of whom I lost the book] la fille a LAQUELLE j'ai offert le livre the girl to whom I gave the book la fille avec LAQUELLE je vais au cinema the girl with whom I go to the cinema I think it could be used as Ken suggests, but the "penultimate" meaning comes out not because that is a definition of "lequel" but because "lequel" is a more marked form than "que/qui". "lequel" is also used when the relative pronoun has gotten separated from its referent by subordinate clauses and the speaker wants to remind the listener of it: Je t'offre ce livre, a l'occasion de ton anniversaire . . . lequel livre j'ai trouve chez un bouquiniste de Lausanne . . . I give you this book for your birthday . . . which book I found at an antiquarian bookshop in Lausanne . . . Anton Sherwood dasher@well.sf.ca.us +1 415 267 0685 1800 Market St #207, San Francisco 94102 USA "We all hate poverty, war and injustice, unlike the rest of you squares." >From cbmvax!uunet!violet.berkeley.edu!chalmers Sat Jan 9 12:42:56 1993 Return-Path: Date: Sat, 9 Jan 93 07:20:31 -0800 From: cbmvax!uunet!violet.berkeley.edu!chalmers (John H. Chalmers Jr.) Message-Id: <9301091520.AA04236@violet.berkeley.edu> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Solex-Mal Status: RO Well, I finally found a copy of the book, "Other Tongues, Other Flesh," by George Hunt Williamson with the allegedly original human language spoken throughout the solar system. What a disappointment it turned out to be! . Either there is another book or I have remembered the examples as having more structure. So far, I have been unable to find any consistent correlation between the syllables and the corresponding glyphs or squiggles with which they are "written." In the few cases where there are sequences of similar sounding words, there are common graphic elements, but then the differential elements do not appear to follow any simple system. Worse, the text is untranslated, even by the author, and is only presumed to be in Solex-Mal. According to another book "The Saucers Speak," by Williamson and a collaborator, Alfred C. Bailey, these words were obtained either through ESP via "The Board" a circular ouija-type board by using an upturned glass as a planchette or by "R" an anonymous ham radio operator who received them in International Morse Code. A few early messages also appear to have been obtained by automatic writing. Frankly, a deliberate hoax is not inconceivable either, though self-delusion is also likely, of course. Some of the words may have been borrowed from earlier occult traditions such as Theosophy. Elsewhere S-M is described as resembling "Atlantean scroll-writing" and sounding like Ainu to Japanese students. The glyphs may be of similar origins though the author does not say how they were obtained. Some resemble James Churchward's MU glyphs, others seem to be rather childish- looking squiggles. I fear, therefore, that there is no true conlang here and that this material may be of less than marginal interest to most of you conlangers. Williamson does, however, devote considerable space to conlangs, even to quoting passages in Esperanto and Interlingua to make a case for IAL's and for a return to Solex-Mal as the only proper one for the New Age. I have heard that a British UFOlogical group is distributing a pamphlet about Solex-Mal. Perhaps there is more material there for me to work with if I can obtain a copy. However, I suspect that this is all there is. The Solex Mal words appeared in the book as a list, though GHW said that they formed a connected, if unknown message. Interestingly, GHW himself noted some sequences of similar sound and graphic depiction. I have marked these with a *. I noticed other sequences as well, but there were no corresponding graphic symbols (sorry, I can't transmit the signs). Conversely, glyphs with similar graphic elements are not usually phonetically similar. I have arranged the text in lines with the words in their original order so that these similarities are more apparent. Note the use of apostrophes and hyphens. Some of the symbols and words said to be signatures and names of individuals. The one signature glyph without a phonetic interpretation has been omitted, but the other two are marked with a #. I have inserted comments and glosses in (). Some of the definitions are reminiscent of Glaugnea. TAUMA RAU MAMMAU RAMDA LENN-YAH MU-NATAI KAAR-MU-DUM MEXEL-TAUX-MANILIL (See below for MEXEL again and words similar to MANILIL) MASU-RA (conceivably a reference to Mars or MASAR) MEXEL-MANU-VEC (VEC is glossed as "space" in The Saucers Speak") RAGDA-MUNLIL (see Manilil, Enlil elswhere) JOSH-TAU-MAXIM MESMAI LENNA LENISH LENMAL LENVA * ( glyphs are supposed to be protruding tongue symbols) SHOSH SHAP SHOP'H SHEN'LIL * ("Snake-form symbols," more like florid integral signs or ampersands) FAMMA FAMMIL FAMMNAL FAMMOSH * ("arms-forward symbols") ASAP'H ASAP'H-UN ( civilization on and under world sphere respectively, symbols resemble Egyptian cartouches of royalty) SART-MUNDAI EDEN-MAI (Looking like a theta, it may symbolize "the division in the Garden of Eden) XEN'PH-MAU MAX-MAL-KISH-ROK-TAU-MUN AGASSI-PAN-AGASSI-MALDEC-TOM-MU (_"a reference to planet Maldek and the Motherland of Lemuria (Mu)"_) EXTEL-HAI UR EIL MUS NA'SHI SHUK-TUM-MU ( reference again to Lemuria, Mu) RAGIF-KONT-VA MEGAL-MEX-MAL UDAI-HUN-DALAI ENLIL ( name of a Sumerian god ) KAL-MU-KAL ISO-TOK-MAL LESH-TAL PITASH-ROK (P-R is glossed as the "Pitach Rhok" mountains of Poseid or Atlantis) IMELEX UR-MUN (the various UR words have no graphic similarity) ZELPH SHAM-TOK-MARU (glyph is glossed as 8-pointed star of Regeneration or Baptism) MEP'TH-MAU MEP MEP'TH (the MEP set has little graphic similarity) NAAG TESH ELHIM-NAZ RAGGA-DAHL REG-MAHL (refers to "4 Great Primary Forces in Universe, in the hand of God") VIZ MARN MARF (the glyphs are similar MAR-TOK-MARU MAR-TOK-KAL MAR-TOK # ( a face, shadowed left eye shows lack of spiritual perception, the glyphs of the last three have little similarity save for a few curlicues.) TEC-LACMAL RAP'H ERMON PHAMMON # (Another face, resembles teacup, has many extra squiggles, purports to be a highly developed individual whose shadowed mouth speaks no evil) PHLIL PHLAN (two more PH words) URNA URNAS URNAN URNEP'H * (described as U or urn shaped symbols, written with similar signs) SHEO-SHEOI ("To the apples we salt we shall return," whatever that means. the sign resembles an arrow with a sperm head) AKASH (glossed as Sanskrit "akasa.") PLAMMA PLAMMA ( these are two visually similar glyphs pronounced "plamma" with slightly different meanings. Sense is forces active at night, dreams) ARAMMA (Forces aiding progression upwards, "road to ever-expanding grandeur) Other Solex-Mal words ISHTAL-MAXIN ( a glyph depicting the "All-Seeing Eye," "the Light of Creation." ) SARAS (the world) MALDEK ( a destroyed planet, now the asteroid belt) MALONA (always paired with Maldek, a satellite?) More words and names from "The Saucers Speak" by George Hunt Williamson and Alfred C. Bailey, 1954, New Age Publishing Company, 1542 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026, pp. 125-127. Most entries are names of contacts or UFO inhabitants. Actar from Mercury, contacted via The Board or by radio Adee from Etonya, the capital city of Jupiter, Adu from Hatonn in Andromeda (a planet ) Agfa Affa from Uranus Ankar-22 a contact, Jupiter? Artok from Pluto Awa a contact Barraga Solex Mal for "friends" Belga Um's (Martian wife of Zo, a Uranian) craft Ben "Good" in S-M Chan another name for Earth, may mean "disorder" in some older earth languages, also spelled SHAN Clacteem personage from Mars DA identification code for outer space radio -- see EU for earth Elala Planet 15 of Solar System 22 The significance of 22 is unknown to me. Elox son of Zo and Um Etonya name Jupiter EU Earth call letters, may be related to EUNZA, early wireless message Fowser Dark 2nd moon of Earth, apparently extant Garr from Pluto Hatonn Planet in Andromeda Kadar Lacu (or Laqu) Head of Universal Tribunal on Saturn Karas a contact Lomec a contact from Venus Macas contact on Neptune Masar the planet Mars Noro a contact Nah-9 from Mars? a contact Oara planetary representative from Saturn Patras a trans-Plutonian 12th planet Planet 5 Maldek, the asteroid belt, destroyed planet, #7 in OF,OT count. Ponnar Planetary head of Hatonn. Regga Rep from mars Safranian another solar system Sagafaris another solar system Saras earth, connected with Saros, the Babylonian astronomical cycle Sedat representative of Hatonn Solas the Sun Solex Mal Solar Tongue Suttku a Judge on Saturn Terra a Venusian contact Tonas "musical instruments" Toresoton another solar system Touka personage from Pluto Trocton a ship from System X Um a martian, wife to Zo Vec "space" in Solex Mal Waw-4 from Safranian system Zago A Martian Zo a Neptunian, husband of Um Zrs contact from Uranus -- John >From cbmvax!uunet!well.sf.ca.us!dasher Sun Jan 10 20:56:11 1993 Return-Path: Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 12:20:12 -0800 From: D Anton Sherwood Message-Id: <199301102020.AA02290@well.sf.ca.us> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: media of language Status: RO Mark Shoulson said: > Hard to say; I'm not sure I understand your definition of a "kind of > language." It's not by sense used to receive it; because "whistled" and > "spoken" both use hearing. Nor is it by means of production: "sign" and > "tactile" both use hands (and other body-parts). How about: two languages are of different kinds if someone who knows only one would not recognize the other as (even a foreign) language? TV and radio both use electromagnetic modulation. Tapes and CDs both work on my ears. Does that mean there's no useful distinction between these media? Anton Sherwood dasher@well.sf.ca.us +1 415 267 0685 1800 Market St #207, San Francisco 94102 USA "We all hate poverty, war and injustice, unlike the rest of you squares." >From cbmvax!snark!cowan Mon Jan 11 16:03:01 1993 Return-Path: Message-Id: From: cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan (John Cowan) Subject: Re: IAL desiderata To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu (conlang) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 10:06:00 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <930109004151_71174.2735_DHQ68-2@CompuServe.COM> from "Rick Harrison" at Jan 8, 93 07:41:52 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 2287 Status: RO la rik. xarysn. cusku di'e > Perhaps the wording of my statement was not precise enough. It seems > to me that your list of rules actually supports what I was trying to > say... I'll send that sentence to the re-phrasing laboratory. I didn't > mean to imply that there are no rules of syntax in German. I didn't think that you did! I merely meant to grumble about German's being used as a traditional (and wrong) example of a free-word-order language. > On the topic of gender... You once gave us an example of a French > sentence in which "he took a (whatever) from his briefcase and > threw it into the sea," and the difference in pronoun gender reveals > which "it" went into the sea. But what if both the briefcase and > the (whatever) have the same gender? Maybe what a conlang needs > for these situations is a pair of pronouns or pronoun-affixes, one > meaning "the former referent" and one meaning "the latter." Plug: Lojban has such pronouns: "ri" means "the last thing mentioned", "ra" means "something mentioned before 'ri'", and "ru" means "something mentioned before 'ru'". Lojban makes use of the formal view of grammatical gender: the gender of a "noun" is determined by its initial letter, and the pronouns are just letters of the alphabet; thus in a discussion about you and me, I would be C and you would be X (see first line). There is also a set of third- person pronouns that are assignable at will and cut across gender lines. > It's interesting to note that written Chinese distinguishes between > "he," "she" and "it" but spoken Mandarin does not. I believe this distinction was imported into written Chinese in the late 19th century under missionary influence. It is interesting to note that the "he" character is the original, unmarked, pre-European version; the other two are modifications of it. > Personally, I favor a third-person distinction between a) sentient or > animate beings, and b) non-sentients or inanimates. I'm not sure this > can be called a "gender" distinction, can it? Certainly. "Gender" < OF "gendre" < L "genus, generis" = "kind, type". Noun genders are just noun classes. Your preference establishes two genders. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From cbmvax!uunet!ctr.columbia.edu!shoulson Mon Jan 11 16:02:58 1993 Return-Path: Date: Mon, 11 Jan 93 11:09:17 -0500 Message-Id: <9301111609.AA06244@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.KPH.Uni-Mainz.de Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu In-Reply-To: J%org Knappen's message of Fri, 8 Jan 1993 21:48 GMT +0100 <01GTAHR1M40G8WW8FQ@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> Subject: ISV Status: RO >Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 21:48 GMT +0100 >From: J%org Knappen > rishons (hebrew/arab) >\footnote{Despite the very apealing name, the rishons are no longer >considered a good model. What a pity} Yes, it is. The name is a happy coincidence with the "-on" ending for subatomic particles and "rishon" which is Hebrew for "first." The other nice thing I like about them is the two types of rishons: T and V rishons, for Tohu and Vohu, the words used in Genesis to describe the universe before creation, commonly translated as "formless and void", though that's undoubtedly a bad translation (the words are seen practically nowhere else). ~mark >From cbmvax!uunet!ctr.columbia.edu!shoulson Mon Jan 11 16:03:07 1993 Return-Path: Date: Mon, 11 Jan 93 12:16:03 -0500 Message-Id: <9301111716.AA06288@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: dasher@well.sf.ca.us Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu In-Reply-To: D Anton Sherwood's message of Sun, 10 Jan 1993 12:20:12 -0800 <199301102020.AA02290@well.sf.ca.us> Subject: media of language Status: RO >Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 12:20:12 -0800 >From: D Anton Sherwood >Mark Shoulson said: >> Hard to say; I'm not sure I understand your definition of a "kind of >> language." It's not by sense used to receive it; because "whistled" and >> "spoken" both use hearing. Nor is it by means of production: "sign" and >> "tactile" both use hands (and other body-parts). >How about: two languages are of different kinds if someone who knows only >one would not recognize the other as (even a foreign) language? I dunno, that's a mighty subjective distinction. A sufficiently perceptive observer, even one who'd never heard of language using anything but speech, might still work out that the mad gestures someone's making are intended to be a language. Or conversely, a sufficiently sheltered individual might not be able to conceive that any language aside from his own could possibly exist, and so the babbling he hears from someone couldn't possible be a language. Also, under what circumstances? Observing two people holding a conversation using whatever means would convince most people that some type of language is happening. Watching Mary Poppins talk to Andrew the dog in the movie could certainly convince someone that barking is a language. But just watching a dog bark, or someone sign, in isolation wouldn't lead to the same conclusion, only that the dog is doing something or other, or the person may be autistic and likes to gesture. >TV and radio both use electromagnetic modulation. Tapes and CDs both work >on my ears. Does that mean there's no useful distinction between these >media? I never said that there's no useful distinction between these "kinds of language". Sanskrit and aUI are both "spoken", but I think you'll find they have some differences. I just don't see exactly how the demarcations between these putative "kinds of language" are drawn. If I were discussing entertainment media and described the different "kinds" as, say, "audio-only", "visual-only", and "audio and visual", then it *would* be the case that audio tapes and CD's fall into the same category, while TV and radio fell into different ones. But at least my distinctions between these kinds would be at least somewhat definable, so some new type could be placed among them (or in a new category, if necessary, e.g. the olfactory symphony player). What would you say to a language that was entirely tonal, but hummed (or sung with "ah" sounds, or "spoken" with meaningless nonsense words that didn't affect the meaning of what was said) rather than whistled? Is that a "spoken" language? Probably not by many definitions. Is it "whistled"? No, nobody whistles it. Is it in its own category? Maybe, but maybe it belongs in the others. What about a language that's "spoken" but only using inhalations, not exhalations? How do you define your "kinds of language"? That's really all I'm asking. ~mark >From cbmvax!uunet!extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU!jcj Mon Jan 11 16:03:26 1993 Return-Path: Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 04:18:04 +1100 From: Jason Johnston Message-Id: <199301111718.AA08817@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: IAL desiderata, 3rd draft Status: RO Thank you Rick Harrison for your interesting and well thought out proposed set of guidelines for an IAL. I'd like to see more of this sort of constructive discussion of the specifics that we disagree on, so that at least we can reach some agreement about them before we expect the rest of the world to :-) Here are some of my thoughts inspired by yours. >4.1 compounding > >If the IAL permits the creation of compound words, the meaning of >any compound must be deducible, on the basis of logic and >pragmatics, from the meanings of the individual formatives. I find it difficult to imagine an IAL that does _not_ permit compound words: it seems the only practical method of enlarging the vocabulary indefinitely. I think a more interesting question is whether an IAL should include derivational morphology _other than_ compounding (I mean non- inflectional morphology done with bound affixes, like agentive -er, causative -iz, nominalizing -ion, etc.) It may be news to some that several languages, including Chinese, get by very nicely with little or no derivational morphology, its place being taken by compounding with elements that can function independently in meanings such as 'person' (for agents), 'change' (for causatives), 'state' (for nominalizations), 'tool' (for instruments), etc. The, let us say, ergonomic aspects of this are enhanced by the fact that the elements concerned are simple (C)V(N) syllables, and usually lose their independent tone when compounded. Of conlangs I know, Glosa seems to lean in the direction of compounding instead of derivation (with, apparently, special shortened forms of some commonly compounded elements), while Esperanto has adopted the unusual course of allowing what look essentially like affixes to be treated as independent stems. >In a priori "philosophical" languages, words are arranged in >categories according to their meanings. For example, in the >language Ro, _lugalab_ means "broccoli," _lugalap_ means "parsley," >and _lugalat_ means "lettuce." It is relatively difficult to >memorize a vocabulary of this type; even the inventors of these >languages cannot use them without frequently consulting their >dictionaries. Words with similar meanings have similar sounds, >which can cause dangerous misunderstandings if there should be a >typographical error in a piece of text or a loud bit of background >noise during a conversation. Exactly. In fact I'd go as far as to say that vocabularies of this sort are the worst possible from a communication point of view. Basic roots that form a semantic field (and are therefore probable in similar pragmatic contexts) should in general be as _unlike_ each other as possible. >... Still, an >a posteriori conlang must make some effort to take material from >a variety of sources if its claims of suitability for worldwide use >are to be taken seriously. I doubt if this would be possible on a scale that would go beyond mere tokenism, and an incoherent hodgepodge would probably satisfy no one. A major problem is that in so many cases, neutralization of the natlang's phonemic distinctions will lead either to homophony with other roots or misidentification. The problem of homophony is, I suggest, insuperable in the case of the largest international, non-European body of roots, namely the "Chinese" (a bit of an abstraction covering a vocabulary resource used by the various Chinese languages, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and others to a lesser extent). This is a great pity, since it is a coherent and flexible body of elements and a few simple rules of combination, at least the equal of the Greco-Latin in scope, and still continues to yield an inexhaustible supply of (often made-in-Japan) new words for new concepts. The down side is that the clarity and transparency of the compound formation is only evident in its logographic guise. In most pronunciations of the compound, it is usually impossible to tell which of many homophones _any_ of the constituent morphemes are. So I don't see how native users of this particular (demographically _very_ significant) stock of vocabulary can usefully be catered for in an IAL. I am less familiar with Arabic and Sanskrit, which likewise furnish an extendable resource for vocabulary building for many languages and over large parts of the globe. But the thought still occurs: if we are going to provide a realistic level of representation for these languages (and assuming there are no technical problems, such as with Chinese, in borrowing vocabulary), how will it be done? Will different cultural "zones" be assigned different fields, so that for instance Sankrit does metaphysics and Arabic does trade, or is the vocabulary to be apportioned more randomly? If so, what good does it do anyone? I think the ease for people of Western European background in learning such languages as Esperanto is not the odd familiar root or word, but the _constant_ presence of more-or-less familiar elements. I find it hard to believe that, for a Chinese let's say, the odd encounter with _lai_ for 'come' or _kwok_ for 'country' in the midst of an overwhelmingly foreign vocaublary could be of much use in learning. So, it seems to me, we are back to your basic Greco-Latin vocabulary (which has a lot of problems, not the least of which is the incredibly complicated, irregular and even whimisical derivational system), or else to a completely arbitrary vocabulary, perhaps computer-generated with an eye to ergonomic factors. (But even here, the choice of concepts to be represented by underived roots cannot be arbitrary, since no one has delineated an authoritative list of semantic primitives.) I find the latter an interesting possibility, even though it still leaves the IAL designer wide open to the charge of cultural prejudice and ethnocentrism in the choice of primitive concepts. >Therefore, I believe the IAL should either allow both common >sequences (SOV and SVO) to be used, or should adopt an SVO order. >This gives us a demonstrably useful syntax which will be somewhat >familiar to a large part of the world's population. I think the question isn't so much whether we should use SVO or SOV, but whether we should design a language to be configurational or non-configurational. That is, are grammatical relations signalled by constituency (for practical purposes, word order) or by some other means (such as case endings, adjectival agreement, etc)? A lot of evidence points to constituency as the most efficient grammatical- relation signalling device, including the fact that the words have to come in some specific order anyway, so that the order may as well signal something useful (a point due, I believe, to Jespersen), and the fact that all pidgins and creoles are strictly configurational (as is still, for what it's worth, the underlying logical structure of all languages according to Noam Chomsky). Advocates of languages with rich case-marking systems, etc, might object that free word order is useful for expression, ie for discourse purposes. I think this is right, but only partially. It is extremely useful to be able to put something at the beginning or at the end of a unit for purposes of delivery, emphasis, contrast, etc. It is more difficult to argue a need for freedom of word order within such units as the clause or the phrase. So the answer is to provide a means, in addition to the normal expression of grammatical relations, of moving elements out of their normal position to the front or the end of a grammatical unit, without causing ambiguity. Once you have chosen to go down the configurational path, the selection of SVO or SOV (or more generally, head-modifier or modifier-head) as the basic order is merely a technical matter. As a matter of fact, I think some evidence from (human and computer) parsability points to head-modifier (or SVO) as the overall better basic construction. In any case, a syntax consistent with either of these principles should not prove too difficult for human beings raised on either of them, or on neither. Over to the conlang crew... Jason. >From cbmvax!uunet!BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU!EVANS Mon Jan 11 19:56:50 1993 Return-Path: Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 16:02 EDT From: Ronald Hale-Evans Subject: Carnyspeak? To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Message-Id: <01GTECKNZ5DS94FECS@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU> X-Vms-To: CONLANG X-Vms-Cc: EVANS Status: RO Ken Beesly mentions a cant in his recent message on whistle speech. The cant is called Carny Talk and is used to conceal secrets from us marks. Ken, can you provide more info on Carny Talk? Can anyone? Ron Hale-Evans >From cbmvax!uunet!compuserve.com!71174.2735 Mon Jan 11 19:57:07 1993 Return-Path: Date: 11 Jan 93 16:04:25 EST From: shared account To: Subject: re: IAL desiderata Message-Id: <930111210424_71174.2735_DHQ22-1@CompuServe.COM> Status: RO Jason Johnston: > I find it difficult to imagine an IAL that does _not_ permit compound > words: it seems the only practical method of enlarging the vocabulary > indefinitely. Well, I can imagine it, altho I wouldn't advocate it. It seems to me that some natlangs, e.g. Spanish, are relatively resistant to compounding; it seems compounding is more prevalent in modifier-head (more specifically in genitive -> noun) languages. (That's just my impression; I've never seen this point addressed in a linguistics textbook.) Also, advocates of computer-tractability have pointed out that natlang-style compounds are too ambiguous; "man made of snow" is more computer-tractable than "snowman." > I think a more interesting question is whether an IAL should > include derivational morphology _other than_ compounding (I mean non- > inflectional morphology done with bound affixes, like agentive -er, > causative -iz, nominalizing -ion, etc.) Good point. Bound affixes could be made unnecessary if the morphology is designed to make them so. >>... Still, an >>a posteriori conlang must make some effort to take material from >>a variety of sources if its claims of suitability for worldwide use >>are to be taken seriously. > >I doubt if this would be possible on a scale that would go beyond mere >tokenism, and an incoherent hodgepodge would probably satisfy no one. A >major problem is that in so many cases, neutralization of the natlang's >phonemic distinctions will lead either to homophony with other roots or >misidentification. I think there are 3 distinct approaches to borrowing words from natlangs: I'll call method #1 "graphemic"; the lang designer tries to make the written words look as recognizable as possible, without much regard for changes in pronounciation that might occur. Maybe Hogben's Interglossa, which used Greek words from the scientific vocabulary, would be an example of this. Let's call method #2 "phonemic"; the designer tries to borrow words so that their pronunciation is preserved. Thus the English word "night" might be spelled "nait." (It's not unusual to see pan-European conlangs that contain a mishmash of the above 2 approaches; unpredictably, some words are borrowed graphemically, others phonemically; Esperanto and Unitario are examples.) The 3rd method, which I favor, we might call "mnemonic." Incoming words are shredded, sliced, and diced to fit the conlang's rules of phonology and morphology. The resulting words might not be recognizable on first sight, but the fact that they are somehow related to natlang words seems to make it easier to memorize them than to memorize randomly-generated words. The fact that many are _not_ recognizable at first sight/hearing is proof that we have achieved the desired degree of cultural neutrality. v Examples of this approach: Vorlin _mav_ from Mandarin _ma_, Korean _mal_, Japanese _uma_. Volapu"k _bo"d_ from English _bird_. Vorlin _bar_ from German _Bart_ and Spanish+Italian _barba_. > The problem of homophony is, I suggest, insuperable in the case of the > largest international, non-European body of roots, namely the "Chinese" Even if the borrowings from dissimilar but important natlangs only amount to tokenism, that's better than no attempt at all. Even Esperanto contains a few feeble attempts at globalism: Greek _kaj_, Arabic _au_, Hindi/ Bengali/Nepali _nau_. As for Chinese (specifically Mandarin), there are a few syllables which have one usage that is much more frequent than the others. Examples are _bu_ (the _bu_ meaning "not" is much more frequent than the other bu's); and _ren_ (the _ren_ meaning "person" is most frequent). Looking at a Chi-Eng dictionary, I see that there are some syllables which only have one logogram associated with each: _dei_ (need/must), _den_ (to yank), _fo_ (Buddha), _gei_ (give; let/allow), and a few others. It seems to me that Chinese words such as these could be effectively borrowed into a conlang. > I find it hard to believe that, for a Chinese let's say, the odd > encounter with _lai_ for 'come' or _kwok_ for 'country' in the midst > of an overwhelmingly foreign vocaublary could be of much use in learning. To a foreigner visiting a nation where the people don't speak his language, hearing just a few words of his native tongue can be a great relief. I live in a tourist-infested city, and as a result of traveling by bicycle (I refuse to operate a car), I am often stopped by lost tourists who need directions. Sometimes they can't speak English at all; my feeble ability to barely communicate in German and Spanish causes these tourists to gush thanks and to praise the diety for helping them find a polyglot. (So far "C^u parolas vi Esperanton?" has never succeeded in establishing communication in these cases.) I don't know for sure, but I strongly suspect that a few familiar words in a conlang would provide similar feelings of assurance and comfort for non-European learners. Your comments on word order are interesting, and I agree it is desirable to be able to re-arrange elements for emphasis. I'll have to ponder this for a while. I've been trying to design a conlang that conforms to my list of guidelines, but haven't made much progress. There are so many possibilities... ======================================================================== Rick Harrison 71174.2735@compuserve.com ...tarpit!bilver!jwt!bbs-hrick ``open up said the world at the door'' - the Move >From cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Tue Jan 12 08:26:25 1993 Return-Path: From: cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 17:10:00 PST Subject: Re: Carnyspeak? In-Reply-To: "EVANS@binah.cc.brandeis:edu:Xerox's message of 11 Jan 93 12:02 PST" To: EVANS@binah.cc.brandeis.edu Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Message-Id: <93Jan11.171031pst.11698@alpha.xerox.com> Status: RO >Ken, can you provide more info on Carny Talk? Can anyone? Carny is a kind of "play language" or deliberate manipulation of the phonemes in words for amusement or, in this case, concealment. In general, the relative privacy of play languages, with the effective exclusion of the uninitiated, often appeals to adolescent cliques. The best known is Pig Latin, also called Hog Latin, which exists in a couple of minor dialects. Lesser known play languages include Turkey Talk and Double Dutch, and there are no doubt dozens of others in English alone. New ones can be invented fairly easily. Such play languages are often the object of serious linguistic study. I've seen only a couple of examples of Carnie talk, which, as best I can recall, go like this: 1. The word is divided into syllables 2. The sequence /i:@z/ is inserted after the initial consonant of the syllable (I use /i:/ for the 'i' phoneme in "machine" and /@/ for the schwa, like the 'a' in "about"). Other parts of the word retain their original pronunciation. e.g. carnival car + ni + val => ki:@zar ni:@zi vi:@zal ------------------------- e.g. remember re + mem + ber ri:@ze mi:@zem bi:@zer One suspect example I heard, from a movie, was not careful to perform the process on ALL syllables, but only on the first: carnies (i.e. carnival people) ki:@zarnies (that is, one might expect ki:@zarni:@zies--perhaps the rule is effectively optional) I'm don't know what happens when the syllable doesn't begin with a consonant. Any carnival people out there? Play languages are interesting to phonologists because they reveal that even your average native speaker on the street seems to have an intuitive sense of phonemes and syllables. Various insertion, reordering and substitution paradigms have been identified, and it is remarkable that people can learn to produce and understand such distortions with facility. Ken Beesley beesley.parc@xerox.com >From cbmvax!uunet!staff.tc.umn.edu!dsg Tue Jan 12 08:27:58 1993 Return-Path: Date: Mon, 11 Jan 93 21:06:30 CST Message-Id: <75991.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu> X-Popmail-Charset: English To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Clothing as language Status: RO Recommended as reading, but not as authority: THE LANGUAGE OF CLOTHES, by Alison Lurie. Ms. Lurie isn't using "language" in a loose metaphorical sense: she talks about the grammar of clothes, for example. Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu >From cbmvax!uunet!staff.tc.umn.edu!dsg Tue Jan 12 08:28:02 1993 Return-Path: Date: Mon, 11 Jan 93 21:42:48 CST Message-Id: <78168.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu> X-Popmail-Charset: English To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: under construction Status: RO A language I've been playing with for a while now. It's a "scribage" (thanks to Anton Sherwood for that term) -- that is, its _primary_ form is writing, rather than it being a written representation of a spoken (or signed, etc.) language. Tentative name: Forty Signs, for the number of "phonemes." Some of the constraints on this language: 1) The "phonemes" need to be unambiguous in shape. 2) No use is made of color; while all users can be assumed to be sighted, they cannot be assumed to have the same visual range, or the same way of dividing up that range. 3) There is no distinction between past and future. Some users would consider it a distinction without a difference; others distinguish between past and future, but disagree among themselves as to which is which. Areas of use: Parts of our universe, parts of the tachyon universe, and certain border regions. Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu >From cbmvax!uunet!mycroft.rand.org!jim Tue Jan 12 08:28:06 1993 Return-Path: To: "" Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, jim@mycroft.rand.org Subject: Re: Clothing as language In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 11 Jan 93 21:06:30 -0600. <75991.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu> From: Jim Gillogly Reply-To: cbmvax!uunet!rand.org!jim Date: Mon, 11 Jan 93 21:24:37 PST Sender: cbmvax!uunet!mycroft.rand.org!jim Status: RO > "" writes: > Recommended as reading, but not as authority: THE LANGUAGE OF CLOTHES, by > Alison Lurie. Ms. Lurie isn't using "language" in a loose metaphorical > sense: she talks about the grammar of clothes, for example. Certainly it's possible to express deadly insults with clothing in L.A.: last week somebody was killed at a funeral for wearing blue, when red was the color of the day... or was it vice versa? Many schools in the county have banned gang colors (mostly red (Bloods) or blue (Crips)) altogether. Jim Gillogly Sterday, 21 Afteryule S.R. 1993, 05:24 >From cbmvax!uunet!snakemail.hut.fi!jkorpela Tue Jan 12 13:13:15 1993 Return-Path: From: cbmvax!uunet!snakemail.hut.fi!jkorpela Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 15:33:24 +0200 Message-Id: <199301121333.AA28306@lk-hp-10.hut.fi> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu In-Reply-To: shared account's message of 11 Jan 93 16:04:25 EST <930111210424_71174.2735_DHQ22-1@CompuServe.COM> Subject: IAL desiderata X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 Status: RO Rick Harrison wrote: - - advocates of computer-tractability have pointed out that natlang-style compounds are too ambiguous; "man made of snow" is more computer-tractable than "snowman." I'd say that the computer-tractability point of view is not as important as understandability to human beings. After all, if you didn't previously know what the word "snowman" means, could you construct its semantics from the meanings of the words "snow" and "man"? Wouldn't it be more natural to assume that it means e.g. something like 'a man who lives in snow'? Notice, by the way, that the word "snowman" as designating 'man made of snow' uses the word "man" in a metaphoric sense. However, expressions like "man made of snow" (or any complex expressions in which the relationships between the elements are shown with prepositions or other morphemes) are quite clumsy when used as technical terms. Being nicely structured, they can clearly express an idea, but when they are used in complicated sentences the result easily becomes _too_ structured - at least for human conversation. Moreover, notice that compound and derived words are often misleading in the sense that they suggest a meaning that is more general than the true meaning. For instance, "automobile" does not mean 'self-moving' (autos+mobilis) in general but a specific class of vehicles, and the word "computer" - although it is semantically vague - does not usually mean 'computing device' in the most general sense. Therefore, it seems necessary to distinguish between two cases of forming words or word-like expressions: - structured formations for which the semantics is clearly and "mechanically" defined by the meanings of their elements (including the construction method) - formations which are new words (or "words") in the sense that their meaning is separately defined by a convention and is not derivable from the meanings of the constituents. In the latter case, the construction method can be simple word composition (e.g. "snowman" or "snow man"), provided that the same method is not used for structured formations. Most existing languages violate the restriction, and this often causes problems: I can understand a word (since I know its constituents) but I don't know whether I understand it correctly. Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, Finland >From cbmvax!snark!cowan Tue Jan 12 15:20:16 1993 Return-Path: Message-Id: From: cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan (John Cowan) Subject: James Cooke Brown on SVO order To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu (conlang), lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu (Lojban List) Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 11:33:06 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 5588 Status: RO The following text was originally written by JCB in 1967-68, published as part of Chapter 6 of his book >Loglan 2: Methods of Construction<, and reprinted in >The Loglanist< 1:2, p. 54ff. Since none of these sources is readily available, I am sending it to both Lojban and conlang lists. It provides an interesting insight into the mind of a language designer at work. [JCB begins by defending SVO as the order of choice because of its prevalence in Chinese, English, Russian, Spanish, French, and German, 6 of his 8 source languages.] There was a time, however, when [VSO] order was seriously, if briefly, considered for Loglan. This order has a certain traditional charm for logicians -- witness the standard schematic notation 'Fxy' for a two-place predicate, for example -- and for certain purposes of manipulation it has undeniable advantages. But for a spoken and, at the same time, uninflected language the VSO order turns out to be quite unsuitable. The argument which discloses that result may bear repeating here. We note first that, on the most fundamental grounds, arguments are not to be distinguished \it{except} by word order in Loglan. Thus we entertain no "case endings", or other marking devices, by which "Subjects" can be intrinsically distinguished from "Objects". \footnote{I leave the argument behind \it{this} remark, however, to the reader.} One form of the argument then hinges on the management of imperatives. \footnote{It could as well be based on specified descriptions; see below.} [Editorial interjection: Both Loglan and Lojban have to some extent withdrawn from the original rejection of case marking, and have created a set of optional case tags. However, neither form of the language uses them much. In Lojban, the argument about "imperatives" which follows must be replaced by an exactly parallel argument about "observatives", since Lojban interprets a V-first sentence as an elliptical subject without imperative coloring. I have added bracketed comments to the next paragraph giving the Lojban, as distinct from the Loglan, viewpoint.] Now imperatives [resp. observatives] are almost invariably short forms; there is apparently little scope for long-windedness in giving warnings or commands [resp. drawing the hearer's attention to things in the environment]. Moreover, the first argument of an imperatively [resp. observatively] used predicate is almost always the hearer [resp. understood from context], and as the omission of any constant feature of a message cannot reduce its information content, first arguments are nearly always [resp. always] omitted in the imperative [resp. observative] mode (e.g. as in English 'Go!' [resp. 'Delicious!']). But if we omit the first argument from the form PAA (Predicate-Argument-Argument) -- for arguments, note, are to be taken as indistinguishable -- we obtain a result that does not differ from the result of omitting a second argument, or a third. Therefore the adoption of the PAA schema as the standard order for the Loglan sentence deprives us of a good way of defining imperatives [resp. observatives]. In fact, it deprives us of the only way of defining imperatives that is consistent with the other patterns of an uninflected language. [Lojban makes use of a special "imperative 2nd person pronoun" which may appear as any argument, thus permitting more complex imperative forms while remaining "uninflected".] Similar difficulties arise with specified descriptions. Thus if 'He gave the horse to John' is to become something like 'Gave he the horse John', how \it{do} you say 'the giver of the horse to John'? A form like 'the give the horse John' will not do, since it is the designation of the giver, not the gift, which normally follows the predicate. Only by introducing some sort of dummy argument into the 'Fxyz' form, e.g. 'F-yz', can we keep the meaning clear. But this is awkward. These seemed good reasons not to use the VSO form, especially as the SVO form does not suffer this disaster. Thus, the schema APA yields an unmistakable PA in the imperative [resp. observative] mood. Incidentally, the SOV order ('He the horse John gave') collapses into the same kind of ambiguity under the pressure of abbreviation. (Is 'The horse John give' an imperative, or an incomplete declaration?) Thus, curiously enough, and independent of any facts about the distribution of these arrangements among languages, we would have been forced to abandon the logicians' notational convention anyway. For once incomplete or abbreviated forms are considered -- and in a spoken language they are far more frequent than unabbreviated forms -- the predicate can no longer be treated as a prefix or a suffix of its uninflected arguments ('Fxy' or 'xyF') but must be treated as an infix ('xFy'). It is only of suche initially infixed arrangements that the fragments left by the removal of uninflected arguments (e.g. 'xF' and 'Fy') remain reconstructable and, hence, grammatically clear. \footnote{In these analyses, by the way, we may have isolated the ambiguity- avoidance mechanism behind one of Greenberg's most interesting universals, namely that all SOV languages have case systems (his Universal 41). I am surprised that the principle does not hold for VSO languages as well. If it did, we should then have strong evidence for the even more interesting converse principle that only SVO languages can be analytic: a fact we suspect anyway, but we would then know why.} -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From cbmvax!uunet!trl.OZ.AU!j.guy Tue Jan 12 08:27:56 1993 Return-Path: Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 14:02:29 EST From: cbmvax!uunet!trl.OZ.AU!j.guy (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9301120302.AA26317@medici.trl.OZ.AU> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: why SVO... Status: RO This thought has occurred to me quite a while ago. 1. Very few verbs are impersonal (e.g. "to rain"). 2. Not all verbs are transitive. So: most verbs take a subject, many also an object. I was taught, when in primary school, that the verb was the essential part of the sentence ("no sentence without a verb"). There are two word orders for which the distance from the root (V) to the two leaves (O and S) is minimal: SVO and OVS. I imagine that that may make the processing of SVO and OVS languages mentally (I was going to say computationally) more economical. Since very few verbs are impersonal, you can expect most sentences of an SVO language to start with S, very few with V, none with O; you can many sentences of an OVS language to start with O, many with V, none with S. So, an SVO language is more predictable than an OVS language, and, presumably, again, easier to process. >From cbmvax!uunet!ctr.columbia.edu!shoulson Tue Jan 12 15:20:15 1993 Return-Path: Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 14:49:05 -0500 Message-Id: <9301121949.AA11219@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Paternoster in aUI Status: RO Hey all. I was re-flipping through my aUI book and thought I'd throw you all a bone. Here's the book's Paternoster. The words in parens appear as such in the book, too: kUtOr Ub Ku (The Lord's Prayer) ---fnum ytvu, xu cEv ag kna, bum fUI kUrUryv (tukOryv)! bum knuwa terv! bum twU Eryv kab bEn Uj ag kna! serv fnum iAm nod at fnu fiA! Ib yrvtrOrv pIn fnum yrUvs rUt fnu, Uj fnu yrvtrOv rUt pIn fnum yrevu. Ib bu yc daiurv fnu tag yrUm tsOb, yUg, fUwerv fnu tyg yrU! yUt knuwa Ib wU Ib kUO (rUI) cEv bum At ymA Ib can-A. FUd-sE-cErv! Just trying to brighten your day a little... ~mark >From cbmvax!uunet!staff.tc.umn.edu!dsg Tue Jan 12 16:53:52 1993 Return-Path: Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 14:51:23 CST From: () Message-Id: <53484.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Re: Clothing as language Status: RO On Mon, 11 Jan 93 21:24:37 PST, Jim Gillogly writes: > >> "" writes: >> Recommended as reading, but not as authority: THE LANGUAGE OF CLOTHES, by >> Alison Lurie. Ms. Lurie isn't using "language" in a loose metaphorical >> sense: she talks about the grammar of clothes, for example. > >Certainly it's possible to express deadly insults with clothing in L.A.: >last week somebody was killed at a funeral for wearing blue, when red was >the color of the day... or was it vice versa? Many schools in the county >have banned gang colors (mostly red (Bloods) or blue (Crips)) altogether. > > Jim Gillogly > Sterday, 21 Afteryule S.R. 1993, 05:24 Ms. Lurie also considers it possible to express much more thoughtful political and philosophical opinions. >From cbmvax!uunet!highlite.gotham.COM!brgilson Tue Jan 12 19:34:53 1993 Return-Path: Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 18:42:42 -0500 From: cbmvax!uunet!highlite.gotham.COM!brgilson (Bruce R. Gilson) Message-Id: <9301122342.AA27770@highlite.gotham.COM> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Consequences of free conversion, Contd. Status: RO Mark E. Shoulson writes: >I was thinking a little more about Bruce's proposal regarding free >interchange between parts of speech, and compared it with Lojban/Loglan >(which tries to do the same thing as much as possible), and the effects >seen there. >One thing that eliminating the copula in favor of verbing everything would >entail would be the loss of the definite article. Well, you have formulated a system which does that. It wasn't entailed by the scheme I originally proposed, and in fact I see Lojban as an example of a scheme where the definite article is terribly necessary. The only way Lojban can create a noun phrase is by using an article before what would otherwise be a verb. (Lojbanis don't like to admit that the language has nouns and verbs, but I find it useful to use such terms in describing Lojban constructions. In Lojban, a word is not per se a noun, verb, or adjective, but it is very clear that particular slots in a Lojban sentence can be called noun, verb, or adjective slots.) Of course, I was not trying to recreate Lojban, and the earlier comment that similar things could be done in Espe- ranto to what I proposed shows that one does not need to think of a structure quite as exotic as Lojban. Esperanto does, however, have the verb "esti" and most Esperantists (I assume) use it rather than verb-izing predicate comple- ments as I'd suggested. > ... This may be no big deal >(Rick H. put it very well in an early essay on vorlin that practically no >language with definite articles has any clear rules for how to use them). >To see this, consider the sentence "I am a doctor." Bruce would recast >this making "doctor" a verb. Using his suggestions ("-i" is adjective >ending, "-e" is noun ending", and "-ar" is verb ending) and made-up >vocabulary, we might get something like "ye doktorar." But how can I saw >"I am the doctor," with the definite article? Would we find ourselves >putting articles onto verbs? I think we have to think clearly about the distinction between subjects and predicates. The examples I gave had a definite article modifying a subject, which is clearly a noun. Here we have the noun made into a predicate, and a different view needs to be made. (One, I admit, that I did not think of at the time of my earlier post!) > ... Maybe, but I suspect that would come closer >to the verbless sentences of Hebrew/Russian/Welsh/etc. than Bruce would >like to see (I thought he was trying to make sentences with true verbs, not >just equations of nouns). Quite right about my thoughts there. >And what of adjectives? Bruce analyzed sentences about "The house is big" >and the like, but what about "That is a big house," (or "The building is a >big house," if you don't like pronouns)? "The house is big", said Bruce, >was "(Li) kase grandar" (as noted above, I think this language can't have >the "Li" article). Your remarks about articles do not convince me that we cannot use articles on true nouns (subjects and objects). I never thought to abolish nouns entire- ly, only to make it possible for every noun, verb, or adjective to convert freely among(at least) these three parts of speech. When a word is being used in a nounlike way, it certainly can take an article. >For "That is a big house", would we do "Te kasar e >grandar" (That houses and bigs)? More likely "That houses big-ly"! > ... Possibly. Probably even. But some might >argue that that changes the meaning a bit, making it too symmetrical. See my suggestion above. >Similar problems happen with relative clauses. "He/she is a/the person >whom I dislike." Well... "He/she is a person" would go into, say, "ge >homar" (He/she "persons"). "Person whom I dislike" might be "home ko ye >hetar ke" (using relative-correlative style relative clauses: Person >who-is-such-that I dislike said-one). Actually, I really like that way of expressing a relative clause. > ... But can you attach relative clauses >like that to verbs? Maybe the solution here is a clause that doesn't have the "relative" structure: "He persons as disliked by me." ("as" = "in such a way as," approxi- mately.) > ... Possibly; it seems to be an artifact of the grammar >and the logical structure of Loglan and Lojban that you cannot in those >languages, but it may be reasonable in another. So "ge homar ko ye hetar >ke"? Hmmm... It seems strange to have relative clauses on a verb. Indeed. But adverbial clauses are not that unusual in languages even like English! > ... A >better method seems to be the same as the one used for adjectives (which >are really a special case of relative clauses, for the most part): "ge >homar e ye hetar ge." Actually, adjectives modifying nouns become, in my mind, adverbs when the nouns become verb-ified, as I indicated earlier in this message. Bruce >From cbmvax!uunet!staff.tc.umn.edu!dsg Tue Jan 12 22:35:20 1993 Return-Path: Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 18:43:50 CST From: () Message-Id: <67431.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Not all languages are spoken Status: RO I suggest that people interested in the structure of language look into the differences in structure between "native" sign languages and spoken languages. Item: In American Sign Language, one can say "He said, and then he said, and then he said, and then he said" without confusion. (Actually, the pronoun used means is genderless). The differentiation is spatial -- a means not usable in spoken languages. I'm far from being an expert on ASL or any other sign language; so you'd do better to investigate for yourself. Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu >From cbmvax!uunet!highlite.gotham.COM!brgilson Tue Jan 12 22:35:24 1993 Return-Path: Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 19:58:00 -0500 From: cbmvax!uunet!highlite.gotham.COM!brgilson (Bruce R. Gilson) Message-Id: <9301130058.AA28268@highlite.gotham.COM> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Gender Status: RO Rick Harrison writes: >Personally, I favor a third-person distinction between a) sentient or >animate beings, and b) non-sentients or inanimates. I'm not sure this >can be called a "gender" distinction, can it? I would certainly consider animate/ neuter a gender distinction. Some Scandinavian languages distinguish common from neuter, though the genders aren't obvious in all cases from mean- ing. Yours would just be a more regular form of that. >From cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab Wed Jan 13 04:35:55 1993 Return-Path: Date: Wed, 13 Jan 93 02:28:14 -0500 From: cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9301130728.AA13557@daily.grebyn.com> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: animate and sentient Status: RO Rick Harrison talks of two possible gender distinctions sentient or animate; non-sentient or inanimate Two problems come to mind. Normally, I would think that in using a third person pronoun, the animate/inanimate/sentient/non-sentient distinction is probably going to be relatively obvious from the context of the sentence ("X told me" is going to 'obviously' imply that X is sentient/animate, and "I told X" only slightly less so), thus failing to serve one of the primary purposes of the anaphora - to abbreviate the referent while retaining claritty of reference. SEcond, what happens when you have conflicting categories? Sentient plants? Is a computer that understands language potentially sentient but not animate? (Some people DO talk to their plants - to tie these two arguments together %^) For some of the higher animals, we might attribute some sort of sentience (i.e. cats and dogs), and they are of course animate. But a snail or a worm is animate but almost certainly not sentient in any sense that we would be likely to intend. Which gender are they? lojbab >From cbmvax!uunet!well.sf.ca.us!dasher Wed Jan 13 04:36:40 1993 Return-Path: Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1993 00:43:03 -0800 From: D Anton Sherwood Message-Id: <199301130843.AA04001@well.sf.ca.us> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Chinese roots Status: RO quoth Jason Johnston: > . . . . The problem of homophony is, I suggest, insuperable in > the case of the largest international, non-European body of roots, namely > the "Chinese". This is a great pity, since it is a coherent and > flexible body of elements and a few simple rules of combination, > at least the equal of the Greco-Latin in scope, and still continues to > yield an inexhaustible supply of (often made-in-Japan) new words for new > concepts. . . . I beg Sir to kindly refrain from setting fire to my legs (as Stephen Fry once said) if the following suggestion is of a pointlessness: Is homophony less of a nightmare in an earlier version of Chinese which had more final stops? On another hand, some encoding of the characters (I understand there is a standard four-digit telegraphic code, and now there's the two-byte Unicode) could be arbitrarily converted to spoken lexemes . . . Anton Sherwood dasher@well.sf.ca.us +1 415 267 0685 1800 Market St #207, San Francisco 94102 USA "We all hate poverty, war and injustice, unlike the rest of you squares." >From cbmvax!uunet!well.sf.ca.us!dasher Wed Jan 13 04:36:35 1993 Return-Path: Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1993 00:43:17 -0800 From: D Anton Sherwood Message-Id: <199301130843.AA04051@well.sf.ca.us> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: the eme meme Status: RO Dan Goodman drops hints about his "scribage": > Tentative name: Forty Signs, for the number of "phonemes." Graphemes. Where did the -eme morpheme come from, anyway? Anton Sherwood dasher@well.sf.ca.us +1 415 267 0685 1800 Market St #207, San Francisco 94102 USA "We all hate poverty, war and injustice, unlike the rest of you squares." >From cbmvax!uunet!uk.ac.uea.sys.s5!jrk Wed Jan 13 10:56:56 1993 Return-Path: Via: uk.ac.east-anglia.information-systems; Wed, 13 Jan 1993 14:12:33 +0000 Message-Id: <7264.9301131411@sys.uea.ac.uk> Sender: cbmvax!uunet!uk.ac.uea.sys.s5!jrk Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1993 14:13:58 +0000 To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu From: cbmvax!uunet!uk.ac.uea.sys.uea.ac.uk!jrk (Richard Kennaway) Subject: Re: animate and sentient Status: RO Lojbab writes: >SEcond, what happens when you have conflicting categories? Sentient plants? >Is a computer that understands language potentially sentient but not animate? >(Some people DO talk to their plants - to tie these two arguments together %^) >For some of the higher animals, we might attribute some sort of sentience >(i.e. cats and dogs), and they are of course animate. But a snail or a >worm is animate but almost certainly not sentient in any sense that we would >be likely to intend. Which gender are they? > >lojbab In Klingon, the test of "sentience" is whether the entity is capable of using language. Notwithstanding Washoe and Nim Chimpsky, and perhaps pending further inventigation of whales and dolphins, I think that humans are the only Terran life-forms that qualify. As for computers, when they can use human language (natural or artificial) well enough to converse sensibly with human speakers, they can be granted the "language-using" modes of address. (I meant to write "investigation" above, but the word I accidentally came up with seems the perfect word for studies whose interpretation is dominated by the assumptions and desires of those interpreting them.) A question about genders in natural languages: when a language with genders borrows a word from another language, how is it decided what gender to give that word? For example, why is "weekend" masculine in French ("le weekend") rather than feminine? If the same word were borrowed into German (masc-fem-neuter) or Dutch (common-neuter), what gender would it receive? Chinese (so I understand) has a collection of "classifier words". The only one I recall is applied to "long and thin" objects -- at least, that's a way of remembering what it applies to, but there are so many exceptions that you just have to learn by rote which classifier goes with which noun. When borrowing a word into Chinese from another language, which classifier would it be given? The example of Chinese classifiers suggests an argument against semantics- based genders in a conlang. If the conlang ever becomes a "real" language (e.g. as defined by the final stage of the steps that Lojbab once listed), it will start growing on its own, and the addition of new words for new concepts not fitting into the pigeonhole of its gender system will start to blur that system, until we are back to the state of just having to remember the genders by rote. Does anyone think that a totally random assignment of genders to words is a good thing? -- ____ Richard Kennaway \ _/__ School of Information Systems Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \X / University of East Anglia uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K. >From cbmvax!uunet!ctr.columbia.edu!shoulson Wed Jan 13 13:23:57 1993 Return-Path: Date: Wed, 13 Jan 93 10:42:34 -0500 Message-Id: <9301131542.AA14277@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: brgilson@highlite.gotham.COM Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu In-Reply-To: Bruce R. Gilson's message of Tue, 12 Jan 93 18:42:42 -0500 <9301122342.AA27770@highlite.gotham.COM> Subject: Consequences of free conversion, Contd. Status: RO >Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 18:42:42 -0500 >From: brgilson@highlite.gotham.COM (Bruce R. Gilson) > Mark E. Shoulson writes: >>I was thinking a little more about Bruce's proposal regarding free >>interchange between parts of speech, and compared it with Lojban/Loglan >>(which tries to do the same thing as much as possible), and the effects >>seen there. >>One thing that eliminating the copula in favor of verbing everything would >>entail would be the loss of the definite article. For no apparent reason, I didn't think of adverbial phrases for descibing verbed nouns (as Bruce suggests later in his response) until a while after I'd posted my letter. This suggests a (to me) interesting solution to the definite article problem. After all, if you're viewing all the parts-of-speech as interchangeable, and for many languages articles are special cases of adjectives, why not apply the same thing to them? So Bruce's "Li" definite article can become adverbial too, say "Lu" ("the-ly"). This could make for interesting things like "le", a noun meaning "something the-ish, something definite". And if you had an indefinite article, "uni", you could talk about "uni le" (some indefinite definite thing) or "li une" (the definite indefinite thing). This can be fun! >> ... This may be no big deal >>(Rick H. put it very well in an early essay on vorlin that practically no >>language with definite articles has any clear rules for how to use them). >>To see this, consider the sentence "I am a doctor." Bruce would recast >>this making "doctor" a verb. Using his suggestions ("-i" is adjective >>ending, "-e" is noun ending", and "-ar" is verb ending) and made-up >>vocabulary, we might get something like "ye doktorar." But how can I saw >>"I am the doctor," with the definite article? Would we find ourselves >>putting articles onto verbs? >I think we have to think clearly about >the distinction between subjects and >predicates. The examples I gave had a >definite article modifying a subject, >which is clearly a noun. Here we have >the noun made into a predicate, and a >different view needs to be made. (One, >I admit, that I did not think of at the >time of my earlier post!) Exactly. And since the noun is now a predicate, definite articles in the traditional sense can no longer apply to it, which was my point. Of course, with what I have above, one could say "ye doktorar lu" (or "ye lu doktorar") --- "I doctor the-ishly." >> ... Maybe, but I suspect that would come closer >>to the verbless sentences of Hebrew/Russian/Welsh/etc. than Bruce would >>like to see (I thought he was trying to make sentences with true verbs, not >>just equations of nouns). >Quite right about my thoughts there. Though not quite right in my languages; I'd been peering at my Welsh book too long: Welsh certainly has a copula, which it seems to use even more than English does. >>And what of adjectives? Bruce analyzed sentences about "The house is big" >>and the like, but what about "That is a big house," (or "The building is a >>big house," if you don't like pronouns)? "The house is big", said Bruce, >>was "(Li) kase grandar" (as noted above, I think this language can't have >>the "Li" article). >Your remarks about articles do not >convince me that we cannot use articles >on true nouns (subjects and objects). >I never thought to abolish nouns entire- >ly, only to make it possible for every >noun, verb, or adjective to convert >freely among(at least) these three >parts of speech. When a word is being >used in a nounlike way, it certainly >can take an article. Of course, but if the language forbids you from using articles symmetrically on copulative sentences (which are more or less symmetrical in meaning, though not in grammar), something does seem to be wrong, and I'd not expect such a language to have articles even on nouns. >>For "That is a big house", would we do "Te kasar e >>grandar" (That houses and bigs)? >More likely "That houses big-ly"! Of course. >>Similar problems happen with relative clauses. "He/she is a/the person >>whom I dislike." Well... "He/she is a person" would go into, say, "ge >>homar" (He/she "persons"). "Person whom I dislike" might be "home ko ye >>hetar ke" (using relative-correlative style relative clauses: Person >>who-is-such-that I dislike said-one). >Actually, I really like that way of >expressing a relative clause. Me too. It's such a neat and elegant method, much cleaner than the complex relative-correlative style you see in most IE languages. >> ... But can you attach relative clauses >>like that to verbs? >Maybe the solution here is a clause that >doesn't have the "relative" structure: >"He persons as disliked by me." >("as" = "in such a way as," approxi- >mately.) Yes, when I finally thought of adverbs it also occurred to me that you could use as construction like this (on the lines of Esperanto's "tiel ke") for this situation. You're right. ~mark >From cbmvax!uunet!ctr.columbia.edu!shoulson Wed Jan 13 13:23:36 1993 Return-Path: Date: Wed, 13 Jan 93 10:54:13 -0500 Message-Id: <9301131554.AA14328@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu In-Reply-To: 's message of Tue, 12 Jan 93 18:43:50 CST <67431.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu> Subject: Not all languages are spoken Status: RO >Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 18:43:50 CST >From: () >Item: In American Sign Language, one can say "He said, and then he said, >and then he said, and then he said" without confusion. (Actually, the >pronoun used means is genderless). The differentiation is spatial -- a >means not usable in spoken languages. Certainly so. As I pointed out in a post a few weeks ago about "intuitiveness" in language, signed languages have some notable advantages over spoken ones owing to simple dimensionality. The real world is roughly four-dimensional, counting time as a dimension. Perhaps a bit more complex, since we discuss things that are not corporeal. Spoken languages are roughly two-dimensional, with one dimension of pitch/sound/etc and one of time. Signed languages are more like four-dimensional, since you have that chunk of 3D space in front of you to play with, plus time (and things like handshape, etc). So your representations can come closer to the real world (my cooked example was the sentence, "Wow, there sure are a lot of bicycles over there, all lined up in a row!" Translated into *any* spoken language, someone totally unfamiliar with the language would have absolutely no clue as to what was going on. Translated into ASL (the only signed language I know at all), even someone with zero knowledge of ASL would almost certainly deduce it had something to do with "over there", maybe "bicycles", and very likely "in a row"). A signer has a handful of spatial locations at his disposal, which can be assigned to different people or objects, aside from the locations of objects present nearby. "It/he/she" for a nearby object or person translates into simply pointing to it, an admirable default assignation of more or less distinct "pronouns" for every nearby object! Things not present are signed on different sides of the body, or in proximity to someone associated with the object (e.g., "ASL is prettier than English" would be signed with "ASL" on the signers left [right-handed signer] and "English" on the right, then pointing to the left [where "ASL" had been established] and signing "prettier". "My brother is older than your sister" would use a similar construction, except that "my brother" would be established close to the signer and "your sister" away from the signer, towards the audience.) >I'm far from being an expert on ASL or any other sign language; so you'd do >better to investigate for yourself. I'm no expert, but I have studied some ASL, and it certainly lends a very good perspective on languages in general. ~mark >From cbmvax!uunet!ctr.columbia.edu!shoulson Wed Jan 13 13:23:39 1993 Return-Path: Date: Wed, 13 Jan 93 11:02:22 -0500 Message-Id: <9301131602.AA14338@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: jrk@uk.ac.uea.sys.uea.ac.uk Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu In-Reply-To: Richard Kennaway's message of Wed, 13 Jan 1993 14:13:58 +0000 <7264.9301131411@sys.uea.ac.uk> Subject: animate and sentient Status: RO I like the sentient/nonsentient gender-distinction a la Okrand, myself. "What hit us?" as opposed to "Who hit us?" is a nice distinction to be able to make, certainly far more useful than "what man hit us?" vs. "what woman hit us?". Sure, it may be on the whole easier to blow away such distinctions altogether, but my personal taste runs toward keeping that one. As to borderline cases, well, from my standpoint I'd see using either gender as not incorrect, but rather indicating how you're choosing to view that object, at least for purposes of the discussion at hand. ~mark >From cbmvax!uunet!VKPMZD.KPH.Uni-Mainz.de!KNAPPEN Wed Jan 13 13:24:00 1993 Return-Path: Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1993 18:10 GMT +0100 From: J%org Knappen Subject: Pictographical script To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Message-Id: <01GTH9LPBF408WWGMJ@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> X-Envelope-To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu X-Vms-To: GATEWAY"conlang@buphy.bu.edu" Status: RO X-Offer: Ask me for a copy Maybe this is of interest for some of you: In the 1 issue of 1993 of the german weekly `Die Zeit' the genesis is translated into pictogrammes by the artist Juli Gudehus. The translation is full of humor and irony (a good portion may depend on german culture, though). A good example of a pictografical conlang invented as an art. Yours, J"org Knappen. >From cbmvax!uunet!compuserve.com!71174.2735 Wed Jan 13 22:26:33 1993 Return-Path: Date: 13 Jan 93 14:00:59 EST From: shared account To: Subject: gender Message-Id: <930113190058_71174.2735_DHQ68-1@CompuServe.COM> Status: RO Richard Kennaway writes: > A question about genders in natural languages: when a language with > genders borrows a word from another language, how is it decided what > gender to give that word? My high school German teacher told us foreign words are always assigned neuter gender. > When borrowing a word into Chinese from another language, which > classifier would it be given? Apart from the names of tribes, languages, nations, et cetera, borrowings are extremely rare in Chinese. > If the conlang ever becomes a "real" language (e.g. as defined by the > final stage of the steps that Lojbab once listed), it will start growing > on its own, and the addition of new words for new concepts not fitting > into the pigeonhole of its gender system will start to blur that system I am not convinced that an IAL, in order to be a "real" language, will have to get out of control and start falling into anarchic chaos as Esperanto has. There are plenty of encouraging examples showing that international language-like media of communications can be controlled: the astronomical nomenclature, zoological and botanical nomenclature, Volapu"k, the Voice of America's Special English, etc. The "real language" criteria list you refer to was created by Detlev Blanke, a fervent Esperantist, and was designed for the sole purpose of making it look like Esperanto and no other conlang is a "real" language. Take it with a grain of salt. The way Blanke exaggerated Esperanto's achievements to qualify it as a "real" language is shameful. There are several possible "gender" systems that are not blurry. For example, we can define an "animate/sentient*" as "a living member of a species that normally demonstrates reflexive movement when jabbed with a sharp needle." In this case, only animals and a few plant species qualify. Lojban's system of using the first letter of a word to select a pronoun- like word is also not blurry or blurable. * neither English word is an exact match for the concept I have in mind ======================================================================== Rick Harrison 71174.2735@compuserve.com ...tarpit!bilver!jwt!bbs-hrick ``open up said the world at the door'' - the Move >From cbmvax!uunet!VKPMZD.KPH.Uni-Mainz.de!KNAPPEN Wed Jan 13 22:26:42 1993 Return-Path: Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1993 20:55 GMT +0100 From: J%org Knappen Subject: Re: gender To: 71174.2735@CompuServe.COM Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Message-Id: <01GTHFDE5LGG8WWGX7@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> X-Envelope-To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu X-Vms-To: VZDMZA::IN%"71174.2735@CompuServe.COM" X-Vms-Cc: GATEWAY"conlang@buphy.bu.edu" Status: RO Dear Rick, what your teacher said about the gender of borrowed words into german is not true. Here are some rules: (1) If a word is borrowed from classical latin or greek, it takes the original gender. (2) Words in -age (from french) are femine (3) Other words get a gender quite chaotically, which one fits best. Often, even germans disagree in this case. (Ex. der, die, das File). (3a) Borrowings from english ending in -er prefer to become masculine (Der Computer) other borrowings from english are most often neuter (Das Gateway). But there are also some feminine ones (Die Drift, die Shift, aber: der Lift [elevator, the german words Aufzug or Fahrstuhl are more common], Die CD [compact disc, pron. ceh-deh, not cee-dee]) (3b) Some borrowings from italian: Die Kasse, Das Konto, Die Bank, Das Cello. (3c) Some other: Der Kakao, Der Mais, Der Tabak, Die Glasnost, Die Perestroika, Der Dschungel, Der Bungalow. --JK. >From cbmvax!uunet!staff.tc.umn.edu!dsg Wed Jan 13 23:16:59 1993 Return-Path: Date: Wed, 13 Jan 93 20:49:37 CST Message-Id: <74978.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu> X-Popmail-Charset: English To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Re: animate and sentient Status: RO On Wed, 13 Jan 93 02:28:14 -0500, Logical Language Group wrote: >Rick Harrison talks of two possible gender distinctions >sentient or animate; >non-sentient or inanimate > >Two problems come to mind. Normally, I would think that in using a third >person pronoun, the animate/inanimate/sentient/non-sentient distinction >is probably going to be relatively obvious from the context of the sentence >("X told me" is going to 'obviously' imply that X is sentient/animate, >and "I told X" only slightly less so), thus failing to serve one of the >primary purposes of the anaphora - to abbreviate the referent while retaining >claritty of reference. > >SEcond, what happens when you have conflicting categories? Sentient plants? I don't see the conflict. If most plants are nonsentient, but this particular plant is sentient, then one uses the sentient pronoun. What's the problem? Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu >From cbmvax!uunet!uk.ac.uea.sys.s5!jrk Thu Jan 14 09:06:04 1993 Return-Path: Via: uk.ac.east-anglia.information-systems; Thu, 14 Jan 1993 11:34:42 +0000 Message-Id: <3088.9301141113@sys.uea.ac.uk> Sender: cbmvax!uunet!uk.ac.uea.sys.s5!jrk Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1993 11:16:06 +0000 To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu From: cbmvax!uunet!information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk!jrk (Richard Kennaway) Subject: MCD status? Status: RO What's the status of the multi-conlang dictionary? All I have of it is Rick Harrison's list of 2000 concepts, but I believe that the dictionary has already been filled out for several languages, and I'd like to get some of the results. Can anyone tell me what's available? I'd particularly like to get hold of Dutch and German versions, if they've been done, in order to plug into my flashcard vocabulary-learning program. (It runs on a Mac, if anyone's interested, and is almost identical to the versions put out by the Loglan Institute and the Logical Language Group, which are hard-wired for Loglan and Lojban respectively.) If this stuff is on the PLS, I expect I can wait until it's up again. -- ____ Richard Kennaway \ _/__ School of Information Systems Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \X / University of East Anglia uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K. >From cbmvax!uunet!uk.ac.uea.sys.s5!jrk Thu Jan 14 09:06:10 1993 Return-Path: Via: uk.ac.east-anglia.information-systems; Thu, 14 Jan 1993 12:24:53 +0000 Message-Id: <4180.9301141224@sys.uea.ac.uk> Sender: cbmvax!uunet!uk.ac.uea.sys.s5!jrk Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1993 12:26:19 +0000 To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu From: cbmvax!uunet!information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk!jrk (Richard Kennaway) Subject: Another pictographic script Status: RO The thread on pictographic scripts has reminded me of the book "The Second Earth: The Pentateuch Re-told", by Patrick Woodroffe. Published by Dragon's World Ltd., Limpsfield, Surrey RH8 0DY, U.K., 1987, ISBN 1 85028 042 8 (hardback) and 1 85028 043 6 (paperback). Previously published in a shorter version as "The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony". Woodroffe is an artist. The book is a fantasy art work purporting to be the history of an ancient civilisation from another star, discovered engraved on copper tablets in a derelict spaceship in 2378 AD. The conlang interest is that some of the pictures in this book include inscriptions written in a pictographic language, for which there is a glossary at the end of about 150 symbols. There are also a couple of fictitious scholarly articles about the language and the alien civilisation. Unfortunately, it's impossible to display the pictographs here, and there's a stern copyright notice explicitly forbidding reproduction of any part without permission, so I'm not going to scan in the glossary. Most of the pictographs are compounds of simpler meaningful elements. Some of the concepts expressed can be analysed thus: city place where (mobile?) houses meet living thing tethered wanderer man the small god that rises and falls in the tides which suggests a seafaring origin for the civilisation. The compounding of symbols can get quite complex, and often a pictograph translates to a whole phrase of English rather than a single word. Each of the following is a single pictograph: "False yet true" "Impossible. We have no words." "The hole between dreaming and waking" "In the beginning there was less than void" "The forgotten bride of man -- remembered in the end" "A thin chain that binds us all" "A spiral mystery" One can even enclose a pictograph in a box in order to use it as an element in a larger pictograph. Some of the elements have grammatical functions: there is a plural marker, a genitive, logical connectives, and conjunctions such as "but" and "because". There is not much in the way of grammar. According to Celia Hiroshige of the Department of Exo-Linguistics at the University of New Tokyo: "It must be understood above all that the main source of this edition, the incised tablets of the Pentateuch of the Cosmogony, is entirely ideographic, bearing no true relation to the spoken or written word. The tablets are not, strictly speaking, capable of being 'read' in the usual sense of the word. They carry only a series of quasi-mystical symbols, each of which represents a 'quantum' of philosophical concepts and attitudes already familiar to the individuals for whom the inscriptions were made. There were probably many interpretations of each statement, even -- it has been suggested -- deliberate ambiguities. "There is no distinction between the parts of speech to which we are accustomed -- no verbs, nouns or adjectives. One symbol may have the function of all three, and a 'statement' is made up simply by stringing separate characters together." The ambiguities mentioned above are presumably not only intended by the fictitious authors of the Cosmogony, but also by Woodroffe himself. The story of The Second Earth is that of a civilisation which lived in a paradise, but eventually fell from grace, polluted their home planet beyond recovery, and emigrated in starships, of which some found our Earth (the eponymous Second Earth), which they colonised. We, of course, are their descendants, and they left this story to us as a warning not to do the same to this Earth. I could have done without this ecopreaching, but I liked the art and the conlang. -- ____ Richard Kennaway \ _/__ School of Information Systems Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \X / University of East Anglia uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K. >From cbmvax!snark!cowan Thu Jan 14 15:06:08 1993 Return-Path: Message-Id: From: cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan (John Cowan) Subject: Re: Chinese classifiers and borrowings (was: gender) To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu (conlang) Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1993 11:30:03 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <930113190058_71174.2735_DHQ68-1@CompuServe.COM> from "shared account" at Jan 13, 93 02:00:59 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 2987 Status: RO Richard Kennaway writes: > When borrowing a word into Chinese from another language, which > classifier would it be given? Li & Thompson, p. 112: The most frequently used classifier in Mandarin is -ge. It is gradually becoming the general classifier and replacing the more specialized ones. For example, the "proper" classifier for cai4 'a course of food' is -dao4, as in nei4-dao4 cai4 'that course of food'; the "proper" classifier for da4pao4 'artillery piece' is -men2, as in zhei4-men2 da4pao4 'this artillery piece'; however, many native speakers of Mandarin have replaced -dao4, -men2, and others with the general calssifier, -ge. FOr these speakers, nei4-ge cai4 'that course of food' and zhei4-ge da4pao4 'this artillery piece' are perfectly acceptable. Rick Harrison writes: > Apart from the names of tribes, languages, nations, et cetera, borrowings > are extremely rare in Chinese. Chinese now has plenty of borrowings from English, ISV, and other international sources. However, it is true that the attitude toward borrowings is somewhat different. Ramsey, pp. 59-60: Ka1fei1 'coffee', a1si1pi3lin2 'aspirin', sha1fa1 'sofa', Bu4er3shi2wei2ke4 'Bolshevik', and the like are part of the language now. But even in cases such as these, where it is clear that expressions are of foreign origin, the Chinese tendency is to try to make meaning of some kind out of the constituent syllables. The phonetic shape of the borrowing lang4man4 'romantic' is intended to approximate the sounds of the English word, but the two syllables of which it is composed also have the literal meanings of 'unrestrained' and 'free'. The syllables of you1mo4 'humor' mean 'secluded' and 'quiet'; xiu1ke4 'shock' means 'be inactive' and 'overcome'; ju4le4bu4 'club' means 'all-enjoyment unit'. In the 1930's, when Coca-Cola first began marketing its product in China, the company sponsored a highly publicized contest to find a suitable Chinese name for its soft drink. The winning name, submitted by a man from Shanghai, was ke3kou3-ke3le4. This name not only reproduced the English sounds fairly accurately, but the individual syllables put together also had the elegantly- phrased meaning 'tasty and enjoyable'. For this linguistic tour de force, the winner received a $50 cash prize. In more recent years, Pepsi-Cola has begun to challenge Coke's success in Chinese-speaking countries by selling its product under a similarly constructed name, bai3shi4-ke3le4, which means 'everything's enjoyable'. The linguist Y.R. Chao himself coined the playful Chinese name of the martini, ma3ti1ni 'horse-kicks-you'. The miniskirt is a mi2ni3qun -- a 'fascinate-you skirt'. Lei2da2 'radar' is 'thunder-reach'; tuo1la1ji1 'tractor' is 'haul-pull-machine'; xim2ing2na4er3 'seminar' is 'review-understand-accept- like that'. In Chinese, a completely meaningless syllable is an anomaly. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From cbmvax!uunet!compuserve.com!71174.2735 Thu Jan 14 15:06:03 1993 Return-Path: Date: 14 Jan 93 14:18:25 EST From: shared account To: Subject: MCD status? Message-Id: <930114191824_71174.2735_DHQ28-1@CompuServe.COM> Status: RO Richard Kennaway inquires: > What's the status of the multi-conlang dictionary? Thanks for asking. I'm now calling it the Universal Language Dictionary, since it is no longer limited to conlangs. If/when the Unicode standard is widely implemented, we might widen the scope of this project and try to include all known languages. 1/2 :-) First draft versions of the following vocabulary lists exist: Esperanto, Intal, Interglossa, Novial, Tsolyani, UNI, English, German, and Dutch. I'm sure there are some "errors and omissions" yet to be corrected. Need to get a native speaker of German to proof-read the German file. I have BASIC and C versions of the program that combines the lists into multi-lingual dictionaries. The C version hasn't been thoroughly tested. A while ago (I'm not sure how long it's been), I asked the PLS dudes to create a separate sub-directory for the ULD project, and I e-mailed a couple of the vocabulary lists to them. Haven't heard anything from them since then. I'm a bit worried about using the PLS as a base for this project; these files will need to be updated from time to time, and in my experience, the PLS administrators are less than enthusiastic about deleting old files and replacing them with new ones. Maybe they could automate the process somehow, e.g. by giving frequent uploaders such as Lojbab and myself the ability to overwrite old files in specified directories? ========================================================================== Rick Harrison 71174.2735@compuserve.com peora.sdc.ccur.com!jwt!bbs-hrick ``open up said the world at the door'' - the Move >From cbmvax!uunet!highlite.gotham.COM!brgilson Thu Jan 14 20:54:26 1993 Return-Path: Date: Thu, 14 Jan 93 19:15:02 -0500 From: cbmvax!uunet!highlite.gotham.COM!brgilson (Bruce R. Gilson) Message-Id: <9301150015.AA13599@highlite.gotham.COM> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: IAL desiderata Status: RO Rick Harrison writes: >Proposed guidelines for the design >of an international auxiliary language >(3rd draft) >by Rick Harrison [text deleted] >For these reasons, the intentional creation of a suitable planned >language is desirable. This international auxiliary language (IAL) >would be designed so that it will be relatively easy for most of the >world's people to learn, do we really want "most of the world's people" -- or rather "most of the world's _literate_ people? Subsistence farmers in Africa or Asia probably do not care about communicating with the "outside" world. > ... based on characteristics of the world's >predominant languages and on information gathered from the fields of >linguistics and language teaching. This IAL would be as culturally >neutral as possible; it would not extract most of its words and >grammar from European languages or from any single family of >languages. I tend to agree with Jason Johnston, who said: >I doubt if this would be possible on a scale that would go beyond mere >tokenism, and an incoherent hodgepodge would probably satisfy no one. A >major problem is that in so many cases, neutralization of the natlang's >phonemic distinctions will lead either to homophony with other roots or >misidentification. The problem of homophony is, I suggest, insuperable in >the case of the largest international, non-European body of roots, namely >the "Chinese" (a bit of an abstraction covering a vocabulary resource used >by the various Chinese languages, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and >others to a lesser extent). This is a great pity, since it is a coherent and >flexible body of elements and a few simple rules of combination, >at least the equal of the Greco-Latin in scope, and still continues to yield >an inexhaustible supply of (often made-in-Japan) new words for new >concepts. The down side is that the clarity and transparency of the >compound formation is only evident in its logographic guise. In most >pronunciations of the compound, it is usually impossible to tell which of >many homophones _any_ of the constituent morphemes are. So I don't see >how native users of this particular (demographically _very_ significant) >stock of vocabulary can usefully be catered for in an IAL. > ... I am postulating that an optimal IAL can only be created >by following objective linguistic guidelines (as opposed to >guesswork or the whims of an individual language designer). "Objective linguistic guidelines" sounds nice. However, when I have tried to get into such an area I run into a veritable thicket. Esperantists point to flexibility of word order permitted by a morphemic accusative, and claim that this outweighs any difficulties involved in learning to use that accu- sative by people whose language does not use case-marking morphemes (or, as in English and French, does so very infrequently -- only in pronouns.) No amount of argument seems to convince them. > ... An >IAL designed in this manner would probably be different from any of >the universal language projects which have gotten a little publicity >during the past two centuries. Here I certainly agree. I also feel that two IALs designed by people or groups with different priorities among the criteria, even using the same criteria, would differ greatly. And I suspect we will have a hard time even gaining consensus on all the criteria! >1.3 the "ease of learning" question [text deleted] >The distinguished linguist Frederick Bodmer wrote: "The primary >desiderata of an international auxiliary are two. First, it must >be an efficient instrument of communication, embracing both >the simple needs of everyday life and the more exacting ones of >technical discussion. Secondly, it must be easy to learn, whatever >the home language of the beginner may be... We can best see what >characteristics make it easy to learn a constructed language if we >first ask what features of natural languages create difficulties for >the beginner. Difficulties may arise from a variety of causes: >structural irregularities, grammatical complexities of small or no >functional value, an abundance of separate words not essential for >communication, unfamiliarity with word forms, difficulty of >pronunciation or auditory recognition of certain sounds or sound >groups, and finally conventions of script." Unfortunately, removing difficulties of this kind for one group of people often creates it for another. For example, Rick Morneau has often advo- cated an extremely simple phonology which limits the sounds to those found in nearly all languages and avoids almost all clusters. This has the ef- fect that most roots of the common languages can either not be used at all or only be used with Volapuk-ish dis- tortion beyond recognizability; we then get to "unfamiliar word forms." >Jacques Guy comments: "There definitely are languages that are >simpler than others, and by a long shot, too. If you don't believe >me, just try learning Navaho, or French, for that matter. If >learnability is one thing we are looking for, we ought to examine >those simple, that is, easily learnt, languages, and draw lessons >from them. How do you tell them? Easy: round up all the Pidgins >for which data is available. Beach-la-mar, New-Guinea Pidgin, >Police Motu (an Austronesian-based Pidgin of New Guinea), Chinook >Jargon, Sabir... Let's round them up and ask ourselves: what have >they got in common? And what is it that they don't have? So far, >I haven't found one with tones, I haven't found one with cases, >I can't think of one with inflected verbs." Great start! I agree that all three of those items are bad, and my constant railing against Esperanto's accusative has a justification which Jacques should cheer there. [text deleted] >"Language educators would agree unanimously and without reservation >that it always comes down to this: a language becomes more >difficult to learn when the student must learn to make distinctions >that he is not used to making. That's why students have >difficulties with things like accusatives, mandatory tenses, tones, >noun/adjective agreement, honorific inflection, consonant and vowel >harmony, mandatory gender distinctions, polysynthesism, ad nauseam. Note that the two drawbacks of Esperanto that I have continually argued against (the accusative and adjective/noun agreement) are on this list! >And that's also why a language like Indonesian is so easy to learn >for everyone, because it does not have any of these obstacles." [text deleted] >Simplicity and regularity are desirable in the orthography of an >IAL. Therefore, in alphabetic writing systems, each letter should >represent only one phoneme, and each phoneme should be represented >by only one letter. Digraphs are generally undesirable, although >some digraphs such as "sh" and "ng" are so widespread that they >might be acceptable if they do not cause ambiguity. In fact, this means that, unless you allow diacriticals (which I think are a bad idea) you must keep the phoneme count down. " Do not cause ambiguity," however, may be an escape hatch. If letters like q or x are _never_ used except as part of a digraph, as is the case in one system used on the net for writing Esperanto, we may be able to get away with digraphs under this criterion. While I might have comments on more of Harrison's article, this is already getting longer than I would like. So I will, for now, end this note. Bruce >From cbmvax!uunet!unixg.ubc.ca!eboyd Fri Jan 15 01:37:27 1993 Return-Path: Message-Id: <9301150554.AA26142@unixg.ubc.ca> Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1993 21:57:33 -0500 To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu From: cbmvax!uunet!unixg.ubc.ca!eboyd(Ewan Boyd) Subject: QuestionsEtc on Language Barrier Problem Status: RO THE GLOBAL LANGUAGE BARRIER PROBLEM QUESTIONS AND THOUGHTS RELATED TO ARRIVING AT A GOOD SOLUTION BY EWAN BOYD This is a rough document that needs lots of refining but hopefully it will get people thinking more of the total problem -- the big picture. What exactly should our mission statement be? Maybe this extract from my "Year End Update" letter might be useful -->Now that we have air transport and low cost global telephone, radio, video, computer and fax networks, plus formal compulsory education systems, it is only logical THAT THROUGH THE SCHOOL SYSTEMS OUR DESCENDANTS BE GIVEN THE BEST POSSIBLE 21ST CENTURY GLOBAL SOUND/SIGHT SYSTEM TO USE AS A "SECOND LANGUAGE" TO COMMUNICATE WITH EVERYONE OUTSIDE THEIR OWN CULTURE. Graduates will then be truly literate. Divisive nationalism could be better contained. When do we start to really organize this? I believe this is a case where the people will lead and the leaders will follow. I want to network with others, preferably by Email.<-- How do we organize existing volunteer organizations to give early support to this large project? Can we develop interim plans for funding research and development? How much should this be a grassroots "from the bottom up" effort? How can we break into teams to specialize on some of the tasks such as early organization, marketing and publicity, financing, while language development continues? Do we assume that no active cultural language (ESL, etc) should be acceptable except in the interim, as at present because of the inequality it creates and because of the high cost of mastery? (I say "yes"). Should deadlines be set? If not how do we control the tendency to work for perfection into the 22nd century? If yes, What should they be? Should we encourage the use of other languages such as English and Esperanto, in the interim? Obviously the Esperanto group will be best able to benefit from a tight deadline. I would like to see them present their current arguments. Who are other serious contenders.? Do we have any positive and negative information from native speakers of the major Asian and African language groups? Is the RAND CORPORATION sponsoring Esperanto (see Esperanto@rand.org)? Is this just one small project for them? Is RAND working on other projects related to the global language barriers problem? What are their guidelines? Does top management endorse a policy? (I could write the Chair of the Board for details but maybe someone else has already done this. and will report.) SPECIFICATION QUESTIONS Why do we need a Specification for the design and selection of the Global Second Language? Who should develop this specification? Who should not develop this specification? Who should give advice on the development of this specification? Who should be on the tender application committee? Who should be on the tender selection committee LAYMAN'S IDEAS ON SPECIFICATION CONTENT The new GSL communication system shall : - be easy to learn. - be easy to teach. - use only the best concepts and techniques from existing and dead languages world-wide. - take into consideration problems of persons with speech, hearing, vision or writing handicaps. - insofar as is possible, avoid.sounds or symbols that cause undue difficulty. - avoid the use of sounds that are particularly difficult for the majority of the major cultures to form with their voice box system at the age of ten or younger. - use a symbol system that is demonstratively superior to any devised in past centuries. The basic system may include pictographs, providing these can be made with the aid of ordinary writing tools, readily available anywhere and not subject to high risk of failure. - shall take into consideration other forms of communication, such as those presently used to supplement the spoken word (e.g. facial expression, other forms of body language and tone of voice) as part of the total system. - will address the problem of using sounds and symbols to describe new concepts in science and all other facets of a dynamic global civilization.. - be at least as suitable as any existing language for handling computer input output. Care shall be taken to exclude rules or terms that encourage sexism, racism or other divisive factors, common in many past and present cultural languages. PRESENTATION OF A SPEC PROPOSAL Any proposal of a system shall be demonstrated with video presentations, showing how the proposal can be taught and learned in the different education systems of the world population. HOW - RESOURCES The research and development required shall be used as a major form of employment in the world's universities. This shall be used in such a way that will encourage some integration of the many special disciplines that have often tended to develop in isolation. e.g.: Phonics, audiology, speech pathology, reading, etc. IMPORTANCE OF LONG RANGE THINKING In view of the long range consequences that will result from good or bad design of a language that is to be shared on a global basis, great care shall be taken to "make haste slowly". A system will not be adopted simply on the basis of short term savings (e.g. the Roman alphabet, or a predominance of current English terms). These would only be used if they were shown to be overwhelmingly better than other possibilities. All possible appropriate current knowledge, facilities and skills from the late twentieth century shall be used to ensure a truly superior system. END OF "LAYMAN'S IDEAS ON SPECIFICATION CONTENT" Maybe others can pick up on some of this and help develop an overall plan to reach various benchmark goals?? Working towards global harmony in Our Common Future. Ewan >From cbmvax!uunet!NUSVM.BITNET!BUACCA.bu.edu!LAWCROWN Fri Jan 15 06:18:35 1993 Return-Path: id 7183; Fri, 15 Jan 93 00:43:59 EST From: Barry Crown Subject: Re: (long) IAL desiderata To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu In-Reply-To: Rick Harrison's message of 07 Jan 93 18:20:52 EST Status: RO I am not a linguist, but I have some experience of teaching Esperanto in Singapore. I was very impressed by Rick's essay. However, I am a little concerned at what he writes about the selection of phonemes. My feeling is that the problem is much more difficult than he suggests. Rick writes: >If we assemble a chart that shows which phonemes occur in which of >the world's important languages {Morneau 1991}, we see that some >sounds are nearly universal while others are quite rare. Morneau >surveyed data on 25 major languages and indicated that the following >phonemes are used in at least 22 of the 25: /a, e, i, o, u, b, d, >k, l, m, n, p, s, t, y/ ("y" represents the semi-vowel [j] as in >"yo-yo"). . . . > >Sapir et al. recommended an even smaller array of phonemes: /a, i, >u, p, t, k, s, l, m, n, v/. These lists seem to be based simply on an observation of the *official* pronunciation of the world's important languages, without considering to what extent speakers of these languages actually conform to that standard. Mandarin Chinese distinguishes between "n" and "l" and, so far as I am aware, speakers in Beijing do indeed distinguish these sounds clearly. The Esperanto Association in Singapore has no more than 10 - 15 active members. However, two of these constantly confuse "n" and "l". One is a Chinese man, born in Singapore, who has been studying Esperanto for many years. Another is a woman from Hong Kong, who has been studying Esperanto for just over a year. I thought at first that these were individual speech defects because - according to the books - not only Mandarin (which is taught in schools and widely spoken in Singapore nowadays) but also Hokkien (the main dialect of Chinese Singaporeans) and Cantonese distinguish between "n" and "l". However, it seems that "n" - "l" sound shifts are quite common in southern China. The large island off the coast of southern China is called "Hainan" in Mandarin but "Hailam" in Hokkien. The Mandarin word for "you" is "ni", but in Hokkien it is "li" or "lu" (I forget which) and in Cantonese it is "nei". However, I have been told by a native Cantonese speaker that in some subdialects of Cantonese it is pronounced "lei". A professor from Beijing University told me that students from Hunan, Hubei and Sichuan have such difficulties distinguishing "n" and "l" in English that she segregates them to provide them with extra tuition. Apparently they have the same trouble speaking Mandarin. As I said earlier, I am not a linguist, so I apologise if I am stating the obvious. I also don't know much Spanish or Portuguese. However, I saw today in a pharmacist a bottle of orange flavoured vitamin C pills with a description in English and what I assume are Spanish and Portuguese. The word "orange" comes out as "naranja" in Spanish and "laranja" in Portuguese. Does this mean that "n" - "l" sound shifts occur regularly around the world? To make matters worse, the gentleman I mentioned earlier also regularly confuses "d" and "l". I don't know anyone else in the Esperanto group who has this problem. However, I have been told that it is quite common amongst Singaporeans educated in Chinese-medium (rather than English-medium) schools. On a related topic I am surprised to find "b" as well as "p", and "d" as well as "t" on Morneau's list. Chinese speakers often have difficulty distinguishing voiced and voiceless versions of the same sound. Just listen to any Esperanto broadcast on Radio Beijing. Barry Crown Faculty of Law National University of Singapore LAWCROWN@NUSVM.BITNET >From cbmvax!uunet!violet.berkeley.edu!chalmers Tue Jan 19 20:27:45 1993 Return-Path: Date: Fri, 15 Jan 93 06:53:29 -0800 From: cbmvax!uunet!violet.berkeley.edu!chalmers (John H. Chalmers Jr.) Message-Id: <9301151453.AA02626@violet.berkeley.edu> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Play languages Status: RO RE Ken Beesley and Carnie: Another play language is "OP" in which the syllable 'op- (where the o is roughly the vowel in father) is inserted after the initial consonant (or cluster) of each syllable or prefixed to the vowel if the word or syllable lacks an initial consonant. Examples are "Thopank yopou" and "OpI'm spopeakoping opOP." Although I haven't heard it recently, it was popular (popopopulopar) when I was in junior high school in the San Diego CA area in the middle 1950's. -- John >From cbmvax!uunet!ctr.columbia.edu!shoulson Tue Jan 19 20:27:46 1993 Return-Path: Date: Fri, 15 Jan 93 10:24:33 -0500 Message-Id: <9301151524.AA25553@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu In-Reply-To: Bruce R. Gilson's message of Thu, 14 Jan 93 19:15:02 -0500 <9301150015.AA13599@highlite.gotham.COM> Subject: SVO, OSV, and all that Status: RO In regard to the case-marking vs. word-order conflict, there's something that doesn't always seem to be looked at. That is, not how many people will have to learn something they're not familiar with, but how hard is it to learn the other method. So, for instance, if you had a lot of people who spoke one language which was extremely difficult to learn, and the minority spoke a simpler language, it might be better for the interlanguage to be closer to the *minority* language, because although more people would have to relearn, they'd be *able* to with fewer errors than trying to teach the minority the complex majority language. Now, the situation we have here isn't quite the same as the exaggerated example above, but it does share some features. I don't know if any studies have been done, but from personal experience with Esperanto and Sanskrit and Lojban and Klingon I find it much easier to learn to mark cases (or, in the case of Lojban, to convert the predicate to match English word-order) than to rejigger the word-order I'd grown used to in my native language. Ask anyone who's been hit over the head with Captain Krankor's word-order sign when trying to write Klingon. So, although case-marking may be more learning for more people, it's more general than word-order and may result in easier learning on the whole. I find Esperanto's relatively small number of cases (just the two) a decent compromise between overly-complex declensions (a la Sanskrit) and the rigidly-held word-order of, say, Klingon (which is more rigid than English, whose word-order I doubt can be well-defined.) ~mark >From cbmvax!uunet!cobra.jpl.nasa.gov!urban Tue Jan 19 20:27:49 1993 Return-Path: Message-Id: <9301151545.AA10817@buphy.bu.edu> To: eboyd@unixg.ubc.ca (Ewan Boyd) Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Re: QuestionsEtc on Language Barrier Problem In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 14 Jan 1993 21:57:33 PST." <9301150554.AA26142@unixg.ubc.ca> X-Face: %q"[Odr2u&o(@]W>9%kwwJ/Td+Ju5!en}ZHQ>G3)9%`RBr7Ct12Dj6LB\Qz@@j|YgfHymB~ Lc>qe:o+U{rh!RVuaYYd{+S4$8tPLu]Y$0<5x>rj-kuS"[eqLFME-('jwXR87s;A3I,=cW*D(> Status: RO Your message dated: Thu, 14 Jan 1993 21:57:33 PST > the major Asian and African language groups? > > Is the RAND CORPORATION sponsoring Esperanto (see Esperanto@rand.org)? Is > this just one small project for them? Is RAND working on other projects > related to the global language barriers problem? What are their guidelines? > Does top management endorse a policy? (I could write the Chair of the > Board for details but maybe someone else has already done this. and will > report.) The sysadmins at the RAND Corporation (my former employer) have been good enough to allow me to continue to funnel the Esperanto mailing list through their computer. It is not, and has never been, an official activity of the RAND Corporation. I believe you will find that almost every Internet public mailing list is an individual activity, not a corporate or institutional one. Mike Urban >From cbmvax!uunet!well.sf.ca.us!dasher Tue Jan 19 21:26:23 1993 Return-Path: Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1993 03:00:34 -0800 From: D Anton Sherwood Message-Id: <199301161100.AA10326@well.sf.ca.us> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: gender Status: RO Joerg reports that in German, >J(2) Words in -age (from french) are femine which is funny, as in French they're masculine. What about -ion words (feminine in Romance)? Anton Sherwood dasher@well.sf.ca.us +1 415 267 0685 1800 Market St #207, San Francisco 94102 USA "We all hate poverty, war and injustice, unlike the rest of you squares." >From cbmvax!uunet!VKPMZD.KPH.Uni-Mainz.de!KNAPPEN Tue Jan 19 21:26:58 1993 Return-Path: Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1993 18:26 GMT +0100 From: J%org Knappen Subject: Re: gender To: dasher@well.sf.ca.us Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Message-Id: <01GTLH1NUAPC8WWLKU@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> X-Envelope-To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu X-Vms-To: VZDMZA::IN%"dasher@well.sf.ca.us" X-Vms-Cc: GATEWAY"conlang@buphy.bu.edu" Status: RO Yes, this is funny. This rule is most probably induced by analogy, since almost all german nouns ending in -e are feminine. Words in -ion are feminine and form their plural with -ionen. There are some exeptions, which do not derive from latin: Das Stadion, die Stadien, Das Ion, die Ionen (and composites of this one). --JK >From cbmvax!uunet!information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk!jrk Tue Jan 19 21:27:12 1993 Return-Path: Via: uk.ac.east-anglia.information-systems; Sat, 16 Jan 1993 23:14:10 +0000 From: Richard Kennaway Message-Id: <22905.9301162314@zen.sys.uea.ac.uk> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Deaf sign language as an IAL? Status: RO I'm watching a fascinating documentary, "In the Land of the Deaf". There's no speech at all, it just shows deaf people talking to camera or amongst themselves, all in sign language (subtitled for the hard of seeing :-)). I don't know to what extent deaf sign languages are constructed (vs. "natural", i.e. just happening), but an interesting point was made by one of the, er, speakers, that although each country has its own sign language, he can go to a foreign country and be chatting with local deaf people within a couple of days. Compare that with the years it takes for hearing people to learn languages. Sign language as an IAL? -- ____ Richard Kennaway \ _/__ School of Information Systems Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \X / University of East Anglia uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K. >From cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab Tue Jan 19 21:28:00 1993 Return-Path: Date: Sun, 17 Jan 93 04:27:30 -0500 From: cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9301170927.AA16160@daily.grebyn.com> To: bn@bbn.com, conlang@buphy.bu.edu, cortesi@informix.com, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu, major@dialix.oz.au Subject: JL17 and LK17 go to press Status: RO I am pleased to announce that ju'i lobypli, our quarterly (we hope for real starting now) journal, issue #17, has gone to press (along with the abbreviated newsletter le lojbo karni). JL is available by (signed) requested subscription ($28/4 issues US/Canada; $35/4 issues most overseas; by special arrangement with Major in Australia/New Zealand). Single issue price (without signed subscription request) is $9 (US/Canada), $10 (overseas), or by arrangement with Major as above. Some 135 copies are scheduled for mailing, 120 or so of those are prepaid subscriptions. Those who have sent in subscription forms or who have been regular JL subscribers and have sufficient positive balances, and a few overseas people getting one last grace issue under the transition-to-subscription policy will get the issue automatically. Most of you getting the issue automatically should know who you are, based on one of those reasons. US subscribers will get the issue by first class mail, probably mailed next Thursday, so people should be getting this issue relatively quickly after press time, unlike the bulk-rate mailings of the past. JL is 72 pages long, and contains news (especially a report on my trip to Russia, LogFest 92 and the status of peace negotiations with The Loglan Institute), Lojban text, and articles derived from exchanges on conlang, Linguist List, Lojban List, and sci.lang. These include polished versions of an exchange between Dan Maxwell and John Cowan on structural ambiguity in Lojban as compared with English and Esperanto, John Cowan's and my responses to Rick Morneau's criticism of Loglan/Lojban as an interlingua for machine translation, a discussion in sci.lang on the current state and future possibility for fluent Lojban speech, and Nick Nicholas's report on the first international telephone conversation in Lojban. A special section on the Sapir/Whorf Hypothesis derived from discussions over the last 2 years on Linguist List features an excellent summary of the scientific status of the hypothesis by Bruce Nevin, a report on recent linguistics experiments supporting the SWH, discussions with linguist Alexis Manaster-Ramer about using Lojban for SWH-related linguistic research, and some additional bibliography items on SWH. The largest section gives the current status of the Lojban Kalevala project (or the ckafybarja project, as you may prefer), our efforts to develop an organized project leading to a body of original Lojban literature; a written literary language base is a feature of almost every major natural language as well as Esperanto. The section includes Veijo Vilva summary of the project, his condensation of the complete discussions that occurred on Lojban List (augmented by a few exchanges that were not on the List and some that occurred after his summary was completed). The original descriptions of the coffeehouse that will serve as the common tie of all works associated with the project are included, along with relevant writings which augment this description. This includes English discussion by Nick Nicholas, two sketches of proposed shared characters by Veijo and by David Bowen (both in English), 2 Lojban pieces by Veijo and 2 by Iain Alexander, 1 by Nick, and 1 by Mark Shoulson. Rough English translations exist for some of these; Veijo's two pieces have parses and glosses generated automatically by our in-progress automated parsing/glossing software that we intend to evolve into Lojban-to-English translation program. Only one story by Iain has no translation at all. All Lojban pieces have extensive footnoted commentary on language usage and stylistics. Finally, the issue contains Ivan Derzhanski's translation of a Bulgarian short story, "The Tale of the Stairs", along with Nora LeChevalier's back-translation to English and an enormous quantity of discussion by Nora, Ivan, Nick Nicholas, and me on language and stylistics questions. Also included, without translation, is Nora's operettina "le ci cribe" (The Three Bears) with familiar plot and set to familiar children's songs, as presented at LogFest 92. The combined Lojban text and their translations and commentary totals over 20 pages of the issue. LK is priced at $1.40/$1.68 for this issue, is 12 pages long (plus a 2 page order form), and contains only the news section from JL edited for inactive followers of the project, discussion of Lojban fluency, a slightly abbreviated version of Veijo's summary, the selected ckafybarja original description, and two short Lojban texts with English translations (Iain's first piece, and a short excerpt from Ivan's translation). It will be mailed to some 570 people, also probably next Thursday, but in this case by bulk-rate post that may take a month to get to some US addresses. Included will be some 120 former JL subscribers who due to low balance and/or non-response did not meet the subscription criteria (you also should know who you are). International copies of JL and LK will be sent surface or airmail to Canada, and international airlift mail (ISAL) to most overseas locations (Major will get his by normal airmail and remail locally made copies of JL and LK to his subscribers). ISAL seems to take from about 1-2 weeks to the UK to 4 weeks to Australia. Also, effective immediately, while we are still for a while taking Master Card and Visa charges for subscriptions, balance payments, and donations, we are having to raise our fee for this service to 10% of the amount charged. After a large increase in November, we are paying $30/month to keep this option open, and took in Visa payments at an average rate of less than $40/month over the past year. Thus, even with the higher fees, this option will not remain open for long unless we find a much cheaper means of supporting the service. I will start preparing JL18 on 5 March, with expected press date of 1 April, and pricing as stated above. Between now and then, I'll be working on the books, and hope to be announcing a publication date for the first book in JL18 (or earlier). JL18 is already 1/2 written, and will contain the preliminary baseline of the Lojban rafsi list, including the fairly extensive changes made as a result of the recent reanalysis, an update to the Lojban E-BNF incorporating all changes expected to comprise the rebaselining in the first book (a summary of the changes will also be included), responses and new texts (all English and Lojban vetted by our editorial board) received as part of the ckafybarja project, and as much other Lojban text as space will permit. JL19 is similarly scheduled for 5 June/1 July, but I haven't yet decided on contents. lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@grebyn.com Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 >From cbmvax!uunet!staff.tc.umn.edu!dsg Tue Jan 19 23:27:36 1993 Return-Path: Date: Sun, 17 Jan 93 13:18:04 CST Message-Id: <47885.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu> X-Popmail-Charset: English To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Re: Deaf sign language as an IAL? Status: RO On Sat, 16 Jan 93 23:14:51 GMT, Richard Kennaway wrote: >I'm watching a fascinating documentary, "In the Land of the Deaf". >There's no speech at all, it just shows deaf people talking to camera or >amongst themselves, all in sign language (subtitled for the hard of >seeing :-)). > >I don't know to what extent deaf sign languages are constructed (vs. >"natural", i.e. just happening), but an interesting point was made by one >of the, er, speakers, that although each country has its own sign >language, he can go to a foreign country and be chatting with local deaf >people within a couple of days. Compare that with the years it takes for >hearing people to learn languages. Sign language as an IAL? > >-- ____ >Richard Kennaway \ _/__ School of Information Systems >Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \X / University of East Anglia >uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K. Sign languages used in deaf communities are natural, mostly. Some sign languages are artificial in the worst sense; generally, a natural sign language is taken and "improved" so that it conforms to the grammar of a "real language" -- that is, a spoken language. Isolated deaf children apparently often construct their own sign languages. A bit off the topic -- Sign language is sent and received at about the same rate as spoken language. (With spoken languages, the Romance languages are spoken at a faster rate than is, say, English -- but English words have fewer syllables, so I suspect the rate at which information is conveyed is about the same. Someone who knows more about linguistics than I do, please comment.) Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu >From cbmvax!uunet!staff.tc.umn.edu!dsg Tue Jan 19 23:27:48 1993 Return-Path: Date: Sun, 17 Jan 93 16:02:11 CST Message-Id: <57732.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu> X-Popmail-Charset: English To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: several Status: RO 1)Gender: In Vernor Vinge's A FIRE UPON THE DEEP, there's a group-mind species in which "individuals" (groups of about 3 to 8) are classified as male or female depending (apparently) on the sex of the majority of members. 2) Creole languages apparently have rather similar grammatical structure. One theory is that this is the grammar natural for humans; and without cultural conditioning to ignore this genetically-conveyed grammar, children who grow up among pidgen-speaking adults reinvent the natural human grammar. If true, seems to me this would be the most appropriate grammar for a universal language. 3) Some linguists claim that the relationships among human spoken languages can all be traced back as far as the ancestral language, about 200,000 years ago. There has been some reconstruction of the vocabulary. I gather that there are other linguists who feel this theory is best evaluated with a manure shovel. Does anyone here know enough about this to give an opinion? 4) Why do so many linguists write as if they aren't native users of any human language? Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu >From cbmvax!uunet!compuserve.com!71174.2735 Tue Jan 19 23:28:20 1993 Return-Path: Date: 17 Jan 93 18:25:29 EST From: shared account To: Subject: lang design rebuttals Message-Id: <930117232528_71174.2735_DHQ36-1@CompuServe.COM> Status: RO Barry Crown: > However, it seems that "n" - "l" sound shifts are quite common in > southern China. If you will only include in an auxiliary language those sounds which are universal and distinctive in all languages of the world, you end up with (at most) 1 or 2 vowels and 1 or 2 consonants -- or possibly no phonemes at all. Since that is not a practical approach for designing a spoken language, it comes down to an argument about how many people will be inconvenienced, and why. Mark Shoulson: > In regard to the case-marking vs. word-order conflict, there's something > that doesn't always seem to be looked at. That is, not how many people > will have to learn something they're not familiar with, but how hard > is it to learn the other method. A study mentioned in the forthcoming issue of _Journal of Planned Languages_ reveals that errors in use of the accusative case are the most common blunder made by intermediate-level students of Esperanto. ========================================================================== Rick Harrison 71174.2735@compuserve.com peora.sdc.ccur.com!jwt!bbs-hrick ``Go ahead, Ren, say something in Limburger.'' -- Stimpy >From cbmvax!uunet!unixg.ubc.ca!eboyd Wed Jan 20 00:27:58 1993 Return-Path: Message-Id: <9301180626.AA09424@unixg.ubc.ca> Date: Sun, 17 Jan 1993 22:30:22 -0500 To: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au(Robin Gaskell), conlang@buphy.bu.edu(mail list) From: cbmvax!uunet!unixg.ubc.ca!eboyd(Ewan Boyd) Subject: IAL/GSL Organizing sub conferences Cc: Peter@URIAH.LAW.MQ.EDU.AU, jafarr@north1.acpub.duke.edu(Jeff), nanci@sfu.ca Status: RO HI ROBIN, I still haven't found this letter of yours on Conlang. So I'll deal with it here, although it would have been easier to just "reply" on conlang using Eudora on my Mac. In case you wondered I don't type out # Ewan responds: R>> <>I agree in principle. We might want to think a bit more about the names SPECLANG = AUXLANG ?; LANGTRUST may be too general and may have to be broken down later into sub/sub groups, depending on the tasks we are working on.. I am trying to interest members of AIESEC in the business organization and financial side of our GSL/IAL mission "AIESEC (pronounced "eye-sec") is a French acronym which roughly translates to the International Association of Students in Economics and Commerce. Our mission is to increase international understanding and cultural awareness through the exchange of students and various other seminars and programs." I spotted a message on esperanto-request@rand.org from jafarr@north1.acpub.duke.edu (Jeff at Duke U). This was an appeal related to building a global database. of AIESEC members. So I sent him a message telling him about our project. I doubt if anything fast will happen but, with my experience and their energy and new knowledge we might have hit a goldmine.-said I optimistically! <> I would hope that those with skills in language development would not be diverted into these other areas. We will need to recruit people with some training in organization, political science, public relations, journalism, commerce, economics, advertising, etc or whatever is needed as we develop. Those on Conlang now could perform a real service by talking to students, or friends in any of these or related fields. Even if we can't use them immediately they might like to come online in the new LANGTRUST (or whatever we decide to call it) and brainstorm with other non linguists on public awareness campaigns, database building etc.<> Anything like calling tenders is a long way down the line. Tenders are only called when there are two or more services/products and that the funding agency/client wishes to make a selection.<> Practical testing or experimentation could probably best be part of the AUXLANG(SPECLANG) task. The other new members as described above need to engage in public awareness campaigns to show the need, organization, interim long range planning, fund raising ideas, we will have to develop etc This would be done in sub/sub conferences.<> I AGREE <> Good. TEMPEST FUGIT if that is the way you spell it,Latin scholars :<) <> I said that? I didn't mean it. I was reminded of inventors coming to me with a rough model of a product and a patent. They had spent all their savings on product development without giving a thought on how to finance production and marketing. if you build a better mouse trap world does NOT unfortunately, beat a path to your door. I have confidence, even if English, then Esperanto, are used in the interim. That the efforts of the conlang experts will not be in vain--provided we can build a strong team with resources to support them.<> I agree. <> Let's face it. English is the IAL at present. I thought we had agreement that it is not the best long term solution. Part of our awareness job is to show the powers that be that any language of an existing culture is a second rate solution.<> We have not only no "product" yet but no "market" We have a lot of planning to do. That's why we want to recruit others on this net with a variety of skills.<> until I/we recruit a younger, more energetic replacement. <> agree <> Absolutely. The same as the millions of concerned volunteers working for enviro and peace organizations. Any one in for a quick personal profit needs some mental therapy. Or am I missing something that you know<> That's it for now Towards global harmony! <From cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab Wed Jan 20 00:27:53 1993 Return-Path: Date: Mon, 18 Jan 93 01:01:19 -0500 From: cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9301180601.AA02212@daily.grebyn.com> To: dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu Subject: Re: several Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Status: RO Regarding the "acestral language" question, the reason it is worthy only of a manure shovel is that the methodology is almost a parody of the normal methods of language reconstruction. The latter require not only identification of words that are similar in the descendant languages, but a clear mechnanism of sound shifts that show a pattern throughout the languages being tied together. To get sufficient data to do this kind of analysis, the descendant languages must have a fair amount of data - I think somewhat in excess of 100 words support for a pattern is considered a norm. Protot-Indo-European has been reconstructed up to some 2000 or so roots, and many grammar features, but it dates back only some 4000-8000 years. The next step back is the proposed Nostratic theory, and it is highly contro- versial, mainly because it muist be reconstructed from Proto-Indo European and the comparable vintage proto's of the other language families, which are much less well reconstructed in the first place. But the methodology in the Nostratic reconstruction is at least for the most part sound. But even if Nostratic is perfect, that only gets us back some 10000 years. You can imagine perhaps that to make a ju,p from 10000 years to 200000 years when there is literally nothing known about langauges in that time period, and there is no expectation of ever getting real data for that period is almost pure speculation. There are some questions that to linguists are simply going to be unanswerable, unless there is something totally new as far as both data and methodology to support it. lojbab >From cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab Wed Jan 20 00:27:51 1993 Return-Path: Date: Mon, 18 Jan 93 01:09:54 -0500 From: cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9301180609.AA02281@daily.grebyn.com> To: dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu Subject: Re: animate and sentient Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Status: RO I understand what you are saying about the cat, but a) I had to decide first just how much intelligence I wanted to ascribe to my cat and b) you had to determine from the pronoun that it was my cat that I was referring to. If you were not accustommed to cats being considered intelligent, and we had a sentence like " My cat rubbed up against the man's leg and then "fo" ate the cat food, you might start wondering about that man. But in my question, I was more concerned with conflicting pronoun definitions. I was responding to a pair of pronouns, one that meant animate/sentient and the other inanimate/nonsentient, and I asked what to do with something that is animate/nonsentient or inanimate/sentient or unknown/unknown. People using natural languages aren;t accustomed to consciously making these decisions - we will attribute gender to things in our native language based on subliminal patterns. But with a conlang, you have to try to figure out what to do consciously, which is not a fluent or natural language-like process. Only when the rules are so simple that you can intenralize it and deicde without thinking, or when you have totally mastered thesets of lists if the patterns are not rule-based, can you become a fluent speaker. lojbab >From cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab Wed Jan 20 00:27:49 1993 Return-Path: Date: Mon, 18 Jan 93 01:20:19 -0500 From: cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9301180620.AA02434@daily.grebyn.com> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu, miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu Subject: Ken Miner comments on Lojban on sci.lang Status: RO Ken Miner writes on sci.lang >However these are not among the linguistic universals that are >presently crucial to Linguistics in its attempt to define the notion >"human language" and so we must wait to see whether human children can >acquire Lojban (roughly, spoken symbolic logic). I suspect that you portray us rather poorly in labelling Loglan and Lojban as "spoken symbolic logic". The symbolic logic aspects of the language have shown little promise in dominating the language, either in its learning or its usage. The predicate language aspect is far more dominant, supported by the absence of parts of speech categorization of any of the content words, and the combinatorial compounding power of Lojban tanru, which are inherently metaphorical (semantically ambiguous, but not figurative) rather than logical. And I think the emotional attitudinal system, if acquired natively by a new generation will most immediately show differences in the thinking of its speakers. Any significant effects from the LOGIC aspects of the language will almost certainly wait for a later generation of speaker, one who has been taught the language by other speakers who are themselves comfortable enough with the logical theory embedded in the language to use it enough for those usages to serve as models. As it is, the most skilled Lojbanists tend to treat the logical aspects as toys to be analyzed and played with rather than internalized. The attitudinals on the other hand are the first to be internalized (and I notice in my Russian native kids that attitudinal-like usages of English are the first things they have acquired, too). As Nick Nicholas observed in our international phone call reported on Lojban List, for a limited subset of Lojban attitudinals I have internalized them and indeed use them before English (and Russian) equivalents in some circumstances. If I were even somewhat more fluent in Lojban, I suspect that my English understandability would be seriously affected by Lojbanisms thrown in subconsciously. (I'm not all that sure that effects not too detrimental to understanding haven't happened already - I know that the way I write and talk has changed since I worked on the project, but not in a particularly obvious way - I suspect that analysis would show it to be based on the tanru effect.) lojbab >From cbmvax!uunet!ctr.columbia.edu!shoulson Wed Jan 20 00:58:27 1993 Return-Path: Date: Mon, 18 Jan 93 09:43:36 -0500 Message-Id: <9301181443.AA04217@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu In-Reply-To: ""'s message of Sun, 17 Jan 93 13:18:04 CST <47885.dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu> Subject: Deaf sign language as an IAL? Status: RO >From: "" >Date: Sun, 17 Jan 93 13:18:04 CST >On Sat, 16 Jan 93 23:14:51 GMT, Richard Kennaway wrote: >>I don't know to what extent deaf sign languages are constructed (vs. >>"natural", i.e. just happening), but an interesting point was made by one >>of the, er, speakers, that although each country has its own sign >>language, he can go to a foreign country and be chatting with local deaf >>people within a couple of days. Compare that with the years it takes for >>hearing people to learn languages. Sign language as an IAL? Hmmm. An interesting point. I believe that ASL, at least, is more easily understood by the completely uninitiated than, say, Swahili or English,, as I mentioned before. I think this is because you can convey more information at once in a signed, visual language than you can with a spoken one. Not to imply that conversations are necessarily faster in Sign (Dan Goodman points out in his reply to this very message that signed conversations tend to transfer information at roughly the same rate as spoken ones), merely that with more "bits per sign", as it were, you can have higher redundancy and a closer approximation to the real-world referent, giving the audience more clues as to your meaning (of course, as with any two languages, you can always find examples of sentences that take scads of words in English and two or three eloquent signs in ASL---and the converse is also true). Even when teaching spoken languages, teachers often use facial expression and gestures to help get an unfamiliar word across; facial expression and gestures are integral parts of signed languages! >Sign languages used in deaf communities are natural, mostly. Some sign >languages are artificial in the worst sense; generally, a natural sign >language is taken and "improved" so that it conforms to the grammar of a >"real language" -- that is, a spoken language. Isolated deaf children >apparently often construct their own sign languages. Yes; especially since most/all deaf people live in a hearing society and are familiar, to one extent or another, with the local spoken language. There are whole ranges of pidgin-signs, which hearing people often use because breaking out of their speaking habits is difficult (e.g. my ASL, even when I'm trying my best, is horrendously "speechlike." I also forget to use my face enough, but that's another story), ranging all the way up from things like Signed English (which, in purest form, is an exact coding of English into gestures, with each synonymn and word-ending represented; just one step up from fingerspelling). Different sign languages have different influences from spoken ones. I remember watching a news program about Russian deaf, and couldn't believe how much fingerspelling they obviously used. ASL doesn't need to resort to fingerspelling nearly so often. More interesting, though, was the speech by a past president of the National Association of the Deaf (?) in 1917, since that was ASL, but old ASL. There was a lot more fingerspelling in his speech than modern ASL would have had, and many of the signs were oddly different, archaic. Good speech, though. ~mark >From cbmvax!uunet!violet.berkeley.edu!chalmers Wed Jan 20 00:58:29 1993 Return-Path: Date: Mon, 18 Jan 93 07:23:22 -0800 From: cbmvax!uunet!violet.berkeley.edu!chalmers (John H. Chalmers Jr.) Message-Id: <9301181523.AA29140@violet.berkeley.edu> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: solex mal, etc. Status: RO Thanks to both Jo"rg Knappen and Richard Kennaway for the references to pictographical conlangs. I'll look for them locally as I think the library takes Die Zeit. If I fail, I'll take you up on the offer of a copy. I was able to revisit the private library where I found the book "The Saucers Speak" and xerox the Solex Mal words. I found a few more SM phrases, given below, and discovered that I had made a few minor errors copying the glossary by hand. OARHAE RETTO (untranslated) AWA AGFA AFFA REFIS LAQU (untranslated, may be just names) RONEM (untranslated, but may mean goodbye, over and out, etc.) VENIS VENIS (part of AN incoherent text Vvs Venis Venis Tfas Ks Ar Ragif Kont Va. The last 3 words correspond to a glyph in OTOF.) Greeting to be said by arriving UFO crews: "Tu Vec Satum Do Pattla Barraga " (untranslated) We should reply: "Udum Regan Vec Yonto Nictum Barraga" (untranslated, but vec is glossed "space,", barraga, friends.) These phrases somewhat resemble the words "Klatu Burada Nicto" from "The Day the Earth Stood Still," the film in which Michael Rennie and the robot GORT arrive in a UFO and land in Washington, DC. Does anyone know if this film was was released prior to 1952? Minor corrections to glossary: Adee capital city of Jupiter, called Etonya Chan "means 'afflicted' in certain ancient languages" Elex (not Elox) " the young son of Zo and UM" Elala "... formerly called Wogog." Kadar Lacu also called Kalar Laqu, not Kadar Laqu Macas Neptunian cattle, not contact Nah-9 from Neptune, not Mars Ro from the Toresoton solar system, omitted Wan-4 not Waw-4 Sorry about the errors. -- John >From cbmvax!uunet!trl.OZ.AU!j.guy Tue Jan 19 23:28:18 1993 Return-Path: Date: Mon, 18 Jan 93 10:26:18 EST From: cbmvax!uunet!trl.OZ.AU!j.guy (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9301172326.AA03522@medici.trl.OZ.AU> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: The language of 200,000 years ago (was: several) Status: RO Dan Goodman: 3) Some linguists claim that the relationships among human spoken languages can all be traced back as far as the ancestral language, about 200,000 years ago. There has been some reconstruction of the vocabulary. I gather that there are other linguists who feel this theory is best evaluated with a manure shovel. Does anyone here know enough about this to give an opinion? There is a theory called "glottochronology". It dates from the early 18th century, but was formalized by Swadesh in 1950. In a nutshell, it says that lexicon "decays" in the same manner as radioactive elements decay (Swadesh was inspired by C14 dating methods). In other words, languages mutates at a constant rate. It is false and has abundantly been proved to be false. Nevertheless it remains that language is never immutable. Very conservative languages, such as Icelandic, Armenian, etc. have been measured, from dated manuscripts, to replace, or innovate, or mutate (whichever word you prefer) at a rate of a few percent of a sample vocabulary per 1000 years. Many languages have been shown to mutate much, much faster, 10% to 50% and more per 1000 years. Imagine now that we have reconstructed the Common Language of 200,000 years ago. For that reconstruction to be possible, there must survive today at least two maximally distant descendents. How much vocabulary out of those two descendents to we need to reconstruct ONE word of that Ursprache? Assume that, by a stroke of extraordinary luck, those two descendents have been very, very conservative (i.e. immune to change) for the whole of those 200,000 years. Say they have mutated only 2% per 1000 years. The probable amount of vocabulary they have in common today is: (1-0.02) ^ (200*2) = 0.98^400 = 0.000309336 that is, one word in 3232. You figure out the consequences. And I've used very favourable figures and assumptions. >From cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Wed Jan 20 00:59:10 1993 Return-Path: From: cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Date: Mon, 18 Jan 1993 10:27:00 PST Subject: Re: gender In-Reply-To: "dasher@well.sf.ca:us:Xerox's message of 16 Jan 93 03:00 PST" To: dasher@well.sf.ca.us Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Message-Id: <93Jan18.102736pst.11567@alpha.xerox.com> Status: RO >Joerg reports that in German, >>J(2) Words in -age (from french) are femine >which is funny, as in French they're masculine. >What about -ion words (feminine in Romance)? In Portuguese, the "age" words, actually spelled "agem" in Portuguese, are feminine. Portuguese -tion words, spelled -c,a~o (c cedilla, a with tilde, o) are feminine. French: Bon voyage! (masc.) Portug: Boa viagem! (fem.) imaginac,a~o "imagination" is feminine >From cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Wed Jan 20 00:59:20 1993 Return-Path: From: cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Date: Mon, 18 Jan 1993 10:49:00 PST Subject: Re: Deaf sign language as an IAL? In-Reply-To: "jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac:uk:Xerox's message of 16 Jan 93 15:14 PST" To: jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Message-Id: <93Jan18.104954pst.11597@alpha.xerox.com> Status: RO Richard Kennaway >>>>I don't know to what extent deaf sign languages are constructed (vs. "natural", i.e. just happening), but an interesting point was made by one of the, er, speakers, that although each country has its own sign language, he can go to a foreign country and be chatting with local deaf people within a couple of days.<<<< The French sign-language system was, I believe, completely or largely invented. It is the basis for American Sign Language, and it is claimed that American and French signers can communicate fairly easily (a great deal of dialectal divergence has occurred). No one knows when and where British Sign Language developed, and I believe that this is the case for most sign languages. They seem to pop up whenever you get a critical mass of deaf people. Study of such languages has traditionally been neglected because they were often dismissed as childish gesturing. (Indeed, a century ago there was still debate about whether the deaf had souls.) Some educators of the deaf still discourage and suppress sign language in an attempt to mainstream deaf students, but I think that these people are now distinctly out of fashion, at least in the United States. There are persistent reports that signers from different countries, even if their sign languages are completely different, can be put together in a room and can be communicating at some level very quickly. In one meeting of British and Swedish signers, with some hearing people as well, the signers were soon chatting away happily while the hearing people remained helplessly separate. American Sign Language is the best studied of all the systems. There have been several attempts to devise a practical, everyday orthography for it, but I believe that none has really caught on. Ken Beesley beesley.parc@xerox.com >From cbmvax!uunet!ctr.columbia.edu!shoulson Wed Jan 20 00:59:29 1993 Return-Path: Date: Mon, 18 Jan 93 14:36:06 -0500 Message-Id: <9301181936.AA04768@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com Cc: jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk, conlang@buphy.bu.edu In-Reply-To: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com's message of Mon, 18 Jan 1993 10:49:00 PST <93Jan18.104954pst.11597@alpha.xerox.com> Subject: Deaf sign language as an IAL? Status: RO >X-Ns-Transport-Id: 0000AA00138CD10A2F02 >Date: >Mon, 18 Jan 1993 10:49:00 PST >From: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com >Richard Kennaway >>>>>I don't know to what extent deaf sign languages are constructed (vs. >"natural", i.e. just happening), but an interesting point was made by one >of the, er, speakers, that although each country has its own sign >language, he can go to a foreign country and be chatting with local deaf >people within a couple of days.<<<< >The French sign-language system was, I believe, completely or largely >invented. I'm not so sure. My ASL teacher told me that an abbot (whose name eludes me for now) was long believed to have been the inventor of French sign language, but that in fact it developed naturally, like everything else. >It is the basis for American Sign Language, and it is claimed that American and >French signers can communicate fairly easily (a great deal of dialectal >divergence has occurred). I dunno. In class as part of the presentation with the speech by Veditz(?) (the 1917 president of the National Association for the Deaf) there was some kind of introduction from French television, using French sign, and I was pretty lost. Then again, my signing ability isn't anywhere close to fluent, and you need a certain ease in a language to grope at understanding similar ones. The speech, incidentally, was in response to a decision by French schools to forbid the teaching of Sign to Deaf students, in favor of oral methods. > Some educators of the deaf still discourage and >suppress sign language in an attempt to mainstream deaf students, but I think >that these people are now distinctly out of fashion, at least in the United >States. Yes, until very recently in fact. But now the Deaf (many prefer to use the capitalized word to indicate it as a culture, not a condition) are coming into their own, so to speak, and Sign has become much more accepted. ~mark >From cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Wed Jan 20 01:29:24 1993 Return-Path: From: cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Date: Mon, 18 Jan 1993 17:39:00 PST Subject: Re: Deaf sign language as an IAL? In-Reply-To: "shoulson@ctr.columbia:edu:Xerox's message of 18 Jan 93 11:36 PST" To: shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Cc: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com, jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk, conlang@buphy.bu.edu Message-Id: <93Jan18.174046pst.11851@alpha.xerox.com> Status: RO Me: >The French sign-language system was, I believe, completely or largely >invented. Shoulson: >>>I'm not so sure. My ASL teacher told me that an abbot (whose name eludes me for now) was long believed to have been the inventor of French sign language, but that in fact it developed naturally, like everything else.<<< [Most of the following is from Crystal's "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language.] The traditional story is that the Abbe/ Charles Michel de l'Epe/e (1712-89) "developed" a sign language in 1775 at a Paris school for the Deaf. According to David Crystal, "The origins of his system are obscure: several of his signs were modifications of those used by the French native deaf population, but he also made some use of the Spanish manual alphabet, and he may have incorporated some of the signs used by the Spanish Benedictine monks." I would guess that in 1775, given the prevailing restrictions on travel and communication, "the French native deaf population" would have been a pretty diverse lot, with several completely separate native signing systems and, at best, severe dialects from one signing community to the next. The selection and standardization of signs and syntax for a national sign language, from such diverse sources, could still be counted as a significant act of invention. Perhaps more significant is the fact that he took the Deaf and their languages seriously. The good Abbe/'s influence was wide. Two students at his school, Thomas Gallaudet (1787-1851) and Laurent Clerc (1785-1869) brought the signs to the USA, where they were taught in schools for the Deaf and naturally merged with existing American systems. (The premier college for the Deaf in the USA is, of course, named Gallaudet College.) Crystal mentions a number of purposely invented or modified systems, many intended to be signed versions of English. Pure ASL is decidedly non-English and indeed non-Indo-European in vocabulary, morphology and syntax. He also mentions an intriguing system called Gestuno, which was "adopted by the Unification of Signs Commission of the World Federation of the Deaf" in 1975. Sounds to me like this Gestuno has conlang written all over it. Ken Beesley beesley.parc@xerox.com >From cbmvax!uunet!unixg.ubc.ca!eboyd Wed Jan 20 18:18:43 1993 Return-Path: Message-Id: <9301202014.AA02092@unixg.ubc.ca> Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1993 12:17:31 -0500 To: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au(Robin Gaskell), conlang@buphy.bu.edu(mail list) From: cbmvax!uunet!unixg.ubc.ca!eboyd(Ewan Boyd) Subject: IAL/GSL Organizing sub conferences Cc: Peter@URIAH.LAW.MQ.EDU.AU, jafarr@north1.acpub.duke.edu(Jeff), nanci@sfu.ca Status: RO HI ROBIN, I still haven't found this letter of yours on Conlang. So I'll deal with it here, although it would have been easier to just "reply" on conlang using Eudora on my Mac. In case you wondered I don't type out # Ewan responds: R>> <>I agree in principle. We might want to think a bit more about the names SPECLANG = AUXLANG ?; LANGTRUST may be too general and may have to be broken down later into sub/sub groups, depending on the tasks we are working on.. I am trying to interest members of AIESEC in the business organization and financial side of our GSL/IAL mission "AIESEC (pronounced "eye-sec") is a French acronym which roughly translates to the International Association of Students in Economics and Commerce. Our mission is to increase international understanding and cultural awareness through the exchange of students and various other seminars and programs." I spotted a message on esperanto-request@rand.org from jafarr@north1.acpub.duke.edu (Jeff at Duke U). This was an appeal related to building a global database. of AIESEC members. So I sent him a message telling him about our project. I doubt if anything fast will happen but, with my experience and their energy and new knowledge we might have hit a goldmine.-said I optimistically! <> I would hope that those with skills in language development would not be diverted into these other areas. We will need to recruit people with some training in organization, political science, public relations, journalism, commerce, economics, advertising, etc or whatever is needed as we develop. Those on Conlang now could perform a real service by talking to students, or friends in any of these or related fields. Even if we can't use them immediately they might like to come online in the new LANGTRUST (or whatever we decide to call it) and brainstorm with other non linguists on public awareness campaigns, database building etc.<> Anything like calling tenders is a long way down the line. Tenders are only called when there are two or more services/products and that the funding agency/client wishes to make a selection.<> Practical testing or experimentation could probably best be part of the AUXLANG(SPECLANG) task. The other new members as described above need to engage in public awareness campaigns to show the need, organization, interim long range planning, fund raising ideas, we will have to develop etc This would be done in sub/sub conferences.<> I AGREE <> Good. TEMPEST FUGIT if that is the way you spell it,Latin scholars :<) <> I said that? I didn't mean it. I was reminded of inventors coming to me with a rough model of a product and a patent. They had spent all their savings on product development without giving a thought on how to finance production and marketing. if you build a better mouse trap world does NOT unfortunately, beat a path to your door. I have confidence, even if English, then Esperanto, are used in the interim. That the efforts of the conlang experts will not be in vain--provided we can build a strong team with resources to support them.<> I agree. <> Let's face it. English is the IAL at present. I thought we had agreement that it is not the best long term solution. Part of our awareness job is to show the powers that be that any language of an existing culture is a second rate solution.<> We have not only no "product" yet but no "market" We have a lot of planning to do. That's why we want to recruit others on this net with a variety of skills.<> until I/we recruit a younger, more energetic replacement. <> agree <> Absolutely. The same as the millions of concerned volunteers working for enviro and peace organizations. Any one in for a quick personal profit needs some mental therapy. Or am I missing something that you know<> That's it for now Towards global harmony! <From cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Wed Jan 20 16:00:14 1993 Return-Path: From: cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1993 10:26:00 PST Subject: Re: play languages In-Reply-To: "chalmers@violet.berkeley:edu:Xerox's message of 20 Jan 93 07:39 PST" To: chalmers@violet.berkeley.edu, conlang@buphy.bu.edu Message-Id: <93Jan20.102655pst.12056@alpha.xerox.com> Status: RO John Chalmers: >>>Ken: Perhaps you could post a description of Turkey Talk and Double Dutch to conlang as I doubt that most of those on the list are familiar with them except by name. <<< Is the whole group really interested in such play languages? I'll try to dig up my copy of a kids' book called Codes and Secret Writing, by Zim, which I believe contained descriptions of a couple of play languages. I also vaguely recall some serious papers in the journal Language. As best I can remember, Turkey Talk is similar to OP, but with insertions of "obble" so that the effect is roughly like turkeys gobbling. A related play language would seem to be Balfang (Bang), for which I have only the following example: Happy New Year Halfapily Nelfew Yelfear (perhaps the first word should be something like "halfapilfy") i.e. /Vlf/ is inserted after the first consonant of a syllable, with V being a copy of the first vowel, or equivalently, /lfV/ is inserted after the first CV) Double Dutch, as best I can recall, involved substituting English consonants with CVC syllables, some of them constructed a bit idiosyncratically. Like using "bub" for 'b' but maybe "mim" for 'm'. It's been 25 years since I looked at this brief description (isn't is odd what you remember and what you forget?)--so I might now see some phonological order where, at the age of 13, I didn't. Crystal's Encyclopedia of Language lists a few schemes like back slang in English, French and Thai (pronouncing words roughly backwards--usually limited to a few words, used for secrecy). Center slang: "the central vowel of a word, along with its following consonant, is placed at the beginning, and a non-sense syllable added" as in "cheek" -> eekcher, "fool" -> hoolerfer, "right" -> ightri. Eggy-peggy or aygo-paygo speech: Put that book down Pugut thagat begook dowgun. (sic. one might expect at least "boogook"--the first two words look remarkably like Balfang, with Vg inserted and with the same vowel copying as Balfang) Crystal also describes a kind of reverse of Pig Latin wherein the final consonant is moved to the front, and a vowel is thrown in to aid pronunciation: Put that book down Tepu tatha keboo nadaw He also briefly describes several play languages based on Cuna (Panama), some metathesis schemes for French and Javanese, and an alphabetic substitution system in Javanese that requires knowledge of alphabetical order to link the otherwise arbitrary consonant substitutions. ***** There is reportedly a play language of Bedouin Hijazi Arabic, described by John McCarthy, that takes the triliteral semitic root and scrambles the order of the radicals, leaving the rest of the word intact. In Brazil, an acquaintance once described to me the "li/ngua do i" the "language of i" that substitutes all vowels with /i/. It is remarkable that 1) these phenomena are so widespread, 2) that humans can learn to process and produce them so easily, and 3) that they are largely invented and passed along among children. Ken beesley.parc@xerox.com >From cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Fri Jan 22 13:56:12 1993 Return-Path: From: cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 10:17:00 PST Subject: Re: (A)SL as universal language? In-Reply-To: "j.guy@trl.oz:au:Xerox's message of 22 Jan 93 12:12 PST" To: j.guy@trl.oz.au Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Message-Id: <93Jan22.101818pst.11592@alpha.xerox.com> Status: RO Jacques Guy: >>>I know, I know, there are transliteration systems for ASL, but the one I have seen (in David Crystal's Encyclopedia of Linguistics) leaves a lot to be desired.<<< There's another orthography for ASL from Emerson & Stern Associates, Inc. 10150 Sorrento Valley Rd. Suite 210 San Diego, CA 92121 (619) 457-2526 they even have fonts available for IBM and Macintosh. It is intended to be a practical, everyday orthography that could be used for publishing books and newspapers (as opposed to some other transcription systems that are used primarily to teach signs or describe signs in the linguistic literature). They used to publish an ASL newsletter, but the last I heard they were trying to get Gallaudet College to take it over. I am told that there are other ASL orthographies available, but I don't have any details. The challenges are considerable. Signs move in time and are located in various spatial regions. Highly significant "suprasegmentals" like head orientations and facial expressions occur simultaneously with other signs. I believe that even negation is signaled in this way. All natural-language orthographies are incomplete and sketchy representations of natural-language acts, just as musical notation is a bare-bones sketch of a musical performance. It is up to the reader to flesh out those bare bones. It is often the suprasegmentals, such as word stress and sentence pitch contours, that are missing from practical natural-language orthographies; such practical orthographies tend to be limited to representing the linear march of phonemes. I doubt that the linear march of cheremes in ASL, ignoring all the suprasegmentals, would be anywhere near sufficient for communication. Ken beesley.parc@xerox.com >From cbmvax!uunet!ctr.columbia.edu!shoulson Fri Jan 22 15:16:13 1993 Return-Path: Date: Fri, 22 Jan 93 14:30:44 -0500 Message-Id: <9301221930.AA26518@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com Cc: j.guy@trl.oz.au, conlang@buphy.bu.edu In-Reply-To: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com's message of Fri, 22 Jan 1993 10:17:00 PST <93Jan22.101818pst.11592@alpha.xerox.com> Subject: (A)SL as universal language? Status: RO Yes, I've never heard of an ASL orthography that was universally liked. At best they're hints at the actual signs, which the reader should already know anyway, and they can't capture all the details of facial expression and speed of doing the sign and motion and location. It's worse than most natural-language written representations, because of the importance of these "suprasegmentals". I agree with Ken: the linear march of cheremes doesn't suffice. ~mark >From cbmvax!uunet!trl.OZ.AU!j.guy Thu Jan 21 23:59:35 1993 Return-Path: Date: Fri, 22 Jan 93 15:12:20 EST From: cbmvax!uunet!trl.OZ.AU!j.guy (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9301220412.AA11291@medici.trl.OZ.AU> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: (A)SL as universal language? Status: RO I now know a little more about ASL, thanks to conlang posters. Sign language strikes me as a better choice for a universal language. If we want to move into the science-fiction realm, we would indeed insist on a language that is not dependent upon one's speech apparatus -- or lack thereof -- and, above all, one's hearing performance. Imagine us as canines. Our spoken or barked language might take advantage of our ability to hear sounds way beyond what humans can hear. Perhaps it would be purely tonal, fifty tones or more. How are we going to communicate with near deaf homo sapiens? On the other hand, so much hoo ha has been made of the vital prerequisite of an opposable thumb that we may surmise that most sentient species would already possess sufficient *signing* organs. Why, an ASL signer could communicate with an intelligent octopus! What about, now, an intelligent bird, or cetacean? Suppose that the Universal Language were signed. Next, we need a written and a voiced representation of it. To make things simpler, there ought to be a one-to-one relationship between the written symbol and the voiced sound (I'm not even saying "spoken"). So it all boils down to coming up with a simple, easily learnt and remembered system of written representation for sign language. I say "written" because we are much better at reasoning on visual symbols than on a spoken chain. Even if it leads to no universal language, it would be a worthwhile endeavour that would profit the deaf-and-dumb. I know, I know, there are transliteration systems for ASL, but the one I have seen (in David Crystal's Encyclopedia of Linguistics) leaves a lot to be desired. >From cbmvax!uunet!extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU!robin Fri Jan 22 19:36:28 1993 Return-Path: Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 10:04:26 +1100 From: Robin F Gaskell Message-Id: <199301222304.AA06280@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Re: Pronunciation Cc: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au Status: RO From: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au (Robin Gaskell) 17 Jan 93 To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu (Conlang Mail List) Subject: Re: Re: (long) IAL desiderata Barry Crown of Singapore writes: > I am not a linguist, but I have some experience of teaching Esperanto > in Singapore. I was very impressed by Rick's essay. However, I am a > little concerned at what he writes about the selection of phonemes. > My feeling is that the problem is much more difficult than he suggests. and, about generalisations about the pronunciation by speakers of Chinese: > ........ I thought at first that these were individual speech > defects because - according to the books - not only Mandarin (which is > taught in schools and widely spoken in Singapore nowadays) but also Hokkien > (the main dialect of Chinese Singaporeans) and Cantonese distinguish between > "n" and "l". also: > A professor from Beijing University told me that students from > Hunan, Hubei and Sichuan have such difficulties distinguishing "n" and "l" > in English that she segregates them to provide them with extra tuition. > Apparently they have the same trouble speaking Mandarin. He adds to this: > To make matters worse, the gentleman I mentioned earlier also regularly > confuses "d" and "l". .............. I wish to back up Barry's observations, suggesting that Chinese people coming from the different spoken language traditions in China bring with them very different problems, when it comes to pronouncing European-type languages. The teaching of Esperanto, English or Glosa to Chinese is not a situation where the learners are a population with homogenious spoken language capacities. My experience is as another amateur, this time, as a volunteer teacher of English to maily Asians at the "Baha'i House" in Cabramatta, Sydney. Early in the piece, it became obvious that these learners were having quite different sorts of problems with their pronunciation of English. And, with the mainland Chinese, lagrely stranded in Australia on 4-year extended visas following Tienamin Square, this was with people who had been learning to read English as part of their coursework. Some showing a feel for vernacular English, had, in China, done extra practice listening to English language radio broadcasts; others, however, who had not gone beyond their study of written English, seemed to have a variety of pronunciation problems - that appeared to be tracable to their neuromuscular patterns acquired while learning their particular 'diale,]$KR¶VK[VW)x REASON FOR COMMENT: Here we are talking about Planned Languages, and about making them suitable for all people to speak. China, because of its large fraction of humanity, represents a significant part of this problem. Yet, we cannot treat the Chinese learners of Artificial Languages or of an adopted International Auxiliary Language as a homogeneous learning group. No matter how hard we try, we will not find a usable language that is readily speakable by people from all cultures: I believe that this is, therefore, not the major criterion we should be working on when choosing the design for an IAL. The present generation, listening to Radio Beijing, will get one version of English or Esperanto; the future generation, listening to Radio World, will get the standardised (international) pronunciation of the ... as yet to be adopted ... Common Second Language for the World. If there is a heirarchy of criteria for IAL selection, I would imagine that a facility for the clear expression of ideas is higher than a lowest common denominator for pronunciation. SOUND IS IMPORTANT Of course, a language presented to the world should sound good (to the majority, at least), be fairly easy to generate, and allow for a minimum of possible confusion, but these criteria should be worked out for the right reasons, and not purely 'historical' ones. We can't really eliminate "d", "n" and "r" simply because different groups have trouble distinguishing them from "l". I would say that the way a language is spoken is one of its fundamental characteristics, but I feel that more effort needs to be put into working out the various priorities ... when it comes to selecting the sound system to be used by a language that is designed for world use. Perhaps I am suggesting that time is a factor that should be taken into the equation. Over one or two generations, pronunciation problems caused by cultural clashes will become mere ripples on the surface of a world communication system, which is based on the adoption of one language for global auxiliary ].YYx Cheers, Robin >From cbmvax!uunet!extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU!robin Fri Jan 22 19:36:30 1993 Return-Path: Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 10:07:19 +1100 From: Robin F Gaskell Message-Id: <199301222307.AA06342@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Re: Desiderata Cc: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au Status: RO From: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au (Robin Gaskell) 21 Jan 93 To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu (Conlang Mail List) Subject: Re: (long) IAL desiderata, 3rd draft Rick Harrison's "Proposed guidelines for the design of an internatioal auxiliary language (3rd draft)" is a fairly good starting place for work on Comparative Conlangology. So I decided to do a 'Glosa Report Card' to see how it looked; also, I would like to comment on a few of the items on this checklist. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ REPORT ON IAL DESIDERATA | Pupil: GLOSA | | Score: Comments: 1. Basics 1.3 "ease of learning" _/ No morphological change: very helpful. 1.4 terminology O.K. "Syntax-based grammar" unusual. 2. Orthography 2.1 writing system _/ Roman 3. Phonology 3.1 phoneme selection _/ Contains q, x, z (historical reasons) 3.2 phonotactics O.K. Diphthongs & consonant pairs only in technical terminology. 3.3 tones nil Stress & vocal inflection - structure. 4. Morphology 4.1 compounding _/ Usually uses hyphen; many still to be recorded. 4.2 allomorphy avoided Some abbreviated forms used. 4.3 Zipf's Law _/ Strictly observed. 4.4 self-segregating (auto-isolating) morphemes _/ Almost completely so. 5. Vocabulary 5.1 vocabulary sources x Classical roots (technology-based); consonant-vowel sequences chosen. 5.2 word allocation _/ One root per concept (other root can be synonym - for literary style). 6. Grammar 6.1 universality and simplicity _/ Regularised with no morphological changes; extremely simple. 6.2 syntax _/ - Word order gives meaning : but rules of syntax not yet recorded. 6.3 gender _/  Only where semantics demand; mixed, with some use of affixes. 6.4 transitivity _/ Unvarying verb morphemes with variable transivity. 7. Computer Tractability _/ Sentences conform to computer logic; but, as yet, no AI research. Principal Comments: A good effort: satisfactory in most departments. More work needed with vocabulary formation and the recording of | syntactic rules. Much more practice needed to show that | science-based (Classical) vocabulary is truly international. | |_____________________________________________________________________________ And here are a few extra thoughts about this 'desiderata' list. The main point of divergence between Rick Harrison's list and Glosa is the apparrent Euro-centricity. While Glosa looks much like Italian, it is so because it is derived from the same source, i.e. Latin. But there are also the Greek roots, as well; between the two, most of the terminology of science and technology is covered. If the internationally known Classical roots are Euro-centric, then such Euro-centricity might not be such a bad feature of a language for international use, after all. The most damaging comment against Glosa, from the above report, is its lack of a printed grammar. Surely, there can't be too many other conlangs that are deficient in this way! However, apart from English and Chinese, there are probably not too many other languages that base their grammar on syntax. Well, English is a 'bastard' language ... with half of its meaning coming from its 'reduced set' five-inflection grammar, and the other half from word order. I'm still waiting for someone to prepare an easily followable "syntax system" so I can use it as a model for Glosa, but I suspect that no-one has cracked the code, yet. Rick Morneau's application of the BNP [?] computer programming syntax was pretty good, but, when I analysed Glosa prose, there were some categories that were not covered in the system Rick used. Back to the drawing board. My best results came from standardising the sequence of word funcions in 'noun' phrases, and in 'verb' phrases. There seemed to be a natural order for the different structures within a sentence. This seems to be in line with the Scientific American article I quted on Conlang, earlier, Scientific American, September 1992, "Brain and Language" pp 63-71, Antonio R Damasio & Hanna Damasio. I probably posted this schemata on Conlang, earlier, but will do so again, if requested. How do other conlangs measure up to Rick Harrison's Desiderata score-card, I wonder? Cheers, Robin >From cbmvax!uunet!compuserve.com!71174.2735 Sat Jan 23 02:39:26 1993 Return-Path: Date: 23 Jan 93 01:49:05 EST From: assorted personages To: Subject: Journal of Planned Languages Message-Id: <930123064905_71174.2735_DHQ26-1@CompuServe.COM> Status: RO The 17th issue of Journal of Planned Languages (ISSN 1066-2545) has been mailed out. This edition contains: Sketches of some language projects originating in the United States: featuring tidbits of SPL, Olingo, Globaqo, Gloneo, and Elias Molee's many languages. News of the "world language problem": three relevant news items. Esperanto Update (the collapse continues); and, Is Esperanto's vocabulary too large? excerpts from a soc.culture.esperanto thread. Reviews of _Star Trek Conversational Klingon_ and _The Primary Synopsis of Universology and Alwato._ A glimpse of Damin (a secret language used by initiated men of the Lardil tribe). Operation Bibliography: 4 references to British newspaper stories about Glosa, and the text of one article in which Ron Clark says "I hate languages. They are such a barrier to communication." Planned languages -- what should they be? by Bruce R. Gilson and more! Scheduled for JPL 18: information about Zilengo which has never before been published in English. And other rare data!! I'm toying with the idea of publishing the 19th edition entirely in various conlangs. If you'd like to write an article about conlangs _in_ a conlang, contact me. Maximum length for these articles will be about 10,000 characters and conlangs which use the Roman or Greek alphabet(s) are preferred. ========================================================================== Rick Harrison 71174.2735@compuserve.com peora.sdc.ccur.com!jwt!bbs-hrick Journal of Planned Languages, Box 54-7014, Orlando FL 32854, USA ``Go ahead, Ren, say something in Limburger.'' -- Stimpy >From cbmvax!uunet!violet.berkeley.edu!chalmers Sun Jan 24 00:56:37 1993 Return-Path: Date: Sat, 23 Jan 93 08:15:42 -0800 From: cbmvax!uunet!violet.berkeley.edu!chalmers (John H. Chalmers Jr.) Message-Id: <9301231615.AA11841@violet.berkeley.edu> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: ASL as interlanguage Status: RO Re (A)SL as a universal interlanguage: Jack Vance has his characters develop a gestural language for communication between humans and "dekabrachs," intelligent, if pre-linguistic, squid-like creatures in his novella "The Gift of Gab." Words are formed by the position and attitude of the 10 arms on a mechanical simulated dekabrack head. -- John >From cbmvax!uunet!is.rice.edu!riddle Sun Jan 24 02:07:47 1993 Return-Path: Message-Id: <9301240029.AA27786@brazos.is.rice.edu> Subject: Reetspeek To: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com Date: Sat, 23 Jan 93 18:29:57 CST Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu In-Reply-To: <93Jan20.102655pst.12056@alpha.xerox.com>; from "Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com" at Jan 20, 93 10:26 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Status: RO > From Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com Wed Jan 20 12:31:45 1993 > Subject: Re: play languages > > In Brazil, an acquaintance > once described to me the "li/ngua do i" the "language of i" that substitutes > all vowels with /i/. Do this in English and you get "Reetspeek", supposedly the tongue of a race of intelligent rat-like creatures (whose vocals tracts don't permit other vowels) in some sf book. A very annoying sound it has, indeed. -- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle@rice.edu -- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer. >From cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Mon Jan 25 22:24:46 1993 Return-Path: id AA01451; Mon, 25 Jan 93 21:38:29 EST From: cbmvax!uunet!xerox.com!Ken_Beesley.PARC Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 16:11:00 PST Subject: Re: writing ASL In-Reply-To: "j.guy@trl.oz:au:Xerox's message of 26 Jan 93 05:20 PST" To: j.guy@trl.oz.au Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Message-Id: <93Jan25.161139pst.11937@alpha.xerox.com> Status: RO >>>>The Easter Island writing system could perhaps a better inspiration. In fact, it might just possibly be a transcription system for a signed -- or danced -- language (cf Hawaiian hula).<<<< Interesting. Some uninformed, off-the-cuff musings: If it was indeed an orthography for the Easter Island natural language, then the graphs will map predictably, at some level, to speakable phonemes, syllables, words and sentences. Another possibility is that it is a dance-movement orthography, a permanent notation of dance movements, allowing them to be preserved, studied and recreated. [There is a modern transcription system for dance movements used in the USA and perhaps elsewhere. Interestingly, it is not used by choreographers themselves but by trained scribes who observe the choreographed movements and set them down on paper.] The Easter Island dance movements might have had conventional meanings, and dances might even tell stories, but they could still be a long way from being a natural language such as ASL. ASL is a full-blown language, capable of communicating arbitrary messages and used by many people as their normal, matter-of-fact medium of human communication. One wonders if on Easter Island one could have "danced" a message like the following: "Get your lazy behind down to the second beach on the left and get me two baskets of brown clams." But seriously, I've only seen a couple of illustrations of the Easter Island script. You seem to be familiar with it. What are the latest theories on what they really represent? >>>arranging them for each glyph more like Korean does (mostly in a 2x2 matrix) <<< The Korean Han'gul system has complex glyphs, each representing a CV syllable if I remember correctly. In addition, the C and V parts are identifiable, and, in most cases, can be further reduced to distinctive-feature elements. The C and V parts of each glyph could easily be separated into a linear sequence (the writing of C and V packed together in one glyph was no doubt inspired by Chinese orthography, where each idiogram represents a syllable/morpheme). But the feature bundles that characterize a consonant, for example, are phonologically simultaneous. It is therefore reasonable and perhaps ideal for these features to be notated "vertically" rather than horizontally. One wonders, however, if the average speaker/writer of Korean is really very aware of the possible breakdown of the glyphs into feature markings or if (s)he just learns each complex glyph, at least the possible consonant and vowel parts, as a whole. Some notation systems for ASL also allow and require vertical representations of movements and distinctive features that are essentially performed simultaneously. My concern is not with the appropriateness of such vertical clusters for transcribing these languages but with the overall *practicality* of such orthographies when it comes to typing, computer storage, printing and computer display. ASL is perfectly good as a language, but the struggle to devise a practical orthography for it continues. It would seem that devising a practical orthography for a sign language is far more difficult than devising one for a spoken language. Because the written medium is so important in modern society, this difficulty could be a powerful argument against adopting a sign language as a conlang. When thinking of orthographies with vertical/simultaneous dimensions, the western notation of music also comes to mind. Simultaneous notes are vertically grouped into chords, and in general, a lot is going on simultaneously, not unlike ASL. The nature of the phonemenon being transcribed requires such a notation, but it is an undeniably awkward notation, difficult to word-process, scan, transmit electronically, etc. In the Romance languages, even a few vertically placed accents are felt to be a nuisance, and they're often omitted in casual communication. For no other reason than that I would recommend that any conlang be designed in such a way that it can be represented adequately with an orthography that consists of nothing more than strings of phonemic and punctuation characters, chosen from a very finite set, arranged linearly. If desired, an auxiliary gestural form of the language, a kind of finger spelling, could be developed, with strict and reversible phoneme-grapheme-chereme mappings. We are already used to such reversible mappings of convenience in computers, as when the English letter 'a' is stored in memory not as a graphic shape but, fairly arbitrarily, as the ASCII bit sequence 01100001, which can also be thought of as the decimal number 97. As long as there is no confusion in mapping between one representation and another, whether phonemic, gestural, graphic or numeric, they are formally equivalent. Ken >From cbmvax!uunet!highlite.gotham.COM!brgilson Mon Jan 25 22:26:30 1993 Return-Path: id AA03392; Mon, 25 Jan 93 22:05:19 EST Date: Mon, 25 Jan 93 19:56:09 -0500 From: cbmvax!uunet!highlite.gotham.COM!brgilson (Bruce R. Gilson) Message-Id: <9301260056.AA26689@highlite.gotham.COM> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: ASL writing systems Status: RO One system for writing ASL that has not been mentioned was Valerie Sutton' Sign Writing. It seems to satisfy the requirements better than any of the others. The Emerson-Stern system that was mentioned in an earlier post, in fact, was originally developed in accordance with a grant that was inten- ded to computerize Sign Writing; how- ever they decided to go their own way and developed an inferior system, in my belief. >From cbmvax!uunet!ctr.columbia.edu!shoulson Mon Jan 25 22:24:37 1993 Return-Path: id AA01321; Mon, 25 Jan 93 21:38:01 EST Date: Mon, 25 Jan 93 20:33:55 -0500 Message-Id: <9301260133.AA08423@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Seen in newspaper today Status: RO A little comic relief for you all. Saw this in the January 25th newspaper, in the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip (for those poor deprived souls who don't know of Calvin & Hobbes, one of the funniest comic strips around, Heaven pity you. It's about a cynical, overbright, and typically childish six-year-old named Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes): The pictures aren't terrible imprtant in this one, basically it's just Calvin and Hobbes walking in the snnowy winter woods. Calvin: I like to verb words. Hobbes: what? Calvin: I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when "access" was a thing? Now it's something you _do_. It got verbed. Calvin: Verbing weirds language. Hobbes: Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding. OK, it was short and sweet, but that "Verbing weirds language" is an excellent line (have I heard it somewhere before?). I'm sure Mr. Waterson won't mind a posting here... This letter yourses, and ~mark mes. (OK, I'm afielding a little here...) >From cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab Tue Jan 26 07:59:26 1993 Return-Path: id AA17246; Tue, 26 Jan 93 02:04:05 EST Date: Tue, 26 Jan 93 01:50:11 -0500 From: cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9301260650.AA13897@daily.grebyn.com> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu Subject: LLG legal victory now official Cc: 70674.1215@compuserve.com Status: RO I have received notice from the Patent and Trademark Office, dated 13 January, that the trademark on "Loglan" has been cancelled in accordance with the appeals court decision of last summer. A public notice should appear in a month or two in the Federal Register (where all federal regulations and rulings get posted). LLG will not change its policy of using "Loglan" as the generic name of the language or familyof languages that have evolved over the past 38 years from the original concept by James Cooke Brown, using "Lojban" to refer to the version of the language that we are supporting, or "Loglan/Lojban" when the reference is to a property of Lojban that we believe is generally true of all of the Loglans. We will of course use "Loglan" in reaching out to the community of people who might be familiar with the Scientific American article from 1960, or who might have been involved with Loglan at one time but gave up on itfor lack of time or because JCB's effort did not seem to be going anywhere. (We have done reasonably well in attracting these people back to the Loglan project and support of Lojban). As in the last sentence, we will also use "the Loglan project" to refer to the research effort that has led to the various versions of Loglan, including Lojban, especially when talking about those goals for the language that JCB set forth earlier in the project such as testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Needless to say, everyone else may use the term "Loglan" in any way that they choose, since the name is no longer protected in any way, and will not have any fear of legal action if what they say displeases JCB and/or his organiz- zation. We have had no specific comment from JCB's organization on preferred ways to refer to their version of the language, which they have continued to call simply "Loglan" (derived from the English roots and not the Loglan roots, as "Lojban" is). We of course will not support calling it by the simple name because that would cause confusion with the broader meaning that we have long attributed to the name. Thus pending further comment from JCB or his organization, we will continue using the name "TLI Loglan" to refer the The version promulgated by The Loglan Institute currently (and various names usually associated with a date to refer to earlier versions from which their version and Lojban have both evolved). lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@grebyn.com Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 For information about the artificial language Loglan/Lojban, please provide a paper-mail address to me via mail or phone. We also have limited introductory information available electronically. The LLG is funded solely by your contributions, which are encouraged for the purpose of defraying our costs (for both electronic and paper distribution.) >From cbmvax!uunet!trl.OZ.AU!j.guy Mon Jan 25 17:05:28 1993 Return-Path: id AA01971; Mon, 25 Jan 93 16:41:12 EST Date: Tue, 26 Jan 93 08:20:54 EST From: cbmvax!uunet!trl.OZ.AU!j.guy (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9301252120.AA15270@medici.trl.OZ.AU> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: writing ASL Status: RO The Easter Island writing system could perhaps a better inspiration. In fact, it might just possibly be a transcription system for a signed -- or danced -- language (cf Hawaiian hula). Most glyphs are anthropomorphic and consist of five elements: left leg, right leg, left arm, right arm, head. Arms are themselves made up of at least two elements: arm proper and hand. There is internal evidence that the glyphs were written and "read" from bottom to top (legs first, ending in head). Appendages (feather-like barbs, flames/leaves, ribbons) often "modify" those body parts. The whole system seems extremely tightly structured and to follow strict combination rules, and the number of different elements (e.g. hand shapes, leg shapes etc) appears to be extremely small, and could probably be transliterated using 50 characters or so, arranging them for each glyph more like Korean does (mostly in a 2x2 matrix) than as we do (linearly). >From cbmvax!uunet!trl.OZ.AU!j.guy Mon Jan 25 22:24:32 1993 Return-Path: id AA01244; Mon, 25 Jan 93 21:37:46 EST Date: Tue, 26 Jan 93 11:52:35 EST From: cbmvax!uunet!trl.OZ.AU!j.guy (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9301260052.AA15724@medici.trl.OZ.AU> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Easter Island (was ASL) Status: RO The glyphs are also reminiscent of... an animated cartoon! Very often, one sees a sequence of similar glyphs, each differing from the previous one only in the position of a limb, and it is very difficult to refrain oneself from seeing in there three or four frames of an action recorded on film. The script has never been deciphered, except for a few lines on a tablet, known as Tablet Mamari, which demonstrably contain a lunar calendar. Thomas Barthel was the first to mention it. Viktor Krupa has proposed a decipherment of it in 1971 or so, based on Barthel's earlier decipherments, in which he sees a chant; I have proposed a completely different decipherment recently (in the Journal de la Societe des Oceanistes), in which I see a method for predicting the phases of the moon and when intercalary nights should be inserted to keep the calendar correct, based on observing the apparent size of the moon. There are only 19 tablets surviving, and the same text appears, in different versions, on 4 of them. I tend to think that they must contain hard-nosed navigational information, hence the astronomical data. Others, including Barthel, read mythical stories and religious chants (viz "The Eighth Land") in there. Some of those glyphs, and probably their components, must have been phonetic, or at least functioned as phonograms. For instance, the glyph which I read as corresponding the night called "tane" is a convincing picture of a frigate bird, which is "taha" in Pascuan. The night called "maure" is represented by a moon crescent with what looks like a penis. Now, in Pascuan, "ma ure" (in two words) means literally "with penis". Enough said: all that has nothing to do with ASL or conlangs. Treat it as just a diversion. >From cbmvax!uunet!RES-C4.Prime.COM!DWOLFF Wed Jan 27 14:30:19 1993 Return-Path: id AA24624; Wed, 27 Jan 93 13:36:09 EST From: cbmvax!uunet!RES-C4.Prime.COM!DWOLFF Message-Id: <9301271755.AA18854@buphy.bu.edu> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Re: writing ASL Date: 27 Jan 93 12:59:09 EST Status: RO Various people have discussed methods for notating ASL. It seems to me that these are attempts to solve the wrong problem. ASL (and music) contain more dimensions and more information than you can easily transcribe onto paper. Using paper for recording continuous motions makes about as much sense as figuring out how to print the Bible on clay tablets: yes, it can be done, but not very well. Clay tablets are simply an inadequate medium for very large amounts of text (or for text that is duplicated very many times; who would even try to print a daily news tablet?) Paper is an inadequate medium for continuously moving actions. A more reasonable medium is video. Video cameras, VCRs, and TVs are reasonably cheap; computer video is becoming popular. So video is becoming a reasonable medium: readable, writeable, and editable. Forget paper notating! David Wolff dwolff@RES-C4.Prime.COM Disclaimer: Reflecting Computervision policy is a non-goal of this posting. FreeAdvert: Esperanto, the international language *that works*: Call (800) 828-5944 for free info package (US or Canada) Wolff'sLaw: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, but generally too late to do any good. >From cbmvax!snark!cowan Wed Jan 27 18:39:17 1993 Return-Path: id AA05213; Wed, 27 Jan 93 17:19:17 EST id AA03907; Wed, 27 Jan 93 16:52:41 EST Message-Id: From: cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan (John Cowan) Subject: Proposed extension to Vorlin: "-wi" compounds To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu (conlang) Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 15:43:57 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1187 Status: RO The following proposes an upward-compatible extension to Vorlin (or a new way of using existing Vorlin machinery, depending on how you look at it.) Background: Vorlin 2.0 (21 September 1992) has three verbs: the copula "wi", the transitive verb "ic", and the intransitive verb "iz". "ic" and "iz" by themselves mean "make, render, do...to" and "do, engage in" respectively, but their normal use is to be appended to nouns to form the regular transitive and intransitive verbs of the language. All content words in Vorlin are nouns by nature, and become verbal by adding these suffixes. For example, the root "ken" is a noun meaning "knowledge". "kenic" is the transitive verb "to know about...", whereas "keniz" is intransitive meaning "to know", and usually takes a "that"-complement. My proposal is to allow "wi" to serve as a verb-making suffix as well, with the sense "to be a ...". So "kenwi" would be the intransitive verb "to be knowledge". For any use of "kenwi", it would be possible to say something involving "wi...ken" as well, but perhaps not so tersely. Comments? -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From cbmvax!pyramid!pyrps5.eng.pyramid.com!fschulz Wed Jan 27 16:52:33 1993 Return-Path: id AA04208; Wed, 27 Jan 93 16:56:49 EST Message-Id: <9301272054.AA16729@pyrps5.eng.pyramid.com> Subject: writing ASL To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu (constructed lang) Date: Wed, 27 Jan 93 12:54:22 PST From: cbmvax!uunet!pyramid.com!fschulz Reply-To: cbmvax!uunet!pyramid.com!fschulz X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Status: RO David Wolff suggests video should be used to record continuous motions, such as ASL. This is wrong, even given that that equipment is available for free. A group was working on recording cultural dances of groups whose members were about to disappear. Video recordings were tried as a recording medium, but were found to not be useful. Critical parts of the movements wound up not being recorded, so that someone attempting to recreate the dance would be unable to do so. The movements were recorded using a linear notation called Eshkol movement notation. These gave a much more accurate representation of the movement than video and once the movement language was learned, was also much easier to read than video. Eshkol developed his notation after taking the Feldenkreis movement training. The lack of enough resolution in video could be solved by having a full 3d holographic recording. This still does not solve the problem of readability. A relevant motor cortex information representation would be more useful in actually producing the movement. The video signal bandwidth greatly exceeds the information bandwidth, making video a conceptually wrong approach right from the start, even disregarding the other problems. Only the signifigant language information should be recorded. -- Frank Schulz ( fschulz@pyramid.com ) >From cbmvax!uunet!peora.sdc.ccur.com!jwt!hrick Thu Jan 28 09:37:02 1993 Return-Path: id AA14997; Thu, 28 Jan 93 09:02:35 EST To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: re: proposal From: cbmvax!uunet!peora.sdc.ccur.com!jwt!bbs-hrick (Rick Harrison) Reply-To: cbmvax!uunet!peora.sdc.ccur.com!jwt!bbs-hrick Message-Id: <1ao3XB1w164w@jwt.UUCP> Date: Thu, 28 Jan 93 00:40:59 EST Organization: The Matrix Status: RO John Cowan proposes allowing the copula "wi" to compound with Vorlin nouns as "ic" and "iz" do. This proposal is okay by me, being merely an extension of mechanisms already installed in the language, but John, why do you find "kenwa" more appealing than "wa ken"? or "mi renwa" more attractive than "mi wa ren"? >From cbmvax!uunet!trl.OZ.AU!j.guy Thu Jan 28 01:23:29 1993 Return-Path: id AA23750; Thu, 28 Jan 93 00:15:56 EST Date: Thu, 28 Jan 93 15:42:08 EST From: cbmvax!uunet!trl.OZ.AU!j.guy (Jacques Guy) Message-Id: <9301280442.AA20484@medici.trl.OZ.AU> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: writing ASL Status: RO I strongly disagree with David Wolff, but let's see why. David Wolff objects that: Using paper for recording continuous motions makes about as much sense as figuring out how to print the Bible on clay tablets. I will leave the clay tablets bit for later, and fire the first shot by pointing out that alphabetical writing represents sounds, which are produced by continuous motions of the phonating organs. The outcome of those motions is itself a continuous motion: sound waves. Yet, symbolizing those sounds on paper, stone, vellum, what-have-you, has proved not only possible, but quite, yes, nifty. So it should not follow, in my thinking, that symbolizing the *continuous* motions of ASL by means of *discrete* signs is searching for the Philosopher's Stone. Now for clay tablets. The Phaistos disk is a clay tablet. Its signs were ... STAMPED. Yes, STAMPED, not written by hand. The inadequacy of clay tablets for recording large amounts of texts lies in their bulk. But this observation brings one immediately to question the validity of video as a reasonable medium on the very same criterion. For how many minutes of ASL text would you fit on a CD video? Ask yourselves now how many hours, nay, months worth of ASL signing you could fit on the same CD, with ASL reduced to a set of discrete symbols? Even if the set were very large: think of Chinese. No, video it ain't. This is not Fahrenheit 451, yet... >From cbmvax!uunet!RES-C4.Prime.COM!DWOLFF Thu Jan 28 21:10:40 1993 Return-Path: id AA28179; Thu, 28 Jan 93 21:04:20 EST From: cbmvax!uunet!RES-C4.Prime.COM!DWOLFF Message-Id: <9301282240.AA17047@buphy.bu.edu> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: Re: writing ASL Date: 28 Jan 93 17:42:22 EST Status: RO Sheesh! Post a half-baked idea and the *experts* jump on you! :-) fschulz@pyramid.com writes: > ((...)) > A group was working on recording cultural dances of groups whose members > were about to disappear. Video recordings were tried as a recording > medium, but were found to not be useful. Critical parts of the movements > wound up not being recorded, so that someone attempting to recreate the > dance would be unable to do so. > ((...)) > The lack of enough resolution in video could be solved by having > a full 3d holographic recording. This still does not solve the > problem of readability. A relevant motor cortex information representation > would be more useful in actually producing the movement. Did this group have anyone with video experience? An amateur doing video recording is about as likely to get good results as an amateur doing, let's say, linguistics. Also, a cultural dance is not a language in the sense that we're using it here. ASL, as a means of transmitting ideas (continuously-modulated ones) from person A to person B, should be much clearer than a dance. (Proof: proof by assertion :-) We can assume that someone watching an ASL video already knows how to sign... otherwise we're discussing translation difficulties, not media. > The video signal bandwidth greatly exceeds the information bandwidth, > making video a conceptually wrong approach right from the start, even > disregarding the other problems. Only the signifigant language information > should be recorded. Do we have too little resolution at the same time as too much bandwidth? This sounds contradictory to me... misuse of bandwidth? Video has so much bandwidth that wasting it is not a problem. If e-mail had a better bandwidth we wouldn't see so many flamewars and misunderstandings... redundancy is very useful when dealing with people. > -- > Frank Schulz ( fschulz@pyramid.com ) j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) also writes: > I strongly disagree with David Wolff, but let's see why. > > David Wolff objects that: > > > Using paper for recording continuous motions makes about as much sense as > > figuring out how to print the Bible on clay tablets. > > I will leave the clay tablets bit for later, and fire the first shot by > pointing out that alphabetical writing represents sounds, which are > produced by continuous motions of the phonating organs. The outcome of > those motions is itself a continuous motion: sound waves. Yet, > symbolizing those sounds on paper, stone, vellum, what-have-you, has > proved not only possible, but quite, yes, nifty. So it should not > follow, in my thinking, that symbolizing the *continuous* motions of > ASL by means of *discrete* signs is searching for the Philosopher's > Stone. This point really sounds good and scared me for a moment. :-) However, the sounds we make just happen to be continuous because of the way the "phonating organs" work. We don't lose anything when we reduce the sounds to discrete signs. (Proof: if you listen to a vocoder or other artificial voice, it's comprehensible even if the sound quality is choppy.) On the other... hand, in ASL, a motion's meaning is influenced by its direction, magnitude, and speed. These are directly represented in video; how can they be (easily and clearly) represented in a discrete symbol? (Sounds like notating "35MPH North-by-Nor'noreast, emphasis 5.5" on each motion... do-able but not very effective.) > Now for clay tablets. The Phaistos disk is a clay tablet. Its signs > were ... STAMPED. Yes, STAMPED, not written by hand. The inadequacy > of clay tablets for recording large amounts of texts lies in their > bulk. But this observation brings one immediately to question the > validity of video as a reasonable medium on the very same criterion. > For how many minutes of ASL text would you fit on a CD video? Ask > yourselves now how many hours, nay, months worth of ASL signing > you could fit on the same CD, with ASL reduced to a set of discrete > symbols? Even if the set were very large: think of Chinese. Hmm... perhaps ASL isn't suited for dictionaries. (BTW, good job on reading my mind. I *was* thinking of the bulkiness of tablets, not the problem of reproducing the info -- I'd hate to have to deleiver tons of "newsbrick"!) Maybe video ASL for speeches, lectures, mail, etc and a printed language for things that don't need as much bandwidth (dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc). A good job for multimedia. Or, if I wished to defend this idea, we could consider the work being done on compressing live video. A good compression algorithm should be able to take the video of a person (who is, after all, changing very little from frame to frame) and compress the bejeezus out of it... > No, video it ain't. This is not Fahrenheit 451, yet... Puh-leeze! I *love* books! :-) David Wolff dwolff@S35.Prime.COM (dwolff@RES-C4.Prime.COM going away around Feb. 10) Disclaimer: Reflecting Computervision policy is a non-goal of this posting. FreeAdvert: Esperanto, the international language *that works*: Call (800) 828-5944 for free info package (US or Canada) Wolff'sLaw: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, but generally too late to do any good. >From cbmvax!uunet!cbmmail.commodore.com!CUVMB.BITNET!LOJBAN Tue Jan 19 21:26:25 1993 Return-Path: Message-Id: <9301160958.AA26095@relay1.UU.NET> Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: TECH: se, te, & lujvo X-To: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk X-Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan Status: RO You cannot assume that seljerna is semantically identical to se jerna, as was pointed out. You have given an example of where the English tanru may be taken more broadly than the English lujvo, even though >I< would never guess at the tanru interpretation without a lot of supporting context. Lojban allows any lujvo to take a more restricted meaning, and seljerna could similarly take a more restricted meaning; it >need< not but it >may<. There is no equivalent mechnaism for the unconverted place, so if you want to restrict jerna, you must to so by providing some modifier that indicates what kind of restriction is intended. Zipf's Law, which Lojbanists may seem to worship, requires us to allow seljerna to be used in lieu of a longer lujvo that is more explicit as to the restriction, because we allow seljerna as a lujvo in the first place, and there is no justification in having the longer form when the short form exists, UNLESS it could carry a somewhat different meaning. We are required to have "sel-" forms in lujvo, because a three-part tanru-based lujvo may depend on using the "se" conversion, and could not be made into a lujvo without a rafsi for "se". Ina ddition, as was also pointed out, in some cases, the two-part lujvo based on "sel-" will be shorter than the tanru, and in this case people will tend, because of Zipf 9so we argue) to use the shorter form. lojbab