CONLANG

Equivalent to Grand Master Plans in Proper Linguistics?

Arnt Richard Johansen — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:36:10 +0200

Throughout my undergraduate linguistics studies, I have been exposed to the Neogrammarian hypothesis, that is, the idea that historical sound change can be described as an ordered sequence of phonological rules that operate on a protolanguage to create a daughter language.

When conlangers describe fictional diachronic languages, this set of rules is called a Grand Master Plan, and is sometimes specified to such a precision that it exists as a machine-readable file that can be used by a sound change applier. [...]

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

Douglas Koller — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 22:51:24 -0400

> Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:28:00 -0500
> From: carraxan@GMAIL.COM
> Subject: Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates
> To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU

> 1. Ngedh Tom źuhr John bvozh gron.

> 2. Ngedh Tom źuhr John flekh gron.

> 3. Ngedh Tom źuhr John trregh gron.

> 4. Ngedh Tom źuhr John ezheshmek gron.

> 5. Ngedh Tom źuhr John cho bvozh gron. [...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

Douglas Koller — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 22:41:22 -0400

> Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:14:53 -0500
> From: carraxan@GMAIL.COM
> Subject: Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
> To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU

> The Gravgaln script doesn't have capital letters (actually none of my alien
> scripts do), but I use normal English conventions in the Romanization,
> since not doing so would look like some kind of e.e. cummings poem. Far
> too cutsie for my taste. [...]

Jun11 noun cases

neo gu — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:16:59 -0400

Here's the Jun11 noun case system. It seems to work but I'm concerned about how naturalistic it is. Also, I wonder if the nominative should be called that given the lack of an accusative.

NOUN CASES

* Each noun is implicitly animate or inanimate.
* Nouns are inflected for number and case.
* The numbers are singular (unmarked) and plural (-P).
* Mass nouns lack plural forms.
* Count nouns lack the partitive singular (although the partitive plural is made from the singular stem).
* Inanimate nouns lack the vocative, obviative, comitative, and dative. [...]

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

Adam Walker — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:28:00 -0500

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 9:46 PM, James Kane wrote:

> I haven't started thinking about a lot of the more complex
> constructions like comparative predicates - John is bigger than Andy.
> I'll have to test drive all the new constructions to see how I can get
> all this to work.
>
>
>
I had a dream a couple of weeks ago -- something that almost never happens
to me anymore. And this dream was about the grammar of Gravgaln --
something which has never ever happened before. In that dream, I
discovered how [...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

Adam Walker — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:14:53 -0500

The Gravgaln script doesn't have capital letters (actually none of my alien
scripts do), but I use normal English conventions in the Romanization,
since not doing so would look like some kind of e.e. cummings poem. Far
too cutsie for my taste.

Carrajina uses the Latin alphabet natively and capitalizes the first words
of sentences and proper names, but not proper adjectives since that seems
to be common practice among the Romance languages. I have briefly
considered capitalizing DJ and CH together rather than Dj and Ch, but
haven't ever actually done it as it looks weird to me. [...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

Jörg Rhiemeier — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:57:57 +0200

Hallo conlangers!

On Tuesday 18 June 2013 17:12:08 Roger Mills wrote:

> --- On Mon, 6/17/13, Alex Fink <000024@GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> I haven't made anything which uses Roman script natively.
>
> Alex
> =======================================
> Neither have I.
> My 2 native scripts (Kash and Gwr) don't use capitals either. Kash
> sometimes uses "italics" for proper names, esp. place names, or foreign
> words. [...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

Roger Mills — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:12:08 -0700

--- On Mon, 6/17/13, Alex Fink <000024@GMAIL.COM> wrote:
I haven't made anything which uses Roman script natively.

Alex

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

H. S. Teoh — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:51:43 -0700

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 02:46:05PM +1200, James Kane wrote:
> On 6/18/13, H. S. Teoh wrote:
[...]
> Now I'm even more split over all these options, they all seem so good!
> But I have the perfect solution: because this language is meant to
> have a whole heap of daughters, I will split it into three dialects
> precursor to the three main branches, each with a different way of
> doing the predicate sentences! Maybe one with the VOS order, one with
> the accusative particle and one with a preposition phrase or some
[...]

software vocal tract models?

Alex Fink — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:59:27 -0400

I have some ideas for a random phonology generator which would
overcome certain features I came to find limiting about the model I
used in Gleb.

I understand that software models of the vocal tract exist, that allow
you to specify the positions over time of the various articulators and
then compute what the resulting frequencies / airflows / whatever are.
I'd like to use this to actually generate the relative timings etc.
of the various articulators in the speech stream and then look for
likely articulatory and acoustically based allophonies or sound
changes to occur from there. As such [...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

Sasha Fleischman — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 21:58:23 -0700

For my proto-language that I'm working on, I initially didn't do
capitalization because my romanization is essentially IPA, and there's no
capital ɦ. Since I started working on the language, I've gotten rid of that
phoneme, but the lack of capitals has stuck. Also, now I'm on a different
computer, and it was easier to set up a keyboard layout which uses shift to
access the extra characters I needed than figure out a way to include caps
and non-caps versions. Also, the language isn't written, so it wouldn't
have any capitalization for me to record in my romanization. [...]

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

James Kane — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:46:05 +1200

On 6/18/13, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 12:03:33PM +1200, James Kane wrote:
>> Wow! Thank you to everyone for your replies!
>>
>> My main question of why nominal and adjectival predicates behave
>> weirdly has certainly been answered. I understand that these are in a
>> completely separate class than normal sentences, and while there is no
>> reason why it should be in an accusative case, there is no reason that
>> it shouldn't be.
>>
>> These predicates definitely aren't objects. I now have to decide what
>> I'll do [...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

Alex Fink — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:44:35 -0400

On Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:10:56 -0400, Rich Harrison wrote:

>I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use the latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters. Vorlin, for example, uses uppercase letters only on proper nouns. Sona IIRC only used uppercase letters for non-assimilated foreign words. Lojban seems to be mostly lower-case but some syllables are uppercase, what's up with that?
>
>Any others avoiding traditional capitalization? [...]

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

H. S. Teoh — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:49:31 -0700

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 12:03:33PM +1200, James Kane wrote:
> Wow! Thank you to everyone for your replies!
>
> My main question of why nominal and adjectival predicates behave
> weirdly has certainly been answered. I understand that these are in a
> completely separate class than normal sentences, and while there is no
> reason why it should be in an accusative case, there is no reason that
> it shouldn't be.
>
> These predicates definitely aren't objects. I now have to decide what
> I'll do in my conlang. I could leave it as [...]

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

James Kane — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:03:33 +1200

Wow! Thank you to everyone for your replies!

My main question of why nominal and adjectival predicates behave weirdly has certainly been answered. I understand that these are in a completely separate class than normal sentences, and while there is no reason why it should be in an accusative case, there is no reason that it shouldn't be. [...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

And Rosta — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:31:24 +0100

On Jun 17, 2013 1:10 AM, "Rich Harrison" wrote:
>
> I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use the
latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters.
Vorlin, for example, uses uppercase letters only on proper nouns. Sona IIRC
only used uppercase letters for non-assimilated foreign words. Lojban seems
to be mostly lower-case but some syllables are uppercase, what's up with
that?
>
> Any others avoiding traditional capitalization? [...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

DM — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:40:31 -0400

I also tend to find the use of capitals to be aesthetically displeasing,
and for this reason I tend not to use them in my conlangs. However, when I
write about them in an English-language document (i.e. a grammar
description of the language), I will apply capitalization in areas where
English would generally use them, such as in the name of the language or on
proper nouns. If I include an example of the language, this capitalization
will appear only in the gloss, but not in the text written in the language
itself. [...]

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

Logan Kearsley — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:17:01 -0600

On 17 June 2013 11:49, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 06:46:43PM -0600, Logan Kearsley wrote:
> [...]
>> I think the "they're both equal" argument isn't very strong; if it's
>> possible to identify one as the predicate and one as the subject, then
>> clearly they are not both equal, if only because they have different
>> syntactic roles. And while nominal predicates are sometimes used to
>> indicate actual equality, they're also used to indicate subset
>> relations (e.g. "John is a man" == there's a set of men, John belongs
[...]

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

H. S. Teoh — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:49:17 -0700

On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 06:46:43PM -0600, Logan Kearsley wrote:
> On 15 June 2013 17:07, James Kane wrote:
[...]
> > Is there some inherent reason that this is a weird way to do it?
> > Looking around other natlangs, it seems most of them leave the
> > predicate-y part in the nominative, and so does Esperanto, which I
> > always found counter-intuitive as the rest of the language is very
> > strict in marking the accusative.
> >
> > The explanation was always that they were equal, and neither was doing
[...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

Zach Wellstood — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 02:06:28 -0400

Absolutely all of łaá siri is written in a lowercase romanization because
for some reason I found that including uppercase letters is extremely
aesthetically displeasing.

Zach
--- Rich Harrison wrote:

> I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use the
> latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters.
Vorlin,
> for example, uses uppercase letters only on proper nouns. Sona IIRC only
used
> uppercase letters for non-assimilated foreign words. Lojban seems to be
mostly
> lower-case but some syllables are uppercase, what's up with that?
>
> Any others avoiding [...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

H. S. Teoh — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:32:22 -0700

On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 08:10:56PM -0400, Rich Harrison wrote:
> I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use
> the latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case
> letters. Vorlin, for example, uses uppercase letters only on proper
> nouns. Sona IIRC only used uppercase letters for non-assimilated
> foreign words. Lojban seems to be mostly lower-case but some syllables
> are uppercase, what's up with that?
>
> Any others avoiding traditional capitalization? [...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

MorphemeAddict — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:31:44 -0400

Toki Pona uses caps for name adjectives, at least some of the time.

stevo

On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 9:15 PM, Jim Henry wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 8:10 PM, Rich Harrison wrote:
> > I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use
> the latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters.
> Vorlin, for
>
> Toki Pona uses all lower case. If I recall correctly, Ceqli isn't
> case sensitive, but Rex May is kind of inconsistent about whether he
> capitalizes the first [...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

Padraic Brown — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:58:35 -0700

--- Rich Harrison wrote: > I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use the > latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters. Vorlin, > for example, uses uppercase letters only on proper nouns. Sona IIRC only used > uppercase letters for non-assimilated foreign words. Lojban seems to be mostly > lower-case but some syllables are uppercase, what's up with that? > > Any others avoiding traditional capitalization What counts as "traditional" capitalisation? English? German? French? Mandarin? In the World, there have been no printing presses that utilise movable type since [...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

Jim Henry — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:15:33 -0400

On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 8:10 PM, Rich Harrison wrote:
> I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use the latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters. Vorlin, for

Toki Pona uses all lower case. If I recall correctly, Ceqli isn't
case sensitive, but Rex May is kind of inconsistent about whether he
capitalizes the first letter of a sentence. [...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

MorphemeAddict — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:07:29 -0400

All translit systems into Roman/Latin from non-case writing systems could
qualify, but most simply adopt an English or European standard.

Lojban can use capitalization to mark non-standard (i.e., non-penultimate)
stress (either vowel or whole syllable0 although it seems to be losing
ground to accent marks for the same purpose.

stevo

On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 8:10 PM, Rich Harrison wrote: [...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

MorphemeAddict — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:03:58 -0400

Klingon has no case, but the letters D H I Q S look capital.

stevo

On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 8:10 PM, Rich Harrison wrote:

> I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use the
> latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters.
> Vorlin, for example, uses uppercase letters only on proper nouns. Sona IIRC
> only used uppercase letters for non-assimilated foreign words. Lojban seems
> to be mostly lower-case but some syllables are uppercase, what's up with
> that?
>
> Any others avoiding traditional capitalization?
>

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

Ph. D. — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:42:02 -0400

Rich Harrison wrote:
> I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use the latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters. Vorlin, for example, uses uppercase letters only on proper nouns. Sona IIRC only used uppercase letters for non-assimilated foreign words. Lojban seems to be mostly lower-case but some syllables are uppercase, what's up with that?
>
> Any others avoiding traditional capitalization? [...]

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

Larry Sulky — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:27:26 -0400

All my conlangs -- Konya, Lume, Elomi, and Qakwan, use capitalisation only
on proper names.

On 16 June 2013 20:10, Rich Harrison wrote:

> I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use the
> latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters.
> Vorlin, for example, uses uppercase letters only on proper nouns. Sona IIRC
> only used uppercase letters for non-assimilated foreign words. Lojban seems
> to be mostly lower-case but some syllables are uppercase, what's up with
> that?
>
> Any others avoiding traditional capitalization?
>

Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

C. Brickner — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:15:14 -0400

Senjecas is unicameral, using only the lower case. I figure that, since there are no capital letters in the various Senjecan scripts, why use them in transliterations into the Latin alphabet?

Charlie

----- Original Message -----
I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use the latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters. Vorlin, for example, uses uppercase letters only on proper nouns. Sona IIRC only used uppercase letters for non-assimilated foreign words. Lojban seems to be mostly lower-case but some syllables are uppercase, what's up with that? [...]

writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters

Rich Harrison — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:10:56 -0400

I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use the latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters. Vorlin, for example, uses uppercase letters only on proper nouns. Sona IIRC only used uppercase letters for non-assimilated foreign words. Lojban seems to be mostly lower-case but some syllables are uppercase, what's up with that? [...]

Re: adposition cases

Jyri Lehtinen — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 01:48:02 +0300

>
> If you couldn't get to the link I posted, just googling "Hungarian
> postpositions" should suffice. As one example:
>
> mellett - next to, beside
> mellé - (to) beside
> mellől - from beside
>
> They follow their nouns (postpositions, quelle surprise -- a ház mellett -
> next to the house), but you can also glom possessive suffixes onto these
> where English would use a pronoun:
>
> mellettem - beside me
> mellém - (to) beside me
> mellőlem - from beside me
>
> I don't know what the indigenous term [...]

A trilingual video in gjâ-zym-byn, English, and Sandic

Jim Henry — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:49:14 -0400

Aaron Wood (known as bornforwater on IRC and some other fora) and I
made a short video in gjâ-zym-byn, English, and Sandic.

http://wytn-awake.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-video-in-gja-zym-byn-english-and.html

It wasn't planned much in advance, and there are a few mistakes, both
in the gzb and Sandic speech and in the off-the-cuff English
translations thereof. For instance, {pwĭ-ĉa} should have been
{pĭw-ĉa}. The transcript accurately represents what we actually said
in the video, though. [...]

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

Jörg Rhiemeier — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 15:43:50 +0200

Hallo conlangers!

On Sunday 16 June 2013 08:31:31 R A Brown wrote:

> On 16/06/2013 00:07, James Kane wrote:
> > Hi all
>
> [snip]
>
> >> For both of these constructions, it's simply
> >> verb-subject-direct.object
> >
> > Is there some inherent reason that this is a weird way
> > to do it?
>
> Well, yes, there is. This has been debated before on this
> list. The complement of the copula (if a language uses a
> verb as copula) is not the same as the direct object. In IE
> languages [...]

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

R A Brown — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 14:01:23 +0100

On 16/06/2013 07:08, Alex Fink wrote:
[snip]

> As for Esperanto, the smart money is that it avoids the
> accusative in copular clauses because Greek and Latin
> did,

... and also because his native Polish does - as does
Russian & German - all languages that he had some
familiarity with.

> not because Zamenhof put a lot of thought into thematic
> relations or anything. [...]

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

R A Brown — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 07:31:31 +0100

On 16/06/2013 00:07, James Kane wrote:
> Hi all
[snip]
>>
>> For both of these constructions, it's simply
>> verb-subject-direct.object
>
> Is there some inherent reason that this is a weird way
> to do it?

Well, yes, there is. This has been debated before on this
list. The complement of the copula (if a language uses a
verb as copula) is not the same as the direct object. In IE
languages the direct object can _always_ become the subject
of a passive verb, e.g.
The cat chased the mouse --> The mouse was chased [by the cat]. [...]

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

Alex Fink — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 02:08:36 -0400

On Sun, 16 Jun 2013 11:07:41 +1200, James Kane wrote:

>Is there some inherent reason that this is a weird way to do it?
>Looking around other natlangs, it seems most of them leave the
>predicate-y part in the nominative, and so does Esperanto, which I
>always found counter-intuitive as the rest of the language is very
>strict in marking the accusative.
>
>The explanation was always that they were equal, and neither was doing
>anything to the other; but my natural instinct (my L1 is English) is
>that, in something like 'he is John', John comes after the [...]

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

Rich Harrison — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 22:17:20 -0400

Probably going off on a tangent here, but does it help to eliminate the copula? If you don't have a vague be/am/is thing in your language, then you only have subject-verb-object statements and of course it makes sense to put the "predicate" in the accusative:

let's say "seteni" is a transitive verb meaning "to be a member of the set of" [...]

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

Adam Walker — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 21:13:46 -0500

Gravgaln puts the first argument in either the Agentiv or the
Patientive cases depending on volition of the subject and the second
argument in Equative case.

Adam

On 6/15/13, James Kane wrote:
> On 16/06/2013, at 12:46 PM, Logan Kearsley wrote:
>
>> On 15 June 2013 17:07, James Kane wrote:
>>> Hi all
>>>
>>> Recently there was a thread on how people formed nominal or adjectival
>>> predicates in their conlangs, and specifically about languages that
>>> mark case on nouns. Most replies marked the predicate in either the
>>> nominative or zero-marked it. Here [...]

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

James Kane — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 13:55:19 +1200

On 16/06/2013, at 12:46 PM, Logan Kearsley wrote:

> On 15 June 2013 17:07, James Kane wrote:
>> Hi all
>>
>> Recently there was a thread on how people formed nominal or adjectival
>> predicates in their conlangs, and specifically about languages that
>> mark case on nouns. Most replies marked the predicate in either the
>> nominative or zero-marked it. Here was my reply (tl;dr I mark the
>> predicate parts in the accusative/direct object case)
>>
>>> The latest lang that I've been working on, Mulesuax, is quite analytic.
>>> While it doesn't feature case [...]

Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

Logan Kearsley — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 18:46:43 -0600

On 15 June 2013 17:07, James Kane wrote:
> Hi all
>
> Recently there was a thread on how people formed nominal or adjectival
> predicates in their conlangs, and specifically about languages that
> mark case on nouns. Most replies marked the predicate in either the
> nominative or zero-marked it. Here was my reply (tl;dr I mark the
> predicate parts in the accusative/direct object case)
>
>> The latest lang that I've been working on, Mulesuax, is quite analytic.
>> While it doesn't feature case endings, it does feature case particles that
>> come before [...]

Nominal and Adjectival Predicates

James Kane — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 11:07:41 +1200

Hi all

Recently there was a thread on how people formed nominal or adjectival
predicates in their conlangs, and specifically about languages that
mark case on nouns. Most replies marked the predicate in either the
nominative or zero-marked it. Here was my reply (tl;dr I mark the
predicate parts in the accusative/direct object case)

> The latest lang that I've been working on, Mulesuax, is quite analytic.
> While it doesn't feature case endings, it does feature case particles that
> come before the noun in question, as Mulesuax is strongly head-initial.
>
> So _ua_ is used for 'X [...]

Re: ablaut plus height harmony

neo gu — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 00:05:12 -0400

On Fri, 14 Jun 2013 21:43:38 -0400, Alex Fink <000024@GMAIL.COM> wrote:

>On Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:08:57 -0400, neo gu wrote:
>
>>In my latest sketch, which is supposed to be naturalistic for a change, the protolanguage has 4 vowels, call them I, U, E, and A (or O). Most roots are CVCVC with each V specified only as being front or back. There may be a suffixed V, also front or back. This leaves 2 ablaut grades, high and low, which affect both the root and suffix V due to the height harmony. E.g. *xIwIm-U vs *xEwEm-A. For [...]