archives of the CONLANG mailing list
------------------------------------



Message-Id: <20295.9107251626@ucl.ac.uk>
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Dhamiathua paternoster
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 91 17:26:41 +0100
From: And Rosta 


*** For the **sui-generis** **gratia-artis** language fans
(**_glossapoeicists_?**):
the Dhamiathua text promised before the offical inception of CONLANG.

This paternoster translation is the last extant text of the extinct language
Dhamiathua, which was an offshoot of a historically earlier stage of Yathoyua,
a language spoken and invented by Leo Marshall.

I have found a short (a couple of hundred words) English-Dhamiathua lexicon,
but hardly anything on the syntax or morphology. Fortunately I have found a
word-by-word gloss of the paternoster text and its dedication. Some of the
verbal morphology is guessable from the text, the gloss and the fragmentary
grammatical notes.
    present indicative simple          -
    present indicative progressive     -(a)nt
    past indicative simple             -dha
    past indicative progressive        -(a)nda
    future indicative simple           -zhi
    future indicative progressive      -(a)nzhi
    present subjunctive simple         -sh
    present subjunctive progressive    -(a)ntash
    past subjunctive simple            -dhash
    past subjunctive progressive       -(a)ndash
    future subjunctive simple          -zhish
    future subjunctive progressive     -(a)nzhish
There is an auxiliary verb baisc used for Perfect, Habitual and 'Antiperfect'
aspects. The tense of baisc indicates the aspectual reference point:
    mi bai sha       I (habitually) hold
    mi bai shadha    I have held
    mi bai shazhi    I am going to hold, I am to hold
    mi badha sha     I used to hold
    mi badha shadha  I had held
    mi badha shazhi  I was to hold, I was going to hold
    mi bazhi sha     I shall (habitually) hold
    mi bazhi shadha  I shall have held
    mi bazhi shazhi  I shall be going to hold
The auxiliary doesn't occur in the progressive, but its complement can:
    mi bai shanda    'I have been holding'
    etc.

I give the plain text first and then a glossed version.

Typographic alterations from the original are:
  acute -> ' (An apostrophe following a vowel indicates that the vowel is
              stressed (default stress is on the final syllable).)
  thorn -> th
  eth -> dh
  s-caron -> sh
  z-caron -> zh
(_c_ always represents [k]; doubled vowels are long)

PLAIN TEXT:

[handwritten:]
Dzha'min bai boduadha camma zhi Iathua

[dedication:]
Mehha camma shishshesh Ii'o Maashu
hens bai scazhanda Iathua
fo bai puesse Dhamiathua

[heading:]
Scazhmos (Pa"teno'ste) Dhamiathua

[text:]
Scazha imos hens sue uth embuasc:
mehha amomiash thaha isha;
mehha empia isha suthesh;
mehha bash bash ca zhens shi faha [sic?],
uth entsha uz bai uth embuasc.
Ossenshi zhi mos uth uema puepa imos zi ue,
fo shanshi sa piei mos idzhbasc imos,
uz mei sha sa piei tshadzhba zhi mos,
fo uanshi sa mos zhi catshosce
uthuocei itshos uanshi mos dha catshotshoo.
Dha shi bai empia pia io shizhzhesc zhi tha,
du thofo fo thofo,
amen.


GLOSS:
(NEUT: neutral for number; SG: singular; PROG: progressive;
DESID: desiderative particle; NOM: nominative; ACC: accusative;
GEN: genitive; REL: relative; PRES: present; SBJ: subjuctive;
IND: indicative; IMP: imperative)

Dzha'min bai           bodua-dha camma zhi Iathua
Jamin    have+PRES+IND send-PAST this  to  Yathoyua
"Dzhamin has translated this into Yathoyua" [NB Dhamiathua was
(unjustifiably) viewed as merely a dialect of Yathoyua.]

Mehha camma shishshe-sh Ii'o Maashu
DESID this  please-SBJ  Leo  Marshall
"May this please Leo Marshall"

hens bai           scazha-n-da             Iathua
who  have+PRES+IND give_birth_to-PROG-PAST Yathoyua
"who has been creating Yathoya"

fo  bai           puesse        Dhamiathua
and have+PRES+IND feed+PRES+IND Dhamiathua
"and feeds Dhamiathua"

Scazhmos (Pa"teno'ste) Dhamiathua
"Dhamiathua Paternoster"

scazha imos       hens    sue         uth embuasc
parent 1+NEUT+GEN REL+NOM be+PRES+IND at  heaven

mehha amomia-sh         thaha isha
DESID venerate+PRES-SBJ name  2+SG+GEN

mehha empia isha     suthe-sh
DESID realm 2+SG+GEN become+PRES-SBJ

mehha ba-sh         ba-sh       ca    zhens   shi      faha
DESID have+PRES-SBJ do+PRES-SBJ thing REL+ACC 2+SG+NOM want+PRES+IND

[maybe it should be _fahash_]

uth entsha uz bai           uth embuasc
at  world  as have+PRES+IND at  heaven

osse-nshi zhi mos        uth uema  puepa imos       zi ue
give-IMP  to  1+NEUT+ACC at  today bread 1+NEUT+GEN to day

fo  sha-nshi sa  piei mos        idzhba-sc     imos
and hold-IMP not over 1+NEUT+ACC misbehave-INF 1+NEUT+GEN

uz mei        sha           sa  piei tshadzhba  zhi mos
as 1+NEUT+NOM hold+PRES+IND not over maltreater to  1+NEUT+NOM

fo  ua-nshi  sa  mos        zhi catshosce
and lead-IMP not 1+NEUT+NOM to  temptation

uthuocei itshos     ua-nshi  mos        dha  catshotshoo
instead  3+NEUT+GEN lead-IMP 1+NEUT+ACC from evil

dha  shi      bai           empia pia   fo  shizhzhe-sc zhi tha
from 2+SG+NOM have+PRES+IND realm power and praise-INF  to  2+SG+ACC

du     thofo    fo  thofo
during eternity and eternity

amen


*********************************
And Rosta

--------------------------------------------------------------------------


Message-Id: <9107261442.AA06471@BU.EDU>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 91 10:40 EDT
From: Ronald Hale-Evans 
Subject: Zemblan: a vocab and references
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu


Greetings, all--

I have two goodies for you. One is a set of two pointers to more information on
Zemblan, the constructed language from Vladimir Nabokov's *Pale Fire* (a
hilarious, moving, and provocative book--read it or be exiled) and the other is
a rough, incomplete  vocabulary of Zemblan that I put together. I've decided
not to reinvent the wheel (hate to use a cliche', but I've decided not to
reinvent the wheel (... so I'm not going to work any more on reconstructing
Zemblan till I chase down these references and discover what's been done.
Enjoy!

*******************

Here are the pointers:

author = "John R. Krueger",
title = "Nabokov's Zemblan: A Constructed Language of Fiction",
journal = "Linguistics: An International Review", #31, May '67, pp.44-49

author = "Ronald E. Peterson",
title = "Zemblan: Nabokov's Phony Scandinavian Language",
journal = "Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter", #12, Spring '84, pp.29-37

*******************

And here's the vocab (page numbers refer to the Berkley paperback):

-ka: (diminutive?)
-ula: little?
alf: elf
alfear: uncontrollable fear caused by elves, p.94
Alfin : Elfin?
alkan: hungry, p.202
belwif: beautiful woman
berg: mountain?
bin: been
Blenda: ?
bogtur: ancient warrior, p.72
bore: farmhouse, p.92
bote: destroyer (bane?), p.179
Bregberg:
bret: chess
buch: book
buchmann: a little pillar of library books, p.107
Cap Turc: Cape Turk?, p.137
cap: cape?
Catkin: "in Catkin week" -- ?-king
Conmal: p.162
coramen: crude strap used by two peasants, p. 90
crapula: hangover, p.106
dett: child
dett: child
dirst: thirst
dirstan: thirsty, p.202
drungen: bramble-choked footpaths, p.164
ebanumf: ebony parts
est: is
eto: that
Falkberg:
fear: fear
fufa: sweater, p.95
garl: girl
gev: give
goliart: court jester, p.165
grados: tree, p.60
grum: groom
grunter: mountain farmer, p.93
Gut: God, p.202
harvalda: "the heraldic one", type of butterfly (monarch?), p.114
hotinguens: tight, short shorts, p.80
id: it
if: weeping willow
ik: his? also ?
indran: without (outside)
ivur: ivory
izba: hut?
kamer: chamber
kamergrum: chamber groom, p.71
kin: king
Kinbote: King-?
kinbote: king-destroyer, p.179
komizars: commissars, p.78
Kongs-skugg-sio ("The Royal Mirror"): a 12th-c. Zemblan literary work, p.47
kot or: what is the time? ("what hour?"), p.92
kot: what
kumpf: compass
lan: long
lev: live(d)?
lil: lily? lilies?
lumbar: lumber
lumbarkamer: lumber room, p. 88
mag: make, p.202
Mandevil, Mt.: Mt. Devil's Heap? 
mann: pile, heap
mid: with
min: mine
minna: darling
minnamin, darling-mine, p.202
mira: mirage
miragarl: mirage girl, p.70
moskovett: "bitter blast"? a wind, p.110
mowntrop: dirt road? field? p.165
Mt. Glitterntin:
muder: mother
muderperlwelk: iridescent cloudlet (mother-of-pearl-cloud), p. 76
mujik: peasant? p.120
Mutraberg: 
muwan: mow (the field next to a barn)
narstran: a place in Hell? a hall?, p.143
natt: night
nattdett: child of night, p.68
Nattochdag: Night --- ?
nippern: domed hills, p.95
nitran: within
onhava-onhava: far, far away, p.171
onhava: far away
or: hour, time
Oswin Bretwit: Oswin? Chess-mind
pa: peacock
Paberg: Mt. Peacock, p.95
pel: tail
perl: pearl
Pern: Satan, the Devil, p.202
phantana: fountains
promnad vespert mid J.S.: evening walk with J.S.
promnad: walk, p.57
putti: boys? p.73
ragh: revenge
raghdirst: thirst for revenge, p. 54
Rodnaya: (in "Rodnaya Zembla", p.62) = ?
romaunt: romance, p.199
roz: roses? rose?
rusker sirsusker: Russian seersucker suit, p.183
rusker: Russian
sam: silk
sampel ("silktail"): a Zemblan crested bird, p.45
shalk: knave
shalksbore: knave's farm, p.139
shargar: puny ghost, p.155
shoot: chute
shootka: little chute, p.148
sirsusker: seersucker suit
situla: toy pail, p.82
snew: four
stana: hundred
stein: stone
steinmann: a heap of stones erected as memory of ascent, p.94
tas: yew
teste: ?, p.184
Thurgus: ?
Timon Afinsken: Timon of Athens (Shakespearean play), p.84
trem: dream
tremkin: dream-king, p.70
tri stana: three hundred
tri: three
turc: Turk?
uf: to?
ufgut: adieu, p.185 (lit. "to God")
ut: and
vebodar: upland pastures, p. 90
verbalala: camels
vespert: evening, p.57
votchez: father
war: were?
welk: cloud
wid: with
wit: intelligence, mind
wod: would
wodnaggen: a wood and brick (?), half-timbered Zemblan house, p. 52
wodo: would have? would?
yeg ved ik: i know not, p.87
zhiletka : (in "zhiletka blades") = razor (lit. "little Gillette")

--end of vocab--


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Mon, 29 Jul 91 09:09:58 EDT
From: ross@buphy.bu.edu (John Ross)
To: tdr@sv001.sandiego.ncr.com, loop!dont@uunet.uu.net,
        lojbab@snark.thyrsus.com, cellar!marquidf@uunet.uu.net,
        castrov!constructed-lang@uunet.uu.net, shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu,
        silverma@sunburn.ec.usf.edu, timm@kant.cogsci.uiuc.edu,
        lsuc!canrem!csaba.lendvay@uucp.cs.toronto.edu
Subject: Welcome!




        WELCOME TO THE CONSTRUCTED LANGUAGE MAILING LIST!

 This list is devoted exclusively to the discussion and dissemination of
information about constructed languages past, present, or future. If
you are an avid Esperantist or Lojbanist, if you've created your own
languages as a child (childhood doesn't have to end after puberty! :-)),
or maybe you love to read Tolkien and would like to talk about Quenya
and Sindarin -- this is the forum for you! Learn and enjoy in whatever
language!

For administrative matters, send email to:

		ross@buphy.bu.edu  (John B Ross)

To post, email to:

		conlang@buphy.bu.edu


	            -- JR
**************************************************************

 I apologize that I didn't add all your names earlier. I was on vacation
last week. I also am quite green when it comes to the computer and many
of you gave me addresses which bounced email. I think I've figured
out the problems and hope this message gets to you. Let me know if it
doesn't :-). 

		Best,

		-- JR



--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Mon, 29 Jul 91 10:43:49 EDT
From: ross@buphy.bu.edu (John Ross)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: I'm back


Dear Folks,

 I'm extremely pleased to see the 50 or so postings to the list while I
was gone. It appears that the mailing list is a success and has
certainly exceeded Steve Rice's and my expectations. (Steve is the
co-founder of this list.) To answer a few questions:

Stephen Tice -- the mailer is nothing other than a system alias. Under
the alias "conlang" there is a pointer to a file called "langlist" in my
account (ross/langlist) which has all of your names. That's all! And
to think that my system manager had so much trouble implementing this!

Steve, have you heard of Interglossa? It seems to be a lang in line with
your conception of a streamlined universal language. It uses
international Greek and Latin roots and its syntax is Chinese (!). I
know that you are interested in not just one "streamlang" but several
corresponding to the major langs of the world (I hope I got this right)
so this may not be helpful info. Anyway, Interglossa was revived as
Glosa about 10 yrs ago and is reviewed in Andrew Large's book on the
int'l lang movement. 

John Cowan -- It's no problem for me to have all administrative matters
sent to me at ross@buphy.bu.edu. Therefore I don't need to have a
separate alias like "conlang-admin" or something like that. Of course,
if the administrative details are taken up by another person on buphy,
then not having a separate alias is troublesome. 

Rick Harrison -- I got your snail today at the physics dept. Babm will
be on the way! I'll also check into the article from the Journal of
Memory and Lang at the lib here.

Steve Rice -- I made it through the 4th chapter of Loglan 1 and am
starting the 5th. I had some questions about ra versus lo but forgot
them. Everything seems clear all of a sudden; I wish more things in life
happened this way :-)!

		Sia loa, hue la Djan Ros.

		wy sana!

		-- JR


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 30 Jul 91 00:51 CDT
From: Stephen Tice 
Subject: How many threads can u juggle at one time?
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
X-Vms-To: IN%"conlang@buphy.bu.edu"
X-Vms-Cc: B645ZAW

rinsa ConLango,
 
John R. -- ckire Conlang!! Welcome Back!
 re. "Glossa," Thanks for the heads-up, I'll be on the look-out.
 re. "streamlang," I certainly hope to have a starter module for
      learning many of the natural languages. Bodmer has done a good
      deal of the work in _The Loom of Language_ by giving common word
      lists for the major tongues. It'll be a while yet, but I'll be
      keying them into the computer. Ah, if only there were starter
      modules for all the different contructed languages. I'd like
      to smorgasboard them before marriage. {.. so laments a
      polygamous polyglottal polywog =-}
 
Hmm ... Interglossa, Glossa, Mario Pei, Roget ... all wonderful
 suggestions from the folks here.
 
Doug@netcom:
 Have Pei's _How to Learn a Language and What Language to Learn_,
 still digesting. {Is this the one you meant?} Have you seen Bodmer's
 book _ The Loom of Language, An Approach to the Mastery  of Many 
 Languages_ ?
 
Rick H.:
 I sure you have The Loom. Have gotten a copy of the intro
 to the original Roget's; most impressed with his life story!
 Currently savouring categories <- good vintage :-)
 
Ron H-E comments:
(1) "Well, I've been trying to compile a list of acronyms used in
     speech." If u don't have it, enclosed below might help.
(2) Pls, post enomic rules & emailme game loci.  
(3) Lv ths lng wth n vwls. Great intro book on redundancy is
    _ Grammatical Man _ by Jeremy Campebell:
 
 `One reason for the failure of artificial languages as a universal 
  means of communication is just this: that they underestimate the
  complexity of the language faculty itself. . . . The early 
  artificial languages, intended for use by scholarly men, were too
  logical. The later ones, designed to be learned quickly by the
  masses . . . were not complex enough in syntax and word use.'
  (261-262).
 
The best redundancy I've found yet is repetition. On the military
teletypes (shortwave is very noisy) we would use the code "IMI" 
meaning "I say again." It could be used as a request or a notice.
Language is highly redundant, and could use a diet :-} 
 
==(start)==
From: cth@hpfcso.FC.HP.COM (CT Hart)
Newsgroups: alt.romance
Subject: Re: short-terms
Date: 22 May 91 19:01:30 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Lines: 96
 
This is part of a list I put together some time ago, far more (I'm sure) 
than you wanted...
 
ACRONYM                EXPLANATION
 
AA.....................Affirmative Action
aka....................Also Known As
ASAP...................As Soon As Possible
AYC....................At Your Convenience
BTW....................By The Way
CPSC...................Consumer Product Safety Commission
DIY....................Do It Yourself
DL.....................Distribution List
DOA....................Dead On Arrival
DWIM...................Do What I Mean
EMACS..................Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping
EOE....................Equal Opportunity Employer
EPA....................Environmental Protection Agency
ESB....................Environmentally Sensitive Behavior
ETA....................Estimated Time of Arrival
FAQ....................Frequently Asked Question
FCFS...................First Come First Served
FIFO...................First In, First Out
FUBAR..................(expletive) Up Beyond All Recognition
FUD....................Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
FURPS..................Functionality, Usability, Reliability, Performance,
                        and Supportability
FWIW...................For What It's Worth
FYI....................For Your Information
g-job or gjob..........Government job, or a project that is of a personal
                        or unofficial nature 
GIGO...................Garbage In, Garbage Out
IEGOYC or IEGYC........Insert Ethnic Group Of/of Your Choice
IMHO...................I Might Humbly Observe
IMHO...................In My Humble Opinion
IMNSHO.................In My Not So Humble Opinion
IMO....................In My Opinion
ITO....................In Terms Of
LIFO...................Last In, First Out
LOA....................Leave Of Absence
MIDI...................Musical Instrument Digital Interface
MO.....................Modus Operandi (Method of Operation)
MOTD...................Message Of The Day
MOTOS..................Member(s) Of The Opposite Sex
MOTSS..................Member(s) Of The Same Sex
NIH....................Not Invented Here
NIH....................Not In-House, foreign, therefore bad.
NIMBY..................Not In My Back Yard
NPI....................No Pun Intended
OEM....................Original Equipment Manufacturer
OJT....................On the Job Training
OOP....................Object Oriented Programming
OSF....................Open Software Foundation
OTOH...................On The Other Hand
PACE...................Precision Architecture Computing Environment
PDQ....................Pretty Darn Quick
PICS...................Phone In Consulting Service
POTS...................Plain Old Telephone Service
RFI....................Request For Information
RISC...................Reduced Instruction Set Computer
ROI....................Return On Investment
RPN....................Reverse Polish Notation
RSI....................Repetitive Strain Injury
RTFM...................Read The (expletive) Manual
SASE...................Self Addressed, Stamped Envelope
SIG....................Special Interest Group
SNAFU..................Situation Normal All, (expletive)/Fouled Up
SO.....................Significant Other
SOL....................Sh*t/Simply Out of Luck
SWBI...................Sure Would Be Nice If
TANSTAAFL..............There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
TAT....................Turn Around Time
TBA....................To Be Announced
TBD....................To Be Determined/Decided
TIA....................Thanks In Advance
TOC....................Table Of Contents
TQC....................Total Quality Control
TTFN...................Ta Ta For Now
USnail.................Humorous reference to the US Mail, also called
                        snail mail
VAR....................Value Added Resellers
VHE....................Virtual Home Environment
WIBNI..................Wouldn't It Be Nice If
WIP....................Work In Progress
WKS....................Well Known Service
WRT....................With Respect To
WYSIWYG................What You See Is What You Get
YA*....................Yet Another *
YTD....................Year To Date
 
You will find others, I'm sure...
Especially if you get off into an area devoted to a specific interest.
                                       
                                  -CT
cth@hpfcsx.fc.hp.com  
==(end)==
 
_ Stephen T. _ (b645zaw@utarlg.uta.edu) [picaillon (Fr) =  sicni (Lb)?]



--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 7 Aug 91 10:12 EDT
From: Ronald Hale-Evans 
Subject: Klingon! (yeah!)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
X-Vms-To: CONLANG

Found this in rec.arts.startrek.info. You can bet I'm subscribing right after I
send this message. Also going to a Boston Trek con this weekend in hopes of
snagging a Klingon dictionary.

Ron



From: eli@ima.isc.com (Elias Israel)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.startrek.info
Subject: Learn Klingon!
Date: 5 Aug 91 18:34:54 GMT
Reply-To: eli@ima.isc.com
Followup-To: rec.arts.startrek
Organization: Vulcan Science Academy, Tau Ceti Sector



		      tlhIngan Hol Dajatlh DaneH'a'?
	       Do you want to speak the Klingon Language?


Do you sometimes wish that you could speak confidentially to your
friends or your mate while in the presence of humans? At parties, do
you ever wish you could impress your date with a language ability that
shows *real* culture? Do you find yourself in combat situations where
giving short but meaningful commands could mean the difference between
victory and death?

		Then Klingon is the language for you!

Announcing the creation of the first mailing list that caters
specifically to people who are trying to learn the Klingon language.
In this free-wheeling mailing list, you'll find plenty of people with
whom you can practice your Klingon language skills. Discussions will
include Klingon spelling and grammar, history, politics, strategy, and
effective battle management for fleet engagements of any size. In
fact, messages can cover just about anything, so long as they're in
Klingon. The main point is to learn to use the language.

What is the Klingon language? Why the language of the Klingon Empire,
of course. The recognized syntax, spelling, and vocabulary of the
Klingon language are defined by _The Klingon Dictionary_, by Mark
Okrand. Mr. Okrand developed the Klingon language for use in _Star
Trek III: The Search For Spock_. Ever since then, the language he
developed has been used whenever Klingon dialogue is required in the
Star Trek movies and in _Star Trek: The Next Generation_.

Beginners and experts, young and old, bumpy foreheads and smooth ones
too: everyone is welcome!  If you want to learn the Klingon language,
this is your chance.

To sign up for this exciting new mailing list, send mail to
. When I add you to the
mailing list, I'll send you a message that tells you how to post and
what guidelines you should follow.

Do it today!



--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 7 Aug 91 12:48:03 CDT
From: lynne@kant.cogsci.uiuc.edu (Lynne Murphy)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: linguists & conlangs

ok, there seems to be some misunderstanding here about why linguists usually
don't study artificial languages (including constructed languages).

most theoretical linguists today are interested in getting behind language
to what exists in the mind: how the mind is structured.  this interest lies
behind what we call "plato's problem": how does one learn to be able to 
be infinitely productive in a language in a finite amount of time?  this 
mystery is greatest in the case of first language acquisition: with only
some examples of how the language is used (e.g. by a parent), how does the
child figure out what is important, what is necessary, what is trivial, 
what is grammatical and what is ungrammatical?  the most prevalent theory
(and hardest to dispute) today is that we are born with an innate language
acquisition device (LAD) which limits us to certain types of grammars. 
(certainly, the extant languages of the world are incredibly similar, and form
a very small subset of possible languages.)

in trying to find what is universal about languages (and thus, perhaps discover
what is innate), we look at languages which are acquired as first languages
by humans (i.e. languages which have native speakers).  very few conlangs have
native speakers and often there is much dispute as to whether children who
supposedly are raised in a conlang are actually exposed to the conlang first.
certainly, though, many linguists would be interested in first and second
generation native speakers of a conlang, as experience with these people
(and the adjustments they make to the conlang) would indicate if any of the 
devices of the conlang are inconsistent with the LAD.

certainly, not all linguists are hard at work looking for the LAD (most are not
even directly looking for it).  conlangs might interest us for other reasons.
for instance, it occurs to me that specialists in pidgin development, code-
switching and other such sociolinguistic phenomena would do well to look at 
conlangs.

my own study of conlangs is unrelated to my more professional linguistic study,
as it is more anthropological and stylistic.  but even without the prejudices
against artificial languages working against linguistic study of conlangs, there
is a more practical barrier to such study:  who would fund the study of conlangs?
not any organization with links to a geographical area, not the nsf, and i
haven't seen the computer companies offer any grants for it!

(btw, no reputable linguist would argue that any word/meaning relations were not
arbitrary, with the possible exception of onomatopoeia.)

lynne murphy


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Fri, 9 Aug 91 12:21 EDT
From: Ronald Hale-Evans 
Subject: Linguistic SF reading list
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
X-Vms-To: CONLANG

Following are two *old* net articles I thought y'all/youse might be interested
in, about linguistic SF. (John R., this stuff's for you!)

DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY OTHER SUGGESTIONS FOR THIS TYPE OF READING?

Ron

**************************************************

>From: ALBERGA@ibm.COM (Cyril Alberga)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-lovers
Subject: Science Fiction as seen by a linguist
Date: 26 May 88 16:46:07 GMT

Browsing in the library at work I found a tongue-in-cheek item in the
"Topic...Comment" section of "Natural Language and Linguistic Theory"
Volume 6 (1988) pp 282-290.  The item is entitled "Some lists of things
about books", by Geoffry K. Pullum, UC Santa Cruz.  After some Chomsky-
bashing are such sub-headings as "10 Books called 'Semantics'", "6 Books in
English whose titles are not grammatical Phrases or sentences", "4
extraordinarily ignorant claims about languages in books by linguists", and
to the point, "6 science fiction novels for linguists."

I attach that section as an example of a different view of some stories.  I, at
least, found it fascinating to see a (to me) foreign discipline nit-pick with
the rest of us.

   (Caveat: I am not a linguist, and while most of what follows is clear,
    there is some jargon which eludes my comprehension.  I CANNOT explicate
    most of it.)

What follows is quoted totally without permission.

Cyril N. Alberga
--------------------------------------------------------


6 Science Fiction Novels for Linguists

1. "Babel-17", by Samuel R. Delany (1966).  A brilliant linguist heroine
   assigned to that ultimate linguist's nightmare, the analysis of a language
   from outer space that does not conform to the principles of UG; a leading
   character called Butcher who has been equipped with an internalized language
   in which the PERSON feature has only the value 3rd, rendering him unable to
   distinguish between his own reactions and those of others; the fate of the
   solar system hanging on the solution of an analytical problem in
   linguistics....  This novel won the Nebula Award for 1966, even without any
   linguists being asked.

2. "The Embedding", by Ian Watson (1973).  A novel about the mental organ.
   Experimental psycholinguistics performed on human infants without human
   subject ethical controls....Hallucinatory drug use by an Amazonian people
   with an extraordinary language called Xemahoa....  Interstellar travellers to
   earth with a scientific enthusiasm for the study of the mind/brain, who
   demand "...six brains, programmed with different languages.  And instruction
   tapes...".  World governments' reaction to the first contact with Beyond....
   This first novel is somewhat unconvincing on the syntactic side (yes, the
   "embedding" of the title is syntactic center-embedding), but quite powerful
   nonetheless.

3. "The Dispossessed", by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974).  Relatively little
   linguistics, though there are linguistic footnotes and excursi.  But what
   linguists will enjoy most in this novel of anarchist political structure and
   cross-cultural communication is the sheer intellectualism, the sense of
   mathematics and physics and what it is like to live the life of the mind,
   together with a glimpse of what academia might be like in a peaceful but
   thoroughly anarchist political system.  The best novel in the list.

4. "Contact", by Carl Sagan (1985).  The first contact with an extraterestrial
   intelligence: a message is received from outer space, and the world's
   intellectual community sets about the task of deciphering it.  This task is,
   of course, essentially an instance of what learnability theorists call
   "language identification in the limit from text," which is unsolvable under
   any reasonable conditions; but somehow they figure it out, which will make
   the book of passing interest to those who have reflected upon learnability
   or language acquisition.  The ending is pretty sappy, but as light reading
   about interspecies linguistic communication, the book deserves a mention.

5. "The Poison Oracle", by Peter Dickinson (1974).  No spaceships; this is
   science fiction only in the sense that it invents a social, geographical, and
   ethnolinguistic milieu, and has a scientist (a psycholinguist/zoologist) as
   hero.  The ingredients include hijacking, murder, a linguistically competent
   chimpanzee witness, and the dauntingly fierce Q'Kuti marsh-dwellers, who
   greet our hero with the one-word formal greeting Kt!urochaRHa'ygharalocht!in,
   analyzable as follows:

Kt!U-       r-     och-  aR-      Ha'y-      gharal-  och-  t!inG
wallow.LOC- EMPTY- POSS- 1PER.PL- PERMISSIVE-buffalo- POSS- 2PER.SG9th.CLAN

'Thy buffaloes may rest in my wallow.'

   Kt!u is the locative of K!tu, the locative case being formed by consonantal
   metathesis, a nice little morphological touch.  (If that '!' segment is a
   post-alveolar click, perhaps the original range of the Khoisan language
   family extended even further north than Hadza and Sandawe would suggest,
   because internal evidence sets this novel somewhere in the region of the
   Iraqi marshlands.  But phonetic considerations suggest otherwise: you can't
   release a dental pulmonic stop and immediately embark on a velaric ingressive
   stop that is also coronal.  Perhaps the '!' is glottal.)  At one point in the
   book, speaking about reading Chairman Mao in the original, the hero observes,
   "you can understand a language without understanding what someone is saying,
   That's one of the things psycholinguistics is about."  Quite so, and pleasant
   to find a novelist who knows it.

6. "The Languages of Pao", by Jack Vance (1957).  From Mao to Pao.  The original
   language of the planet Pao had no verbs and no adjectives.  How can anything
   be said given such a linguistic deficit?  The morpheme gloss of a sentence
   meaning 'The farmer chops down the tree' is given as follows:

farmer-EXRT axe-INSTR tree-VICT

   where EXRT indicates 'in a state of physical exertion', INSTR indicates 'an
   instrument or agency', and VICT indicates 'in a state of subjection to an
   attack.'  A more complex example is this utterance, spoken to a
   representative from the planet Mercantil:

rhomel- en-  shrai bogal- mercantil- nli- en  mous-  es-   nli- ro
IMPRT-  RDY- two   ear-   Mercantil- GEN- RDY mouth- PROX- GEN- VOL

'There are two matters I wish to discuss with you.'

   Here, IMPRT is an importance marker, RDY indicates being in a state of
   readiness, GEN is the genitive suffix, PROX indicates 'this person here', and
   VOL indicates 'in a state of volition'; 'Two-important-things-ready
   Mercantil's-ear-ready this-person's-mouth-willing.'  Getting the hang of it?
   Linguist readers of this novel about language planning will be relieved to
   know that by the end of the story the hapless Paonese are being provided with
   a new language intended to shake them out of their political apathy, the
   original one having given them a bad case of Orwell's Problem.


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Date: Tue, 13 Aug 91 15:13:12 CDT
From: lynne@kant.cogsci.uiuc.edu (Lynne Murphy)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: laadan grammar, etc.

the laadan grammar and dictionary is available from:
	Society for the Furtherance and Study of Fantasy and Science Fiction
	Box 1624
	Madison, WI 53701-1624
i don't know the current price. i'd expect around $10.

sounds of laadan:
a (calm) e (bell) i (bit) o (home) u (moon)
b, d, sh, m, n, l, r, w, y, h (as in English)
th (think) zh (s in pleasure)
lh (lateral fricative--put your tongue as if to make an "l" and breathe hard)

/lh/ is a morpheme/phoneme.  it is only used in words with pejorative meaning
and can be added to words to give them negative meaning. (this is patterned after
navajo).

the language has high and low tones.  (i can't make accent marks on my terminal.
the sentence structure seems to be VSO.  there is marking for case on nouns.

(case marking is optional when there is no possibility of ambiguity.)

there are a lot of morphemes that attach to various things for varied reasons:

degree markers:
	-hel = slightly
	-hil = rather
	-0 (zero-morpheme) = to an ordinary degree
	-hal = very
	-hul = extremely
	-h'aalish = to an extraordinary degree

duration markers:
	na- = to start to...
	n'a = to continue to...
	ne- = to repeat
	no- = to finish
	n'o- = to cease to...

embedding markers (attached to last element in embedded clause)
	-h'e = sentential complement
	-h'aa = relative clause
	-h'ee = embedded question

evidence morphemes
(begin sentence, based on similar things in navajo)
	wa = known to X because perceived by X
	wi = known to X becuase self-evident
	we = perceived by X in a dream
	w'aa = assumed true by X because X trusts source
	wa'a = assumed false by X because X distrusts source
	wa'alh = assumed false because X believes source to have evil intent
	wo = hypothetical
	w'oo = X has total lack of knowledge as to validity
	0 = X makes no comment on validity
(no--wait a minute--they're the FINAL thing in the sentence)

repetition morphemes
	bada = repeatedly at random
	badan = repeatedl in a pattern over which humans have no control
	brada = repeatedly in a pettern fixed arbitrarily by humans
	bradan = repeatedly, in pattern fixed by humans in analogy to something
	brad'a = repeatedly in what appears to be a pattern, but cannot
		be demonstrated or proved to be one.

speech act morphemes
	b'ii = declarative (usu. optional)
	b'aa = question
	b'o = command (rare except to young kids)
	b'oo = request
	b'e = promise
	b'ee = warning

noun declension
	-i = for no good reason
	(excuse me) -i = for no reason
	-e = for good reason
	-o = for foolish reason
	-u = for bad reason
	-(e)he = despite negative circumstances

(so, imagine adding these affixes to the noun for "joy" or "pregnancy")

there's more.  if you're interested, order the grammar.  it includes some
lessons, songs, and stories.


i'll send on the laadan bibliography i have in a day or two.

lynne murphy


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Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1991 15:52:40 +1000
From: Nick Nicholas 
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Cc: nsn@ee.mu.oz.au
Subject: More Interglossa text (from Hogben himself)

Some Interglossa text from the 1943 textbook. I myself take issue with
Hogben's style, and found some passages very obscure (mostly in the longer
prose passages which I'm not giving here). Oh well.

Psalm 23:

Canto 23

U Theo eque mi Ovi-pe. Mi post habe pan necesso Re.
An date preparo mi Clinica in plu chloro Agri. An acte controlo mi Pedi
littora paco Hydro.
An date sano mi Logo. An acte dirigo Mi a Via de Verito pro an Nomino.
Cleisto chron Mi acte grado in Valli de Umbra de Morto; Mi non esthe phobo
u Malo; causo Tu habe syn Mi. Tu Rhabdi plus tu Ovi-ru stimule consolo Mi.
Tu date preparo u Trapeza pro Mi contra mi Anti-pe. Tu stimule rheo un Olea
pei mi Cephali. Mi Calyci acte rheo supero Ora.
Certo, un Eu plus u Pardo post kine retro Mi pan Di de Bio. Plus Re, Mi habe
eco in Domi de Theo holo Tem.

That old Yeshua ben Yosef jive:

U Petitio de Christi

Na Parenta in Urani:
Na dicte volo; tu Nomino gene revero;
Plus tu Crati habe accido; plus u Demo acte harmono tu Tendo epi Geo homo in
Urani.
Na dicte petitio: Tu date plu di Pani a Na; plus Tu acte pardo plu malo Acte
de Na; matro Na acte pardo Mu; Su acte malo de Na.
Peti Tu non acte dirigo Na a plu malo Offero; Hetero, Tu date libero Na apo
Malo.
Causo Tu tene u Crati plus u Dyno plus un eu Famo pan Tem. - Amen.

Bits from the communist Manifesto:

U Proto plus u Fino de communisti Manifesto

U Mytho-pe stimule phobo Europa - u Communismo. Singulo Crati de palaeo
Europa eque u Mero-pe de hagio Grego tendo u Balle Pe apo, u Papa syn Tsar,
Metternich syn Guizot, plu Radicalisti de France syn plu espio Polizi de
Deutschland.
Quo loco un anti Partio habe eco; Su no gene aetio e Crati causo auto
Communismo. Quo loco un anti Partio habe eco; Su no dicte protesto per iso
pyro Verba allo de plu major laevo Partio allo de Mu major dextro comparo
Auto.
Causo Re, Na vise bi Sequo:
(i) Pan europa Crati nu dicte confessio; u Communismo habe gravo.
(ii) Harmono u nun Occasio, plu Communisti debito date publico mu Plano;
plus Mu debito date phanero mu Credo contra holo Geo. Mu necesso acte necro
u para infanti-ca Historo de communismo Mytho per auto Manifesto.

Sequo, plu Communisti de plu hetero Natio acte unio in London. Plus Mu pre
facte u para Manifesto tendo u Typo per plu Glossa de England, France,
Deutschland, Italia, Nederland syn Danmark.

[...]

Per oligo verba, mu Plano eque u para Re.
Plu Communisti in pan Loco acte catalyso singulo laevo Partio anti u nu
Civilisatio plus u nu politica Systemo.
Syn singulo homo Partio, Mu date phanero u duco Gravo de propria Privilegio,
cleisto major cleisto minor ge maturo.
Fino, Mu acte ergo tendo u Zygo de plu democrati Partio de singulo Natio
pan-lo.
Plu Communisti esthe arrogo de No-crypto de plu Credo syn plu Plano de Auto.
Phanero, Mu dicte; plu Tendo de Mu poto gene profito per zero Methodo 
no-cleisto u violo Victo anti pan nu grego Physio.
Plu archo Classi debito esthe phobo u communisti Revolutio. Plu Proletari
poto perde zero Re no-cleisto plu Catena de Auto. U Geo posso eque u Profito.

Pan Proletari de pan Natio: gene zygo.

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Date: Thu, 15 Aug 91 15:04:42 CDT
From: lynne@kant.cogsci.uiuc.edu (Lynne Murphy)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: stuff: laadan, etc.

item #1: laadan bibliography
here are some things which may be of interest.  (i've not included things that i
have already mentioned & given bibliographic info on.)

3 articles on women & constructed language (esp. laadan) in Women's Studies, 
vol. 14, pp. 163-186:
Wiemer, Annegret. Foreign l(anguish), mother tongue: concepts of language in 
	contemporary feminist science fiction.
Elgin, Suzette Haden. Women's language and near-future science fiction: a reply.
Kramarae, Cheris. Present problems with the language of the future.

Ratterman, Debra. 1987. a science fiction dream of a common language.  off our
	backs xvii:5.24.

Murphy, M. Lynne. 1991. Phonetic Symbolism in a "Women's Language" (Laadan).
	Presented at the 8th National Graduate Women's Studies Conference,
	Ann Arbor, MI.

Also:
Murphy, M. Lynne. 1991. Constructed Realities: The Treatment of Gender in 
	Modern Constructed Languages.  Presented at the 1991 Midwest Feminist
	Graduate Students' Conference, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.

To order either of my papers, contact:
	M. Lynne Murphy
	Dept. of Linguistics
	4088 Foreign Languages Bldg.
	University of Illinois
	Urbana, IL 61801
send $3 to cover copying, postage, & handling.

Suzette Haden Elgin's address is:
	OCLS
	PO Box 1137
	Huntsville, AR 72740
write to this address for: catalogue of her publications, subscriptions to 
the Lonesome Node newsletter. (catalogue includes laadan cassette & video.)

The Laadan Network can be contacted through:
	Sharla Hardy
	769 M St.
	Davis, CA 95616
This is VERY UNRELIABLE.  When operational, it publishes a directory of 
network members, laadan songs, poetry, etc., and new "encodings".

Item #2
AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE
it has been written here that ASL is a creole, related to English.
Actually, ASL is more closely related to French than to English.
Fingerspelling is not actually part of ASL-- that's like transliteration of
English words in the sign modality.  If you look at a dictionary of "Sign
Language", you'll undoubtedly see words that involve manual alphabet letters
that signify English words.  These are adaptations of actual ASL signs into 
the Pidgin-Sign-English form (PSE is what most hearing people, incl. interpreter
use, and what is most often taught as ASL in schools).

Item #3
Doug asked if there was anyone else who is skeptical about loglan, etc.
I am skeptical of all constructed languages (eek! sacrilege!  i can see the 
hoards with the flaming torches and ptichforks gathering 'round the office
address i just gave!)

I'm interested in constructed languages from the point of view of an anthropolo-
gist.  I see them as interesting artifacts of the time of their creation.

Item #4
Thanks for the comment on Hildegarde of Bingen.  I have Large's book, so I'm
actually looking for more details on the nature of her language.  What was
her purpose in writing it and how does it differ from her native and
acquired tongues?

that's quite enough for now, i'd say.
lynne


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To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Old conlang mail. Zhasniad. Spokit.
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 91 16:30:26 +0100
From: And Rosta 

1	Does anyone have copies that they could send me of conlang postings 
from the period 3 August to 13 August 1991? All mail sent to me within this 
period has been irrecoverably lost before I could read it. My hearty thanks 
to anyone who is able to oblige.

2	Are we ever to be given a dissertation on Zhasniad philology?

3	Paternoster in Spokit ("Dr Nicolas, 1887-1904"), "an a priori
language with expressive phonemes" [taken from Yaguello (1991), referred
to in a previous posting]:
	Mael nio, kui vai o les zeal; aepseno lezai tio mita. Veze lezai
tio tsaeleda. Foleno lezai tio bela, uti o zeal itu o geal. Demai da ni
zaiu nio braima ulliozo. E sbilai da ni noi gelena, uti ni itu sbilai da
gelenalas nio. E no spidai ni o fismena. Stu nibai ni i le sfail.

And.


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Date: Fri, 16 Aug 91 23:32:52 pdt
From: well!hrick@apple.com (Richard Harrison)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: new? conlang sighted

POSSIBLE NEW LANGUAGE SPOTTED: It's new to me, anyway.  A friend who
reads _New_Age_Journal_ (jun waxzet de waxzyb) sent me the following
classified ad from their July/August edition:
 
 POLIESPO (Poly Synthetic Esperanto), an invented Iroquoian
 Language which greatly increases reading, writing, and thinking
 speed.  Membership in world Poliespo organization is $39.
 Grammar 50 pages, 8 1/2 x 11", $10 ppd.  For information send
 three international response coupons and phone number to
 W. Steinhauer, Dept. 3132, Oberau 63, D-7800, Frienburg Germany.
 
------------
hrick@well.sf.ca.us

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Fri, 16 Aug 91 23:32:01 pdt
From: well!hrick@apple.com (Richard Harrison)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: the first conlang

 
gynzan Lynne Murphy rafek:
> articles on women & constructed language (esp. laadan) in Women's 
> Studies, vol. 14, pp. 163-186:
 
What year was that published, please?
 
> Thanks for the comment on Hildegarde of Bingen.  I have Large's book,
> so I'm actually looking for more details on the nature of her language.  
 
Me too.  Information seems to be hard to come by.  I don't know how
much information about this language still exists.  
 
from _Nature_ 23 Jan 1943, lead editorial:
"The first recorded attempt to construct a world language was made
some six hundred years ago by the Abbess Hildegarde, of Rupertburg,
near Bingen.  She devised a system with an alphabet of thirty-two
letters on lines which did not appear again until the latter part of
the nineteenth century.  Then followed Descartes..."
 
That, and the one sentence in Large's book, is all I've seen.  Maybe
following up that reference to the New Catholic Encyclopedia would
lead to yet another reference that would lead to more information.
Another place you could look would be the history section of P. E.
Stojan's _Bibliografio_de_internacia_lingvo_ (Geneva: 1929) if you
can find a copy that hasn't crumbled to dust (it was printed on
high-acid self-destructing paper).
 
It's interesting to note that the art-form of language creation, which
is practiced mostly by men, was apparently pioneered by a woman.
 
hrick@well.sf.ca.us = Rick "would-be conlang bibliographer" Harrison

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Organisation: Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Melbourne
Subject: Detlev Blanke's AL as language criteria
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 91 11:12:06 +1000
From: nsn@mullian.ee.Mu.OZ.AU

The following criteria for an AL being a language are from Blanke's "Planned
Languages - a survey", p. 69 of the Interlinguistics book edited by Schubert
(a must-get for conlangistanis, despite its obvious Espish bias):

"The life of more than 900 projects ended immediately after the (1) publication
of its structure. In other cases, there often followed (2) a production of
texts, sometimes appearing in a small journal, accopmanied by discussion of
linguistic details. Ro by Foster (1908) reached this stage, for example.
Often the authors of the projects succeeded in finding a few interested
persons from different countries who learned the system and used it, mainly
for (3) international correspondence. Texts were created. The socialisation
process had begun. Further steps were characterised  by (4) a certain 
organisation of the adepts and somewhat systematic publicity. This stage was
reached, for example, by Idiom Neutral by Woldemar Rosenberger [1898] or Neo
by Arturo Alfandari (1961). Further steps worth mentioning are (5) the creation
of literature, (6) the appearence of certain (small) journals, and (7) a
certain application to specialised texts. Except for steps (6) and (7), these
steps were achieved by the Peano's already mentioned Latino sine Flexione
(later named Interlingua, but not to be confused with Gode's Interlingua).
Ido, Occidental-Interlingue and Interlingua-Gode were also (8) taught to a
certain extent and were (9) applied internationally in speech. This is valid
to a limited extent for Ido up to the present, but hardly for Occidental-
Interlingue and Interlingua, and at the end of the 19th century for Volap"uk.
Only Esperanto wentr further: (10) further specialised practical usage
(specialised journals and organisations), (11) a developed network of national
and international organisations, (12) a wide range of literature, (13)
relatively wide instruction (sometimes state-supported), (14) large periodically
occuring international events, (15) regular radio-programs, (16) clear social
and political distinctions in the already formed language community and its
linguistic reflection, (17) an independent youth movement, (18) a certain
evolution of independent cultural elements linked to the language community,
(19) bilingualism (involving an ethnic and a planned language) of children in
(most often international) families."

Blanke then classifies ALs into: Planned language projects (steps 1-4),
Planned semilanguages (1-9) and Esperanto (Planned Langauges).

The criteria are, as Blanke admits, somewhat arbitrary; it is intriguing to
note that the later criteria were fulfilled relatively late in Esp history.
At a guess, the following chronology holds for Esp:

1. 1887
2. 1888
3. 1888
4. '90s
5. 1889
6. '90s
7. early '00s
8. '00s, properly
9. early '00s, properly
10. late '00s
11. '10s
12. '10s, '20s for the good stuff
13. '20s
14. 1905 
15. '20s
16. '20s
17. '30s
18. '20s (Blanke has the Esperanto supernational brand of socialism 
incorporated in SAT in mind.)
19. '20s

Lojban, I'd say, is pushing at (3). Hm.


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Date: Wed, 21 Aug 91 04:44 EDT
From: cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!lojbab@uunet.UU.NET (Bob LeChevalier)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: tanerai?  Anyone heard of it?  Anyone interested?


I received something today perhaps of interest, though I can't make too 
much of it.

The third issue of a publication called _taboo jadoo_, "a journal which
discusses invented language".  Actually that is from a letter that came
with it, which is in English.  The journal itself appears to be
predominantly in a conlang called 'tanerai' or 'Taneraic'.

24 pages approx 5"x7" of small print, seamstitched.  It comes out
infrequently - the issue dates listed are #1 10/89 #2 8/90 #3 2/91,
although two other dates given for this issue #3 are 'summer 1990' and
'august 1991'.

Publisher is Nosukumo of Melbourne (Australia), whose letterhead says
"Publishers of poetry" and gives three names, one of whom signed the
letter.  Address is:

Javant Biarujia
c/o Nosukumo
GPO Box 994-H
Melbourne 3001
AUSTRALIA

They ask $5 for a single issue, $12 for a 3 issue subscription, and
$20 for a 6 issue subscription.  I would guess that is Australian dollars.
Add $1.50 for Air Mail Post overseas.

I was sent this issue because virtually its entire contents is a
Lojban/Taneraic Taneraic/Lojban dictionary that appears to cover the
entire Lojban public domain gismu (root word) list.  Since the entries
generally are one or two equivelent words each, I suspect that the work
was done primarily based on the keywords.  It may have been done
inaccurately as well, because in several cases, more than one Lojban
gismu is given as an equivalent where there is no obvious connection
between the words (but this could be my own lack of imagination) e.g.
"icyir" is equivalent to the Lojban words with English equivalent
'full', 'fill/stuff', and 'illuminate/light'; 'esocya' is equivalent to
'vary', 'modify', and 'exchange'; 'bepeq' is equivalent to 'answer',
'respond', and 'responsible'.  There are few cases where more than one
Taneraic word is given for a single Lojban word, which is strange,
especially when I did cross-checking:  the word for the Lojban
equivalent of 'fasten' is given as sole definition the Taneraic meaning
'hook' or 'clasp', based on the English in the dictionary advertisement
mentioned below.  It also has a 1 page description of Lojban, which
covers the basic concept and the phonology.  Whether it is accurate, I
have no idea, since only about 1/3 of the words I see in the text
apparently correspond to our gismu.

Taneraic appears to have some kind of suffix or prefix or both system,
whether inflection I can't tell.  There is no description of Taneraic
itself.  However, there apparently is a dictionary of the language
available, which if my word-for-word translation of the advertisement
means anything, contains 1000 root words and 10000 derivative words.
The advertisement (2 of the 24 pages) includes a 1-page sample of this
dictionary which is prettily done.  Since it covers 11 of those 1000
roots, I would guess the entire dictionary is 100 pages or so, in
dictionary-sized type, typeset.  These people seem to be going to some
lengths to give a professional appearance.  Also impressive are one or
more non-trivial sentence examples for each root word, with English
translation.

The language inventor(s) have obviously put years of work into it, but
more importantly, they are trying to use the language communicatively:
there are perhaps 250 words in the Taneraic description of Lojban
(Whether anyone receiving or reading the publication understands it is
your guess as well as mine.) and nearly the whole issue is written in
the language.

They asked me to write an article on Lojban, so obviously not every
issue is written in Taneraic, and the next issue apparently will have a
description of a language called Glaugnea by Michael Helsem, whom
Lojbanists know as a prolific Lojban poet.  Each issue of _taboo jadoo_
features a single language project.
----
lojbab = Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
         2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA
         703-385-0273
         lojbab@snark.thyrsus.com



--------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: riddle@is.rice.edu (Prentiss Riddle)
Subject: Re: Linguica is alive and well
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 91 6:23:15 CDT
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL8]

Here's the address: the central mailer (not "editor" per se) of
Linguica is Sarah Ovenall, 703 Ninth St. #330, Durham, NC 27705, tel.
(919) 286-0152.

For any latecomers, Linguica (the "c" is a cedilla) is an amateur press
alliance or "apa" devoted to language.  Six times a year the members
write  a few pages of whatever they want on the subject of language and
send them to Sarah, who collates and redistributes the members'
writings.  Conlangs figure prominently in the subjects covered, but so
do sociolinguistics, personal experiences learning languages,
linguistic trivia, book reviews, language puzzles, and much more.  For
a sample, send $1.50 to Sarah at the address above.

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle@rice.edu
-- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 28 Aug 91 14:43 EDT
From: Ronald Hale-Evans 
Subject: Schklorpya (retry)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
X-Vms-To: CONLANG

Here are some rough notes on a language I developed when I was a kid (middle
school through high school). They are far from complete, but I thought I'd let
ya'll have a taste before I do much more work on it, seein' how slow conlang
has been lately.

Schklorpya is the language of a (science-fictional!) race of intelligent
six-legged reptiles known as the Shvorn. Their pessimistic worldview can be
seen reflected in their language; "zord" means "cloud"; "zord'y" ("not-cloud")
means "sky". (Pretty heavy cloud cover on their planet.) I had a few things in
mind when I created this language: English backwards through a tape recorder,
Russian, and the language the creature in the Mos Eisley Cantina speaks to Han
Solo ("Oota doota, Sooloo?") Speak it as if it had tones. (It doesn't. Try
accenting it like Swedish.)

Following are some vocab and grammar notes and a few examples of Schklorpya as
She is Spoke.


Schklorpya
----------

ADJECTIVAL VERBS
Bimini - to be tall or long
Bjjork - to go
Gnarp - to take
Kord - to be good
Kyorpnyn - to do, make; to be (exist)
Moyrgatroy - to be peculiar, to be flawed
Prentoll - to praise or love
Sclrump - to eat
Tnyet - to have
Viirt - huge
Yorll - to be long

QUANTITATIVE NOUNS
bomuu - bowl, cup, container (of)
kordaluu - pleasure; enough (of)
korduu - good; goodly amount (of)
slavuu - piece (of)
tevuu - string (of)

REGULAR NOUNS
bortta - money
hkomo - human (Homo sapiens)
klord - song
korl - rock
morb - word
moyo - tree
nvo - green, greenness
platya - paper
schklorpya - mouth; language
sclrumpsh - food
shvorn - Shvorn, person (human = hkomo)
yak - milk
zord - cloud
zord'y - sky

BODY PARTS
kra - ped (hand = kra'yo; foot = kra'ko)
lejbij - joint (elbow = lejbij'yo; knee = lejbij'ko)
lomp - shoulder or hip (shoulder = lomp'yo; hip = lomp'ko)
tan - digit (finger = tan'yo; toe = tan'ko)

bo - middle limb (which humans do not possess)

body = yoboko ?
human body = yoko ?

PARTS OF SPEECH
interrogative - hkai
exclamatory - orp
'p - forward, future
'd - backward, past
'z - present
'y, ya - negative

byup - 1st p.
kank - 2nd p.
nord - 3rd p.

ii- - masc.
el- - fem.

To form plurals, double the root:

bomuu-bomuu korl - bowls of rock
el-byup'byup - we (f.pl.)
bomuu korl-korl - a bowl of rocks

PREPOSITIONS
nyni'p, o'p - toward
nyni'd, o'd - from

NUMERALS
0
1 - slupp          
2         
3
4
5
6
7
8 <10> - kor
9 <11> - kor-slupp
10 <12>           



PRONUNCIATION:
hk - loCH
uu - fOOd
sclr - just like it looks!


SOME SCHKLORPYA TEXT:

SCLRUMPSH MOYO                  TREE FOOD

.slupp slavuu zord  		One raindrop (lit. "piece of cloud")
Shny'Yorll'z o'd                might lengthen from
bomuu zord'y                    the bowl of the sky
o'p moyo nvo.			toward a tree of green.
!Sclrump!			Eat!

?Gnarp'd kordaluu bortta, hkai ii-kank'kank hkai?
Did you (m. pl.) have enough money?

!orp ii-kank Moyrgatroy orp!
You (m.s.) are f*cked in the head!

-----

That's it for now. Lots of unexplored territory here, stuff I haven't looked at
in years. There are some regularities that just seemed to appear magically in
the language (e.g. the -uu words) that I would like to analyse and expand.
Sorry I haven't given much in the way of grammar.

Ron Hale-Evans



--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Richard Kennaway CMP RA 
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 91 00:29:20 BST
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Re: Tsolyani

And Rosta writes:
> Is the enclosed message about the guy who invented [Steve Rice, please
> forgive the misspelling I'm no doubt about to perpetrate] Tsolyani?

Yes, and that's the name.  I have "Man of Gold", but have never got
round to reading more than the first few pages.  Tsolyani is one of the
languages of the world of the novel, which is also the world of "Empire
of the Petal Throne", one of the early frp games (before D&D, even - the
golden age of frp gaming, before Gygax commercialised it...but I digress
from conlang).

I also have a pair of books by Barker: The Tsolyani Language, parts I
and II, published in 1978.  I expect it is difficult to find now, but
for the record, the publisher was Adventure Games Inc., 871 Edgerton
St., St. Paul, MN 55101, USA.  The research on which it is based (it
says here) was performed pursuant to a contract with the High Chancery
of the Tsolyani Imperium at Avanthar.  The author also acknowledges the
help and support of Lord Chaimira hiSsanmirin, Provost of the High
Chancery, and the help of his informants, Mr. Tras"une hiTankolel and
Miss Kalus"u hiViridame.  This is a class act, folks, a serious work of
fictional linguistics!

Part I gives in a very brief introduction the history of the language,
which is a member of the Khishan family, related to its neighbours
Mu'ugalavyani, Salarvyani, and Livyani.  There follows an explanation
of the sound system and conventional orthography in the Roman alphabet,
then (the major part of Part I) the grammar, and a travellers'
phrasebook.  Part II consists of English-Tsolyani and Tsolyani-English
vocabulary lists, and an explanation of the Tsolyani script (which
appears to be at least as complicated as Arabic).

I haven't studied the language, so rather than try to summarise its
basic features, here are some entertaining extracts from the phrasebook.

The books use accents on some letters which I will represent here thusly:
/	primary stress on next syllable
`	secondary stress on next syllable
'	glottal stop
"u	u-dieresis (sounds the same as in German)
+i	i-hacek (a hacek looks like an upside-down circumflex).  I couldnt
	find any mention of how +i is pronounced.

Tsolyani stress is irregular, hence its explicit indication in the
transcription.

Note that Tsolyani has a system of inflections for indicating the
social class of speaker and/or listener.  These examples are given with
the "middle-class" forms, but it is important to use the appropriate
form for the circumstances.  The overall intonation pattern of a
sentence is also used to express social attitudes.  Errors can result in
unpleasant social consequences, as the foreigner found who,
complimenting a senior Tsolyani official on his noble lineage, used the
"sarcastic-scoffing" intonation instead of the "emphatic-approval" one.

TRAVEL

One of the moons will rise soon.
    pr/ukh hil"ul"ungyal neb/an m/al /ul gu/al tupts/o

Where are the litter-bearers?
    toktan/eryal f/enul gu/al dop/al

SHOPPING

Can you make a sword of this shape for me?
    t/usmi chalul/um moy+i tlay/esh m/asun, pr`utlassy/u m`asunhidaq/or, n/e?

I (habitually) fight with a two-handed sword.
    l/um thamtlark/esh p/urdal b/ar"u

Sell me a shield on which is the insignia of the Legion of the Lord of
Red Devastation.
    moll/um dhuf/anli m/asun, pr`utlagaiz/an, d/e teoch/arikh hitik/a
    hitum/e k/arin sanm/asun gu/al bap/al

Where is the slavemarket in this city?
    m`asunbrusav/al, nraggash/enikh f/enul gu/al

EMPLOYMENT

I need a priest for my household
    l/um hiy/en dop/al m/aisur, pr`utlash/arto, l/ummra chaluv/eshu

I am a priest of Belkhanu, Lord of the Excellent Dead.
    l/um sh/artokoi hibelkh/anu, tik/akoi hich/allayal, gu/al

I know many rituals.
    l/um trash/om mss/uri, b`urutlarash/angyal

A DINNER PARTY

I will cook five dishes of Jakalla
    l/um m/al /ul gu/al k/utl mss/uran, tl`otlam/aniyal hijak/alla

I also have some black wine of Salarvya.
    l/um tatl/an m/en dop/al m/asun, tlang/alu mik/arun hislarvy/a

May the gods see us! (said when beginning to eat)
    m+itland`alid`alisayal m/al /ul pag/al tlal/umi

MILITARY

Set up the onagers behind that wall!
    m`asun`onuldhitim/ung nojl/akpeli mssur/an, tlamilbab/ailyal!

SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

the captain whom I somewhat humorously despise
    sh`arzak/asi

the beloved person who was captain yesterday
    p`alt`uplank/asi

to that (distant) one most great, mighty, living emperor whom I love,
consider omnipotent, and of whom I stand in awe
    m`asunj`agapr`umoltoq`utup`ant`uplank/olumeld`alid`alisanik`el

Each of these is one word.  The last consists of a large number of
elements attached to the root "k/olumel", "emperor", expressing
grammatical case, number, and attitude of the speaker.  The
"attitudinal" affixes play a large role in Tsolyani.

ENTERTAINMENTS

People in Tsolyanu gamble a lot.
    ts/oluyal brutsoly/anu b/urun nj/umu b/ar"u

What do you know (how to do)?
    t/usmi trash/om mss/uran, tlazh`urzh/ur

I know singing and dancing.
    l/um trash/om mssur/an, tlasiun/el l/el tlass/anu

I also know thirteen of the Erotic Acts of the Dancing Maiden of Temptation.
    l/um tatl/an trash/om mss/uran, b`itl`etlapaimoy+iyal hiss/anutora
    hish/afer

What else do you know?
    t/usmi trash/om m/asun, tlazh/ur br/asin

--
Richard Kennaway          SYS, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.
Internet:  jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk		uucp:  ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Paku - another conlang
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 91 16:17:52 +0000
From: And Rosta 

Sent on the LINGUIST mailing list:


Date:     Tue, 3 Sep 1991 21:49:13 +0800
From: Linguist Mailing List 
Date:    Mon, 02 Sep 91 20:33 PDT
From: Vicki Fromkin
 
Subject: Re: Linguistic Terms in Titles

Re tv programs and linguists etc (noone really mentioned them but wothehell) --
I think my major claim to fame with the Linguistic 1 students at UCLA
is that I wrote a language called PAKU spoken by the Pakuni (monkey
people) in a children's TV program called Land of the Lost.  I had no idea
anyone knew of it and happened to mention it and got a standing ovation
from the usual bored, noisy group of 500 students.  It seems they keep
showing it.  For those of you who are Africanists out there -- you will
notice that it is very much like a Kwa language of West Africa.  This of
course has no relation to any of the linguistic novels.

To finish -- re Paku and
Land of the Lost -- I never saw the show -- just the scripts which I had to
translate into Paku.  The whole experience was very funny.  They -- the
producers were worried about the sear words I wrote in Paku.  I tried to
convince them that noone would know what they meant anyway but I am
not sure they believed me.  Anyway, it is a lovely language which I understand
children were beginning to pick up (which was my purpose of course) --
nice regular anti-penultimate stress, homorganic nasals, nasalization of
vowels before nasals, deletion of final vowels before vowel initial suffixes.
A wonderful language!

Vicki Fromkin

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1991 15:36 EDT
From: Ronald Hale-Evans 
Subject: Monteton Solsbury
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
X-Vms-To: CONLANG
X-Vms-Cc: EVANS

Here is my translation of the first verse of "Solsbury Hill" by Peter Gabriel.
*Please* post comments and critiques. I'm working hard on translating the whole
song, and this is the first verse I feel satisfied enough with to send out.
Nicxjo, Davido Lupo, Johano Ross, iu ajn Esperantisto?

Monteton Solsbury grimpante,
Mi povus vidi l'urbolumon.
Vent' blovante, temp' haltante,
Agl' elflugis je la dumon.
Ja li estis rigardenda;
Li proksimis, sonis vocx';
Cxiu nervo strecxegenda,
Mi auxskultu sen riprocx'.

Mi ne kredis la informon;
Mi devis fidi fantazion.
Mia kor' batis BOM BOM BOM!
"Hej," li diris, "pretigxu nun,
Mi hejmkondukos vin."
Hej--hejmen!

Ron Hale-Evans


--------------------------------------------------------------------------


Date: Wed, 11 Sep 1991 09:26 EDT
From: Ronald Hale-Evans 
Subject: Monteton Solsbury/Solsbury Hill
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
X-Vms-To: CONLANG
X-Vms-Cc: EVANS

OK, "Solsbury" is the correct spelling, according to the Gabriel song. Here is
my retranslation without the strained conceit of "Agl' elflugis je la dumon"
(Eagle flew-out of the during), with the English words for the first section.
(Da da da dummm dummm, dummm dummm dummm dummm....)

Monteton Solsbury grimpante       	Climbing up on Solsbury Hill
Videbla estis l'urbolum			I could see the city lights
Vent' blovante, temp' haltante,		Wind was blowing, time stood still
Aglo flugis el mallum'.			Eagle flew out of the night.
Ja li estis rigardenda;			He was something to observe
Li proksimis, sonis voc^;		Came in close, I heard a voice.
C^iu nervo strec^egenda,		Standing stretching every nerve
Mi au^skultis sen riproc^'.		Had to listen, had no choice.

Mi ne kredis la informon.		I did not believe the information
Mi devis fidi fantazion.		I just had to trust imagination
Mia kor' batis BOM BOM BOM!		My heart going BOOM BOOM BOOM
"Hej," li diris, "pretig^u nun,		"Hey," he said, "grab your things,
Mi hejmkondukos vin."			I've come to take you home."
Hej -- hejmen!				Hey -- back home!

Beautiful song. Hear it if you can. I believe it's on the Peter Gabriel album
called "Peter Gabriel". Or is it "Peter Gabriel"? Or "Peter Gabriel"?...
Actually, it may be on "So".

Ron Hale-Evans


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 1991 10:23 EDT
From: Ronald Hale-Evans 
Subject: Solsbury Hill, verse 2
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
X-Vms-To: CONLANG
X-Vms-Cc: EVANS

This verse was tougher to translate. I'm looking for even more criticism on
this one:

Se mi interne gardus min,		To keep inside as I'd designed,
Mi s^ajnus kiel idiota,			My friends would think I was a nut
S^ang^ante l'akvon al la vin';		Changing water into wine
La pordo estus ekfermota		Open doors would soon be shut
Do mi tag'-al-tage vivis,		So I went from day to day
Sed mia viv' estis bankrota		But my life was in a rut
G^is mi certan ligon klivis,		Till I thought of what I'd say,
G^is certa vort' estis dirota.		Which connection I should cut.

Mi min sentis meblarero;		I was feeling part of the scenery.
Ne estos mi mas^inarero!		I walked right out of the machinery.
Mia kor' batis BOM BOM BOM!		My heart going BOOM BOOM BOOM
"Hej," li diris,"pretig^u nun,		"Hey," he said, "grab your things,
Mi hejmokondukos vin!"			I've come to take you home."
Hej -- hejmen!				Hey -- back home!

Notice the last two lines of the first section are reversed in translation for
the sake of rhyme. I could rhyme "iris" with "diris", but I doubt it's
idiomatic in E-o to say literally "I *go* from day to day". 

Comments?


Ron


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
To: riddle@is.rice.edu (Prentiss Riddle)
Cc: well!hrick@apple.com (Richard Harrison),
        conlang@buphy.bu.edu (ConLang list), nsn@mullian.ee.Mu.OZ.AU
Subject: Re: conlang foul language 
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 91 12:26:47 +1000
From: nsn@mullian.ee.Mu.OZ.AU


Apologies for Esp specificity; Rick might find the following etymologies
useful, however.

>Esperanto has a full complement of obscene terms for sexual and
>excretory organs and acts, based (as you would expect) on various
>standard European roots.  

These terms were very much invented by Kalocsay, but since they fulfilled a 
need in the community, they took off. I have my doubts as to whether this
represents a clear superiority of Esp, as they were pulled out of thin air.
I'm not aware of similar features in other ALs; Lojban's terms are one-term-
fits-all-contexts, Volap:uk limited itself to "derogative-water" for urine;
I'd have to check up on Ido, which is the other AL most likely to have come
up with something.

The full complement of terms is:

fiki	- to fuck. German
kaco	- dick. Italian
picxo	- cunt. Slavic. In his poetic glossary of terms, Kalocsay (under the
pseudonym Peter Peneter) exults that this generative term should be expressed
in the language group that was the locale of Esperanto's generation.
cico	- teat. German. The nipple-breast confusion evident in the English
'tit' (and the Greek 'buzi' and elsewhere) is not to my knowledge evident in
Esp, which uses the straight 'mamo' for the latter. (The official term for
nipple is mampinto, breast-peak.)
pugo	- arse. Ancient Greek
bugri	- to bugger. English
midzi	- to fellate. Ancient Greek.
frandzi	- to cunnilinguate. No source language given, but I suspect ancient
Greek. This term has not come into current use, though I'm not sure if midzi
encompasses it nowadays.
pisi	- to piss. Germanic (this was already in the language)
merdo	- shit. French
kaki	- to defecate. Universal European baby talk? This term has died out
in favour of the straight term feki, much used as an interjection (fek!)

I'm not aware of derogatives for homosexuality (gejo, from the English, has
prospered in the language), or anus. Whether either reflects any bias of
the authors, I am not competent to discuss :-1/2

>If anyone has really seen any
>Esperanto erotica dating back to the early decades of the language,
>I'd love to hear about it.)

You mean you haven't seen the Secret Sonnets (1931), where the terms were
invented, nor the somewhat kinkier sequels, penned pseudonymously by Kalocsay 
and Waringhien, the two men who defined just about everything else in the
language? Man, you have missed out.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Cc: nsn@ee.mu.oz.au
Organisation: Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Melbourne
Subject: Esperanto foul language addendum
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 91 12:00:14 +1000
From: nsn@mullian.ee.Mu.OZ.AU

Oh, and how could I have forgotten:

cxuro 	- jism. Etymology unknown to me.

Rick is right in that the Lojban mal- is analogous to the Esp. -acx. In my
view, that constitutes little recommendation; these suffixes get very monotonous
very quickly (see any of Jean Forge's novels for proof). On the other hand,
Lojban being what it is, I can scarcely see a new stem being introduced simply
to convey a different register of speech.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 16 Sep 91 13:47:00 EDT
From: "61510::GILSON" 
Subject: definitions
To: "conlang" 

I have been working on a mini-dictionary of all the words appearing in
Erich Weferling's "Standard-Gramatik del International Auksiliari Linguo"
and I have made a list of some length. Most of the words are easy for me
to define, but there are a residual group that are giving me trouble. In
this group, I have a fairly good idea of the meanings of a few (like the
"-mod" words), but I cannot precisely ascertain Weferling's intent as to
the distinction between "modo" and "manir" in the table on p. 23. In some
other cases (like "ekster" and "ekstra") I cannot figure out the distinction
between certain specific words. Most of the remainder just escape me. I
would appreciate suggestions as to what to put for the translations of
the words listed below. (E-mail responses to:
                   gilson%61510.decnet@ccf1.nrl.navy.mil 
                       rather than broadcasting them. If you don't have a copy
of the "Standard-Gramatik" and want one, please E-mail me too.)

advere, page 22
amo, page 8
apen kaum, page 22
babilemi, page 17
bokedo, page 18
cakmod, page 23
canso, page 7
cek, page 7
dom, page 8
ekster, page 14
ekstra, page 14
filozofira, page 18
fru, page 21
ganto, page 7
glasedo, page 18
grelun, page 18
hasti, page 8
interes, page 7
kartuciero, page 18
kazu, page 8
kimod, page 23
koketira, page 18
konto, page 8
koram, page 14
lanajo, page 17
ludilo, page 18
mudilo, page 18
nam, page 15
ni, page 15
nokti, page 8
nulmod, page 23
nun ... nun, page 15
oft, page 21
omnimod, page 23
or, page 15
pafado, page 17
paleska, page 18
piani, page 22
profetira, page 18
proprimen, page 22
puntar, puntizar, page 19
razilo, page 18
regira, page 18
rentiero, page 18
sablun, page 18
sensu, page 8
sentro, page 8
sitere, page 22
sive ... sive, page 15
skalun, page 18
soluendi, page 18
sommod, page 23
sonjo, page 8
sorgemi, page 17
spunedo, page 18
tempope, page 21
timod, page 23
tra, page 14
vane, page 22
vazo, page 7
veto, page 7


                                              Bruce R. Gilson


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 16 Sep 91 16:07:00 EDT
From: "61510::GILSON" 
Subject: Esperanto "mal-" and the like
To: "conlang" 

Esperantists often comment favorably about the fact that in E-o, only
one root is needed for a pair of concepts that are directly opposed, as
in big/small (granda/malgranda). Most other conlangs have taken the
position that it is better to have two different roots (e. g., in Ido,
granda/mikra). The former may be easier to speakers of languages like
Chinese, where _none_ of the E-o/Ido roots are familiar anyway and
_all_ have to be learned anew. The latter is clearly easier for European-
language speakers, who have more trouble remembering that "small" has
to be Newspeakishly translated into "un-big." I wonder what thoughts this
group has about this issue.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 91 22:46:31 pdt
From: well!hrick@apple.com (Richard Harrison)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: opposites

 
Bruce R. Gilson asked for our thoughts about Esperanto "mal-" and
the regular formation of opposites. 
 
Some high-frequency Esperanto words have developed irregular opposites
which co-exist with the regularly-formed ones, e.g. "malvarma" and 
"frida" for 'cold,' "mallonga" and "kurta" for 'short.'  I don't know
exactly what conclusions we can draw from this, but it is interesting.
 
Also you will note that Zamenhof himself did not max out the possibile
uses of mal-; "without" is expressed as "sen," not "malkun"; "under" is
known as "sub," not "malsuper."
 
No doubt "mal-" was an unfortunate choice for Esperanto's prefix of
opposites, since it means "bad" or "incorrect" in so many European
languages.  
 
Also, it is sometimes hard to predict (or explain) which root is going 
to be the basis upon which "mal-" gets affixed; in long/short, left/right, 
big/small, tight/loose, there seem to be some built-in value judgements 
about which property is better; and these value judgements would not make 
much sense to an American hippie or a Chinese Taoist who knows that loose 
is better than tight, slow is better than fast, small is beautiful, etc.
How do you decide whether "hard" is better than (or likely to be more
frequently uttered than) "soft"?
 
In developing Vorlin, which relies heavily on compounding, I have found
that it is a good idea to have "irregular opposites" for extremely
frequent concepts (big/small, young/old, near/far, in/out) so that the
prefix of opposites (kan-) doesn't have to be used too often.  However,
I generally favor the regular formation of opposites via an Esperantish
approach, because it really does conserve time and memory capacity when
memorizing a vocabulary. 
 
Lately I have been studying the list of >1300 Lojban "gismu" (content-words 
as opposed to structural particles) and a list of 1100 Chinese characters
considered essential to students of the language.  I believe both of these
lists could be 20 percent smaller if these languages used some regular
method of forming opposites instead of doing it in an unpredictable manner.
That would make these vocabularies 20 percent easier to learn -- not a small
improvement.
 
I do not agree that it is difficult for Europeans to remember that
Esperanto "small" should be derived from mal- + granda -- not any more
difficult than memorizing any given conlang's word for "small."  Indeed,
remembering a rule should theoretically be easier than remembering all
the words to which the rule applies.  
 
So, maybe a compromise or mixed approach is best for a conlang: irregular
opposites for frequent concepts (but not to the exclusion of regularly-
formed opposites).  It really is a matter of the language's designer's
objectives and aesthetics.  "Learnability" and "recognizability" are
sometimes mutually exclusive.  Interlingua is easy for Anglo-Euro types to 
read, but being able to read it does not give one the ability to pronounce, 
speak or write it; that requires as much study as any other conlang (unless 
you already know Italian, of which Interlingua seems to be a dialect).
 
hrick@well.sf.ca.us = Rick Harrison
Tortilla chips, cheddar cheese and picante salsa = nectar of the gods.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: riddle@is.rice.edu (Prentiss Riddle)
Subject: Re: opposites
To: well!hrick@apple.com (Richard Harrison)
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 91 8:28:11 CDT
Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu (ConLang list)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL8]

> From: well!hrick@apple.com (Richard Harrison)
>  
> Some high-frequency Esperanto words have developed irregular opposites
> which co-exist with the regularly-formed ones, e.g. "malvarma" and 
> "frida" for 'cold,' "mallonga" and "kurta" for 'short.'  I don't know
> exactly what conclusions we can draw from this, but it is interesting.

It's worth noting that, as with Esperanto obscenities, these "irregular
opposites" were contributed to Esperanto by the poets, who wanted more
than one way to say the same thing and particularly wanted ways that
didn't depend on repetitive use of a small set of affixes.

Poetry and other examples of virtuosic language use may always introduce
criteria which are at odds with the "what's most easily learned is best"
rule of thumb.

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle@rice.edu
-- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 17 Sep 91 15:57:25 CDT
From: lynne@kant.cogsci.uiuc.edu (Lynne Murphy)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: -ul- and publication

if ido uses -ul- as a masculine version of -in-, what does it use for -ul-?
(that is, does it have the -ul- of esperanto as well?)

esperanto speakers i know use -i^c- as a masculine parallel to -in-.

by the way, in case you don't know about this, there is a newsletter 
entitled "the glossopoeic quarterly" which deals exclusively with conlangs.
i've seen 2 sample issues of it, and, well, it looks pretty, but i'm not sure 
it says much.  it's the newsletter of a special interest group of mensa (eek!)
but you don't have to be a genius to subscribe (and i can't tell that geniuses
are writing the thing).  the issue i have in front of me now is mostly concerned
with tolkein's languages.  the other issue if
(excuse me) the other issue i've seen was full of factual mistakes.
sample issues are $2.  yearly domestic subscriptions are $6.
contact: sdeyo@pnet51.orb.mn.org for info, or write:
steven deyo, editor
glossopoeic quarterly
P.O. Box 11626
St. Paul, MN 55111-0626

lynne

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: riddle@is.rice.edu (Prentiss Riddle)
Subject: Opposition != negation != lack
To: tdatirv!sarima@uunet.uu.net
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 91 9:05:52 CDT
Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu (ConLang list)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL8]

> From: tdatirv!sarima@uunet.uu.net
> Subject: opposites
> 
> Or does Esperanto (or the other CL's) distinguish between 'opposite' and 'un-'?

Yes -- Esperanto has separate prefixes meaning opposite of (mal-), not
(ne-), and lack of (sen-).  Examples:

     mal-    mallonga       short        (literally, "anti-long")
   
     ne-     antauxnelonge  recently     (literally, "before-not-long-ly")
   
     ne-     nepagipova     unable-to-pay, subject to currency restrictions
                                         (literally, "not-to-pay-capable")
   
     sen-    senhara        bald         (literally, "without-hair-ish")

You could certainly say "nelonga" to mean "not long but not necessarily
short" and you would be understood.
   
You may note that the "ne-" examples are a bit more complex than the
others.  "Ne", of course, is the usual Esperanto word for "no" and
"not" (as in "Ne, mi ne scias" == "No, I don't know").  I'm not sure
that "ne-" as an affix is a core element of Esperanto (part of the
Fundamento, taught in elementary textbooks, etc.), but it is certainly
used by Esperantists -- the examples above are real ones.  Perhaps
Esperantists later introduced the prefix form "ne-" as a way to express
the distinction between opposition and negation.  In any case it is a
productive element of the language nowadays.

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle@rice.edu
-- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------


Date: Wed, 18 Sep 91 10:59:56 pdt
From: well!hrick@apple.com (Richard Harrison)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: conlang topics

Bruce Perens wrote:
 
> You assume that difficulty of learning a vocabulary scales linearly
> with size. Have you seen research on this? Could it be that there is
> a non-linear relationship that could make a 20 percent reduction in
> size more (or less) important?
 
You assume that I assume that :-).  I'm sure other factors also
affect the ease of learning a vocabulary, including the presence or
absence of cognates, patterns of sound corresponding to meaning, etc.
 
apple!uunet.UU.NET!tdatirv!sarima wrote:
 
> Except that I find it unintuitive to treat 'small' as equivalent to
> 'not large'.  These mean different things to me.  A 'not large' object is
> simply not large, it is NOT necessarily small.  Or to put it more precisely,  
> I use large to mean 'of noticably greater size than typical', and small,
> equivalently, means 'of noticably lesser size than typical'. 
 
Opposition, negation, and "lack" are three different phenomena.  Prentiss 
Riddle's reply to your message illustrates the differences between sen-, 
ne-, mal- in Esperanto, which parallel the differences between sen-, ny-, 
kan- in Vorlin and similar patterns in other conlangs.  The English
prefix un- sometimes indicates simple negation, but sometimes indicates
the direct opposite of something, so it is not a good idea to use
English un- as an example or basis for thinking about this topic.
 
Lynne Murphy wrote:
 
> by the way, in case you don't know about this, there is a newsletter 
> entitled "the glossopoeic quarterly" which deals exclusively with conlangs.
> i've seen 2 sample issues of it, and, well, it looks pretty, but i'm not
> sure it says much.
 
I'm under the impression that GQ dealt mostly with conlangs with used in
fiction, such as Tolkien's languages.  From its first edition I quote:
"It is your editor's hope that we can primarily explore linguistic creation
as both a science and an art, mainly in service of the literary/mythopoeic
process."
 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Organisation: Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Melbourne
Subject: More Esperantology (*sigh*)
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 91 13:34:50 +1000
From: nsn@mullian.ee.Mu.OZ.AU


> From: well!hrick@apple.com (Richard Harrison)
> Some high-frequency Esperanto words have developed irregular opposites
> which co-exist with the regularly-formed ones, e.g. "malvarma" and 
> "frida" for 'cold,' "mallonga" and "kurta" for 'short.'  I don't know
> exactly what conclusions we can draw from this, but it is interesting.

Of these, only a few have entered into common use; it is interesting to
note that they are much more popular in compounds than by themselves;
it is much more common to hear kurtonda (shortwave), fridujo (cold-container:
fridge), durdiska drajvo (hard drive) than kurta, frida, dura themselves.
The only such words which seem to be entering into some currency of use
(and even then are still not the generic terms used) are, IMHO, trista and
olda. The terms are, none the less, there, and can be counted as one of
Ido's contributions to Espo. Whether this is appreciated is another matter.

Bruce Gilson writes:

>There are several things that I think Esperanto does badly, and in some
>cases it almost seems as if this is in distinct reaction to what reformed-
>Esperanto projects (particularly Ido, which is the one with which I'm most
>familar) did.

Reaction makes a lot of sense with the Esp community, but I don't think
these are instances of it. (The war against non-mal-words was, though).

>For example, I was told many years ago, by an Esperantist, that if one does
>not have the Esperanto diacriticals on a typewriter, the Fundamento permits
>the use of "ch," "sh," etc. 

The use of h would be phonologically ambiguous in Esp (in Ido, when such
ambiguity eventuates, a hyphen is used). Apart from that, the use of the
caret just approximates the script that Espists are familiar with, and the
use of x is there to eliminate phonological ambiguity and faciliatte sorting,
and is unknown outside the net community (the former academian I mentioned
it to was highly bemused about our disuse of h). I doubt those who invented
the x notation were even aware of Ido. I have seen Esp text with h, and
it is not anathema to me; it is, however, quaint to me. Oh, and the use of
"jh" would not look natural at all, if that be your criterion.

>Also, I think many people, even devotees of Esperanto, admit the imbalance 
>of the Esperanto -in- feminine ending as opposed to a zero masculine ending.
>Again, however, since Ido adopted "-ul-" as a masculine correlative to 
>"in-," Esperanto will not move from its system.

To which Lynne (long time no hear, and where's that anthropology thesis :-)
reacts:

>if ido uses -ul- as a masculine version of -in-, what does it use for -ul-?
>(that is, does it have the -ul- of esperanto as well?)

If you'd read my Ido Expose, available at the Planned Language Server
(langserv@ivory.cc.columbia.edu), in the folder Esperanto, you'd know :-)

The Ido system is slightly muddled; -er seems to have replaced the Esp -ul,
but need not be used as often in Ido as in Esp, since the derivation from
adjective to person characterised by adjective uses a null sign; thus blindo
in Ido is a blind person, whereas in Esp it is a laconic version of blindeco,
blindness.

>esperanto speakers i know use -i^c- as a masculine parallel to -in-.

It would be nice if I could lay back and accept this, but it is an arbitrary
back-formation, and Esp-speakers are particularly neurotic about breaks in
the continuity of the language. I favour the more traditional use of the
prefix vir- to denote male professional.

And the familial terms of Esperanto will have to stay as is: frato, fratino,
gefrato. It is hard to communicate this, especially on this forum, but to
change the meaning of the word for brother, though theoretically feasible,
is in practice impossible; it cuts much, much deeper than spelling womyn
with a y. And I don't think it's just my sexism which makes me see such
a radical change as undesirable.

That said, -icx doesn't look as bad to me as it used to. But vir- is
preferable, and if you think you can use -icx- in Esp prose without the
tag, not necessarily of feminist, but of crypto-Idoist or "why-won't-s/he-
leave-our-language-be-instead-of-spawning-yet-another-reform"ist, well,
you're hanging out with a different crowd than me.

It'd be worth seeing if there has arisen a feminist view on the language
within the community. My reading is not up to date, so I would not know.
It'd be worth asking this in soc.culture.esp, which is by the way available
as a mailing list from listserv, listserv@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu (Pierre,
cxu vi auxdis?)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Nick S. Nicholas,			"Rode like foam on the river of pity
Depts. of CompSci & ElecEng,  		 Turned its tide to strength
University of Melbourne, Australia.	 Healed the hole that ripped in living"
nsn@{munagin.ee|mullauna.cs}.mu.oz.au     -	S. Vega, Book Of Dreams
_______________________________________________________________________________

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Organisation: Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Melbourne
Subject: un-: negation and opposition
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 91 13:40:27 +1000
From: nsn@mullian.ee.Mu.OZ.AU

Worth noting that interglossa, and presumably glosa, do not distingiush
between the two with the particle non-
 
I think the use of ne- as a prefix was there from the start in Esp.

I tend to agree with sarima, though, that mal- is more a memory hook for
these concepts. A very prodigiously used hook, mind you; it is a status
symbol to use mal- as imaginatively as possible. (Those Lithuanians uncele-
brating the annexation, the kid saying his dad worked unSundayly...)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: riddle@is.rice.edu (Prentiss Riddle)
Subject: Esperanto masculine suffix (-i^c etc.)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu (ConLang list)
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 91 8:53:07 CDT
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL8]

Nick S. Nicholas (nsn@ee.mu.oz.au) says:
> It'd be worth seeing if there has arisen a feminist view on the
> language within the community. My reading is not up to date, so I would
> not know.

My reading hasn't been up to date either, alas.  But last I checked,
the occasional feminist newsletter published by the official fakasocio
for that subject had Bernard Golden (!) writing articles about
proposals for masculine suffixes.  I don't think Esperanto has a
sufficiently well-developed "womenspace" to have an indigenous feminist
view on the subject.

(For the non-Esperantists out there, Bernard Golden is an expatriate
American who has been living in Hungary for a number of years and who
writes prodigiously in every Esperanto 'zine on the planet, whether or
not he knows anything about the subject of the publication in
question.  He's sometimes interesting, sometimes tedious, always
pedantic -- the kind of nitpicker who gives conlangs a bad name.  *Not*
the person to come up with a liveable solution to sexism in language.
I've always wondered about his personal story and how he came to live
in Hungary -- does anyone know?)

Bruce Gilson points out that "-i^c" is not officially accepted in the
Esperanto world and calls i^c-dialects "patched-up Esperantoj [and]
variants of no status".  That they are, but with a reason:  if you
create a masculine suffix parallel to "-in", what happens to hitherto
masculine words like "patro" and "viro"?  It's one thing to reflect
shifting social structures by shifting "doktoro" from default-masculine
to indeterminate gender, as has happened in Esperanto practice in
recent decades, but obsoleting every explicitly male word in the
language overnight is more difficult.  Do speakers of i^c-Esperanto
really use "patri^co" for father and "patro" for parent?  If so, they
run the risk of being misunderstood by speakers of standard Esperanto.

There are certainly knee-jerk conservatives in the Esperanto world, but
there are also many people who are happy to accept change provided it
doesn't break anything in the existing language.  This is called
"reform by neologism" and was Esperanto's historic compromise with
reformists all the way back to the time of the Ido schsim.

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle@rice.edu
-- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Richard Kennaway CMP RA 
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 91 19:59:32 BST
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Ticato?

I recently remembered an article I read more than twenty years ago.  The
magazine Science Journal (you won't have heard of it; it only lasted a
few years before merging with New Scientist) had a monthly column by
Edward de Bono on lateral thinking.  Each month he would set a problem,
and the readers' solutions would be discussed in a later issue.

One of the problems he set was of relevance to conlang: design a
language with no more than 20 words.

To my surprise, I found that the library here has a complete set of SJ,
so here's the problem as he stated it:


"It has become fashionable to be impressive through being unintelligible. 
Does efficiency in communication involve extending the means of
communication by adding new words or does it involve making better use of
words already available?  There does come a time when existing words
prove too cumbersome to describe a new concept and a new word is
necessary.  At other times an apparently complex concept can be
simplified by clever use of familiar words.

"Suppose your vocabulary was to be limited to 20 unalterable words. 
These words would have to suffice for ordinary day to day living, not for
technological communication.  They could not be supplemented by facial
expression, tone, gesture, or sign language.  Nor is picture material
allowed but simple indicative pointing is allowed.

"The words do not have to exist at present.  You can invent any words
with which you would like to communicate particular meanings.  The words
could be used separately or in any sequential manner.  What are your 20?"


Would any conlang-ers like to attempt the exercise?  He didn't mention
grammar - feel free to develop anything in the spirit of the exercise. 
Note that the words are "unalterable" - no inflections.  "Solutions"
which involve coding tricks, such as using the twenty words as
letters to spell out the real words, are right out.


The word I used as the subject of this message is from one of the
languages which readers submitted.  I won't explain it, as the concept it
expresses seems to me so fundamental to this problem that it would
influence everyone's solutions if I did.

--
Richard Kennaway          SYS, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.
Internet:  jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk            uucp:  ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Fri, 20 Sep 91 00:22:43 EDT
X-Mailer: Mail Manager (1.0 14nov90)
From: harvard!scubed!pro-micol.cts.com!psavoie@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (Pierre Savoie)
To: nsn@mullian.ee.mu.oz.au, conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Esperanto to Feminists

   Jes, mi a`udas, Nikolao...

   Rikardo ^Sulco (Richard Schultz) of Germany has traced many irregular
constructions of Esperanto and denounced their usage as corruptions,
especially if they violate the implications of the fundamental rules of
grammar, also known jokingly as the Sixteen Commandments!  He deliberately
avoids such forms in his own writing (in Esperanto, that is) and the reader
is struck with strange "proper" forms he wasn't used to but which suddenly
become quite clear.  The book is "Sur la Vojoj de la Analiza Skolo: 
Esperantologia esearo" (On the Paths of the Analytic School:  A collection
of essays in Esperantology)
   In Esperanto, he is "li", she is "^si", they for either sex is "ili". 
To specify an exclusively male person or animal you have the prefix vir-,
to specify a female person you can add the suffix -in(o) to the name of a
profession.  Thus, sinjoro (Mr.), sinjorino (Mrs., which I don't even know
how to spell out in full in English), doktoro ((male) doctor), doktorino
(female doctor).
   Schultz lists various irregular proposed forms such as "^sili" and
"geli" (ge- being a prefix to show "of either sex") or "i^si" to mean
several females by analogy to "ili" which seems to have "li" in it and
imply several males.  He remarks that these are attempts to prevent sex
discrimination, but is language REALLY a help or hindrance to sexual
equality?
   He goes on citing various other misuses of certain authors, and even the
principal Esperanto dictionary, the Plena Ilustrita Vortaro (or PIVo,
for short.)  He even dares to point to certain things that the inventor of
Esperanto wrote and say THEY are wrong, that Zamenhof had a certain lapse
at that point which didn't fit into his own rules and the use of logic.

   I recall a phrase from a grammar book on Esperanto, where the author
complained of the contradictory suggestions he had for a revised text.  he
said, "Ankora`u nenio pla^cas al ^ciu."  (As yet nothing will please
everyone.)


  -->  generic!pnet91!pro-micol!psavoie@zoo.toronto.edu
   (Pierre Savoie; Micol Labs BBS; Toronto.  A.k.a. DRACONIAN)
   ***NOTE:  I can only receive E-mail; I can't "see" the message areas.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Fri, 20 Sep 91 00:35:08 EDT
X-Mailer: Mail Manager (1.0 14nov90)
From: psavoie@pro-micol.cts.com
To: shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu, conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Re: More Esperantology (*sigh*)

   Please note that what Zamenhof suggested was ch, gh, hh, jh, sh, and u. 
The u-breve has no h or other added letter to it, the round mark is simply
dropped.  Some people have been using "uh" here.
   I have actually seen this in practice, and it was initially suggested
since most printing presses could not support (to use a "computer" term for
printing of the last century) the Esperanto letters.  It was used in
practice for telegrams (Esperanto was "legalized" as a clear language for
telegraphy in 1924) and in an interesting Esperanto column in a Canadian
Prairie paper I've seen from the 40s and 50s.
   But nowadays with good computer printing, accents are no problem and are
even beginning to appear in city newspapers (for example, all those Serbian
and Croatian villages getting the manure kicked out of them which end with
a c are in fact c-hachek, a reversed circumflex which here denotes a "ch"
sound in our script!)
   Whatever system people use will make themselves understood.  I don't
like "cx", "gx" etc. since this was an attempt to represent the Esperanto
letters for producing lists in alphabetical order (x does not exist in that
language).  But similar words using "cz", "gz" actually come BEFORE the
accented letters in that position and so the x-system only works 99% of the
time.

  -->  generic!pnet91!pro-micol!psavoie@zoo.toronto.edu
   (Pierre Savoie; Micol Labs BBS; Toronto.  A.k.a. DRACONIAN)
   ***NOTE:  I can only receive E-mail; I can't "see" the message areas.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Fri, 20 Sep 91 00:51:49 EDT
X-Mailer: Mail Manager (1.0 14nov90)
From: harvard!scubed!pro-micol.cts.com!psavoie@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (Pierre Savoie)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Text samples

   I agree that the Pater Noster would not be the ideal international text
as an example of conlangs.  Even the word "paternoster" for the Lord's
Prayer or "Our Father" is not only a Christian bias, but Catholic
specifically.
   It's a shame that the UN Charter is not generally known to the world. 
People know their own country's stock patriotic incantation, such as the
Pledge of Allegiance for gently brainwashing American children (grin!)
   What else is international?  I would even jokingly suggest Edith Piaf's
song "La Vie En Rose" which has been done in English by Louis Armstrong and
in Esperanto by Joelle Rabu, and probably in a host of other languages, but
such songs are poetic and never directly translated word-for-word.
   How about Euclid's ELEMENTS?  The ancient Greeks were limited in their
science but they were unfettered when it came to musings about geometry and
other non-numerical math.  Long ago Euclid formulated the systematic
thinking of geometry, and the ELEMENTS have been translated into several
languages including non-European ones like Arabic (which in fact was the
first foreign language to receive and even preserve it!)  It used to be the
standard text in English-speaking countries until recently, although people
still know the standard lines from it such as:
   "The shortest distance between two points is a straight line."  [all you
Einsteinians and SF freaks should keep silent on this one!]
   "Things equal to a third thing are equal to each other."
   "The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the
other two sides."

   How about that?  The drawback there is that technically this is
scientific language and not everyday phrases.
   I once saw a book on the history of typewriters, and they showed the
phrase "To save time is to prolong life." in 100 languages, including
Esperanto and Ido!  Various typewriter layouts were shown from different
countries.  In Belgium, for example, they don't use the QWERTY order we are
accustomed to, but a Dvorak-inspired design where not even the numbers are
in our accustomed order!

P.S.:  If you look at the history of Ido, you would see strong resemblances
to the story of Judas in the New Testament.  Its inventor proposed it at a
think-tank on international languages in 1907, and yet he was SUPPOSED to
be representing Zamenhof and Esperanto there!


  -->  generic!pnet91!pro-micol!psavoie@zoo.toronto.edu
   (Pierre Savoie; Micol Labs BBS; Toronto.  A.k.a. DRACONIAN)
   ***NOTE:  I can only receive E-mail; I can't "see" the message areas.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: "a layer bare of conceptual structure"
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 91 17:41:57 +0100
From: And Rosta 

I wrote:
>My claim is that genuine oppositions of the sort discussed here really
>do have a 'basic member' and other members are defined with respect to
>it. Any conlang that agreed with me would therefore go down well with me
>as a layer bare of raw conceptual structure.
I meant: 
	as an exposer of raw conceptual structure.
not:
	as a layer without raw conceptual structure.

On the subject of ambiguity, someone mentioned _Time flies like an arrow_
as a case of multiple ambiguity arising from zero-derivation, - the words
not showing what syntactic category they belong to. In fact, if you think
about it, this sentence is ambiguous because of lexical ambiguity & adjunct
attachment ambiguity.
Change _like_ to _love_ or (roughly) _resembling_, and _flies_ to _speeds_
or _insects_ & you're left with just one ambiguous pair: 
	Time insects like/resembling an arrow.
_insects_ = head of _like_:
	[I order you to] time insects that resemble an arrow
_time_ = head of _like_:
	[I order you to] time insects in an arrowlike manner 
Note that in both cases _like_ is a preposition, so adding a categorial
affix won't help unless you distinguish between a prep with noun as head
and with verb as head. (As, roughly, adjectives differ from adverbs.)
I remember that when I was reading the Vorlin paternoster I thought that
there might be a lot of ambiguities of this sort.



And.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Re: opposites
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 91 18:08:14 +0100
From: And Rosta 

Sarima [sorry - can't find yr full name] writes, re. antonymy:
 >[Small is as much a primary, *positive*
 >attribute as is large].
_This book has a large amount of largeness_ = "This book is very large".
_This book has a small amount of smallness_ = [if you pardon my bad example]
	"This book is not small"
Better examples are:
This road is long on length. vs. This road is short on shortness. [i.e. it
is long].
The point is that "small" is in some sense the negative member of the pair.
[I don't think it's negative in the sense of formal logic - rather, localist
that I am, I think that all types of negation are grounded in spatial
displacement. Don't ask me how or why though!]

Reference: D.A.Cruse. 1986. _Lexical semantics_. Cambridge UP.

And.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: privative antonyms in conlangs
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 91 17:16:14 +0100
From: And Rosta 


Bruce Gilson writes:
 >Esperantists often comment favorably about the fact that in E-o, only
 >one root is needed for a pair of concepts that are directly opposed, as
 >in big/small (granda/malgranda). Most other conlangs have taken the
 >position that it is better to have two different roots (e. g., in Ido,
 >granda/mikra). The former may be easier to speakers of languages like
 >Chinese, where _none_ of the E-o/Ido roots are familiar anyway and
 >_all_ have to be learned anew. The latter is clearly easier for European-
 >language speakers, who have more trouble remembering that "small" has
 >to be Newspeakishly translated into "un-big." I wonder what thoughts this
 >group has about this issue.
I advocate "much size/little size" for big/small, or locutions equivalent
to English "barely having any size/very much having size" (or "near to/far 
from sizelessness). "Bright" wd be "having much light", "dim"="little light", 
"light"="having light" & "dark"="having no light". Other oppositions are 
based on deviance from a paragon: "mad"="away from sane". "Different"="far 
from identical", "similar"="near identical".

My claim is that genuine oppositions of the sort discussed here really
do have a 'basic member' and other members are defined with respect to
it. Any conlang that agreed with me would therefore go down well with me
as a layer bare of raw conceptual structure.

And.


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Date: Sun, 22 Sep 91 04:31:11 -0400
From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: response to Kennaway on mini-languages

Richard Kennaway poses a problem:
>"Suppose your vocabulary was to be limited to 20 unalterable words.
>These words would have to suffice for ordinary day to day living, not
>for technological communication.  They could not be supplemented by
>facial expression, tone, gesture, or sign language.  Nor is picture
>material allowed but simple indicative pointing is allowed.
>
>"The words do not have to exist at present.  You can invent any words
>with which you would like to communicate particular meanings.  The words
>could be used separately or in any sequential manner.  What are your
>20?"
>
>Would any conlang-ers like to attempt the exercise?  He didn't mention
>grammar - feel free to develop anything in the spirit of the exercise.
>Note that the words are "unalterable" - no inflections.  "Solutions"
>which involve coding tricks, such as using the twenty words as letters
>to spell out the real words, are right out.

I won't do this, but mention that Jeff Prothero proposed a "solution"
that I think we printed in ju'i lobypli several issues ago.

His solution, modified for the conditions here, would use a couple of
scalar words (opposite, and neutral scale might be enough, or maybe just
opposite), and 18 maximally orthogonal concept words.  In essence then,
every concept is expressed by binary or trinary coding that uses tanru
(metaphor compounds) based on whichever of the orthogonal concepts are
relevant.

Jeff's solution was binary, so you would have 2**20 concepts
representable.  With a scalar negation particle, you have effectively a
trinary system, at the cost of one word, or 3**19 concepts expressible.
A coding trick, thus violating the rules.  But then every sentence in
every language is such a coding combination of words unless you
absolutely rule out compositional semantics.

Of course, you still have to pick the words.  Left as an exercise...

lojbab


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Date:         Mon, 23 Sep 1991 13:40:00 EDT
From: "61510::GILSON" 
Subject:      Recognizability
X-To:         conlang 
X-Cc:         lojban 

One of the ways we discuss the attributes of conlangs is recognizability. (I
know that recognizability may not be a major factor to everyone, but it is to
me and to a lot of others; in fact, to advocates of Interlingua, it is prob-
ably _the_ major criterion.) It sometimes troubles me that we have no good way
of analyzing recognizability other that to give someone a bunch of text in a
language without any instruction in the language and see how much of it can
be understood.

James C. Brown, the inventor of Loglan, used a formula which had the advantage
of mathematical preciseness; however, insofar as it considers the recogniza-
bility for speakers of a given language, it seems to me to be fatally flawed.
For one thing, it does not take into account the fact that the consonants, I
believe, count for more than the vowels; for another, I am quite certain that
disconnected parts should be counted for less than connected. Thus, for example,
JCB's figure of 2/7 for Russian "galuboi" in "blanu" (in the original Sci.
Amer. article) is probably a great overestimate of the amount by which "blanu"
reminds a Russian speaker of "galuboi." I would count close to zero there. To
the extent that Lojban keeps JCB's formula, it suffers from the same defects.

Another question is the fact that in English and French, at least, spelling
may count more than pronunciation for recognizability. Suppose we were
constructing a loglan (in the generic sense) in which only English was to
be used in generating a recognizability score. For the word "nation," using
pronunciation alone, probably the best word would be "necno" or something
close to it (the final vowel would be arbitrary). But I guarantee that more
_literate_ English speakers would recognize "natno" (again, with the vari-
ation of the final vowel permitted). If we do not confine ourselves to a
Loglan type of CCVCV/CVCCV structure, Interlingua's "natione" is just about
ideal in recognizability, though in pronunciation only the two n's would
count in a pronunciation-based recognizability score.

To me, at least, this is a vital question to be faced by a language con-
structor; therefore, I would be interested in seeing all comments on this. For
that reason, I am sending this to both the lojban list and the conlang list.
My apologies if this means you get two copies (I will!) because you're on both.

                                                  Bruce

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 23 Sep 91 14:07:00 EDT
From: "61510::GILSON" 
Subject: color terminology
To: "conlang" 
Cc: "lojban" 

One of the most difficult problems that I think face the constructor of
a vocabulary list for a conlang is color terminology. Even closely related
languages divide the color spectrum differently. We might notice that
English and French have two color names that look similar, namely brown/brun
and maroon/marron, and they are related names ("maroon" is actually an English
borrowing of French "marron," and French "brun" is a borrowing from a Germanic
source that is cognate to the English "brown"). Yet English "brown" really
covers the territory of both of these two French words, and English "maroon"
represents a distinctly redder color than French "marron."

Another example is that Russian distinguishes "galuboi" (roughly, sky blue) ftom
"siniy" (roughly, dark blue); English has one word "blue" that covers both, but
we make a perfectly analogous distinction between "pink" and "red."

Even in one language there is variation. I noted an exchange on the lojban list
as follows:

>From: dave@PRC.Unisys.COM

>Remember ROY G. BIV?  Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo,
>Violet.  When is the last time you have ever heard anyone use the word
>"indigo" (or used it yourself)?

>As a fan of the blue end of the spectrum, I decided a year or so back
>that "indigo" was getting short shrift, and decided to restore it to
>my language.  (I have also joked about starting a "Society for the
>Restoration of the Color Indigo.")

>"Indigo," as everyone ought to know, refers to the "bluish" purples,
>as opposed to the "reddish" purples, which probably should be called
>"violet".  I started trying to make this distinction awhile ago, and
>found it very difficult at first.  (Of course, the "real world"
>persists in giving us colors with little regard for our labels.)
>Lately I find it is much easier to make the distinction, to the point
>that I find it almost silly to call both colors "purple."  Also, I am
>finding that a lot of things I would have formerly called "blue" are
>really "blue-indigo" ("indigo-blue"?).

>In other words, by deliberately introducing a color word into my
>vocabulary, and attempting to use it, I find that I have gradually
>learned to make the distinction between it and other colors more
>quickly and easily.  Probably this is not a physiological change.  But
>while I could certainly "distinguish" indigo and violet before, I
>didn't "see them as different" in the way that I do now.  (I guess
>this is subjective evidence for Sapir-Whorf....)

>I just observed in myself that, since I have been trying to use the
>word "indigo," but not concentrating on other words, my subjective
>feeling for "purple" has become largely identical to "violet."  I'll
>have to correct that, because I think "purple" ought to be a general
>term including both indigo and violet.  Right?

>From: "Chris Handley"  

>Dave writes that he has restored indigo to his vocabulary and 
>thereby increased his perceptions of the blue end of the spectrum. 
>However, he then gets a trifle confused between violet and purple. 
>If one looks at the CIE diagram (any half way decent reference work 
>on Colour Theory, Image Processing or Computer Graphics should 
>contain one), then the spectral colours (including violet) lie 
>around the periphery, whereas the purples lie on the straight line 
>joining the blue and red ends of the curve. They are niot spectral 
>colours, but because we cannot see further than red and violet, we 
>pretend there is nothing beyond them, so purples are called 'pseudo- 
>spectral' colours, just to close the diagram off.

Now, my own usage of the term "purple" is probably closer to Dave's than
to Chris's, but Chris's usage seems to be the one used by color theorists
(as he states). I would probably refer to the "purples" of color theory as
"magenta" -- but I think also that most people's "red" includes some magentas
and that their "orange" could often include what color theorists call "red."

Any comments? 

                                               Bruce


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To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: defining colour terms in conlangs
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 91 20:01:05 +0100
From: And Rosta 

Bruce Gilson asks how conlangs are to define colour terms. My proposed
solution is to state which Munsell Colour [Color] Chips correspond to
the senses of the colour terms. Munsell chips are an international 
standard. Unfortunately I have been unable to locate a source for these 
chips, though I have tried hard. Does anyone know how to get hold of a set?

Of course, the learner of the language must learn the colour terms from
a set of chips or from another competent speaker.

Somewhat trickier to define are terms for tastes and smells. Perhaps like
English, languages in general have an impoverished vocabulary for tastes
and smells, possibly because these senses are secondary for most of us. In
this case the conlang inventor could define just a few terms, describing
what things' taste & smell would be described by which term (e.g. "curry
has taste X; lemons have taste Y"). But how to get any more precise?

And.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Tue, 24 Sep 1991 13:46:15 GMT+1200
From: Chris Handley 
Subject:      Colour words
X-To:         lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu
To: Mark Shoulson 

Bruce writes

> Now, my own usage of the term "purple" is probably closer to
> Dave's than to Chris's, but Chris's usage seems to be the one used
> by color theorists (as he states). I would probably refer to the
> "purples" of color theory as "magenta" -- but I think also that
> most people's "red" includes some magentas and that their "orange"
> could often include what color theorists call "red."

> Any comments?

Th neat thing about use of aids such as the CIE diagram is that it
gives a consistent context within which to talk about colours, and
to plot relationships between colours, hues, saturation,
complementarity, etc. Incidentally shows why 30-colour theories for
either the production or perception of colour are fatally flawed.

As to magenta, this has, or should have a precise meaning. Along
with cyan and yellow, it is one of the three complementary colours
to the ubiquitous red, green and blue of most modern colour
production. As such it can be found very easily on a colour diagram
- locate the points corresponding to your favourite versions of blue
and red, (specs for these are available), join them to white, bisect
the angle between them and project that line to the periphery. That
point will be magenta in your system. To misquote JC Superstar

   "We both have magenta, is mine tha same as yours?"

Chris Handley                                    chandley@otago.ac.nz
Dept of Computer Science                       Ph     (+64) 3-479-8499
University of Otago                           Fax     (+64) 3-479-8577
Dunedin, NZ


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Date: 24 Sep 91 08:34:00 EDT
From: "61510::GILSON" 
Subject: Color terminology
To: "conlang" 
Cc: "lojban" 

dave@PRC.Unisys.COM writes:

>In a language constructed in a modern scientific society, there would
>seem to be absolutely no reason not to have standards for color names.
>Instead of saying that "blanu" is "more or less like the English
>'blue'", it could be precisely defined.

>In the case of a spectral color, such as blanu, one could define it as
>the pure color of such-and-such a wavelength.  I don't know whether
>there are ANSI standard color names (Chris Handley's comment suggests
>there might be), but I would expect people to have more trouble
>agreeing on English color names than Lojban color names, simply
>because Lojban speakers are fewer in number and haven't "always" used
>their color terms in their own idiosyncratic ways.  And if there is a
>standard for, say, "purple," it is not one or most English speakers
>have helped define, and I might or might not agree with it....

One problem is that there are several different systems for giving
color standards: CIE, Munsell, Hickethier, etc. Each has its advantages
and disadvantages.

>The major difference between this and natural languages such as
>English is that when we say something is "blue" we mean it is an
>approximation to our idiosyncratic notion of "blue", rather than as an
>approximation to an agreed-upon standard.  Probably this is why my
>wife and I never agreed whether our first car was green or blue....

>So how about it, Lojbanisti (or whatever the term is)?  Do you want
>logical color names, or vague names semi-defined by your cultural
>backgrounds?

For Lojban, Dave's approach is probably right. For a conlang that tries
to be more representative of what natural languages do, probably not.

Chris Handley  writes:

>Bruce writes

>> Now, my own usage of the term "purple" is probably closer to
>> Dave's than to Chris's, but Chris's usage seems to be the one used
>> by color theorists (as he states). I would probably refer to the
>> "purples" of color theory as "magenta" -- but I think also that
>> most people's "red" includes some magentas and that their "orange"
>> could often include what color theorists call "red."

>The neat thing about use of aids such as the CIE diagram is that it
>gives a consistent context within which to talk about colours, and
>to plot relationships between colours, hues, saturation,
>complementarity, etc. Incidentally shows why 30-colour theories for
>either the production or perception of colour are fatally flawed.

30-color theories? Or is the 0 a stray?

>As to magenta, this has, or should have a precise meaning. Along
>with cyan and yellow, it is one of the three complementary colours
>to the ubiquitous red, green and blue of most modern colour
>production. As such it can be found very easily on a colour diagram
>- locate the points corresponding to your favourite versions of blue
>and red, (specs for these are available), join them to white, bisect
>the angle between them and project that line to the periphery. That
>point will be magenta in your system.

The terms "red," "green,", "blue," "cyan," "magenta," and "yellow" have
two meanings in color theory. Chris is talking about the points (Cyan =
Hickethier 900, magenta = Hickethier 090, yellow = Hickethier 009) that
define additive and subtractive primaries. But in some treatments, the
color wheel is divided into six _regions_, based on which of the six are
nearest; i. e., "magenta" means anything closer to subtractive-primary 
magenta than to additive-primary red or additive-primary blue, or in
Hickethier notation anything of the form xyz with y>(x + z).

(As you can see, I tend to like the Hickethier notation, which makes it
very easy to describe colors in terms of primaries. The CIE notation is
much harder in my thoughts to visualize.)

                                                Bruce


--------------------------------------------------------------------------


Date: Tue, 24 Sep 91 09:17:27 EDT
From: gary@maestro.mitre.org (Gary Bisaga)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Re: Color terminology

Bruce Gilson writes:
>(As you can see, I tend to like the Hickethier notation, which makes it
>very easy to describe colors in terms of primaries. The CIE notation is
>much harder in my thoughts to visualize.)

(This doesn't have much to do with conlangs, but it may be interesting to
some.)

Perhaps it harder for *you* to visualize, but the HSL (Hue, Saturation,
Value) color system is much easier to actually use in most
circumstances where you need to work with colors rather than just
specify a particular color.  The three parameters are:
(1) Hue, which gives the primary "type" of the color (bluish, reddish,
    purplish);
(2) Saturation, which gives the percentage of the primary actually used,
    where 0 is none and 100 is full;
(3) Value (L), which gives the brightness of the color, where 0 is none and
    100 is full (I believe the letter comes from "luminance").

So, H=red, S=L=100 gives pure red.  Dropping S to 25 gives a pink.  Leaving
S at 100 and dropping L to 25 gives a very dark reddish color.

H=anything, S=0, L=100 gives pure white.  H=anything, S=anything, L=0 gives
pure black.  Any intermediate values of L give shades of grey.

So, say you have a color, pure green.  H=green, S=L=100.  You want to make
it a little yellowish.  So, you bump the H over towards yellow a little.
Now you want to make it a little less colorful, so you reduce the S.  Fine,
but it's a little too bright, so reduce the L.

This would certainly be a way, logical and useful, to represent colors in
a conlang, using three roots or particles for each of H, S, and L.  The S
and L would be easy, I would think.  It's the H that's hard, but still
considerably easier than taking the arbitrary realm of colors; you just
need the realm of fully saturated, high brightness, colors (for which
little more than ROY G. BIV may be sufficient).

Gary


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Wed, 25 Sep 1991 09:28:40 GMT+1200
From: Chris Handley 
Subject:      More on Colour
X-To:         lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu
To: Mark Shoulson 

Bruce writes

> 30-color theories? Or is the 0 a stray?

Oops, yes it was.

> The terms "red," "green,", "blue," "cyan," "magenta," and "yellow"
> have two meanings in color theory. Chris is talking about the
> points (Cyan = Hickethier 900, magenta = Hickethier 090, yellow =
> Hickethier 009) that define additive and subtractive primaries.
> But in some treatments, the color wheel is divided into six
> _regions_, based on which of the six are nearest; i. e., "magenta"
> means anything closer to subtractive-primary magenta than to
> additive-primary red or additive-primary blue, or in
> Hickethier notation anything of the form xyz with y>(x + z).

> (As you can see, I tend to like the Hickethier notation, which
> makes it very easy to describe colors in terms of primaries. The
> CIE notation is much harder in my thoughts to visualize.)

The problem with all the 3 (6) colour, additive/ subtractive systems
is that they are _wrong_! One cannot define the all spectral colours
in terms of any of them. CIE gets round it by specifying  a multi-
peak 'spectrum' for its primary colours, and allowing negative
weights on its additive colours, i.e. to get a match you may have to
add some colour to the sample. All the nice diagrams you see in the
colour textbooks omit to tell you that they are, pure and simple,
kludges. We can perceive the spectral colours, but there is no way
we can reproduce them (except spectrally) and we certainly cannot
photograph them or print them. You don't believe me? Fire up your
favourite painting program (even using 24 bit colour) and make me a
rainbow.

Returning to colour terminology. One thing I have seen on CIE
diagrams, although not on otther systems, are circles (ellipses) of
confusion. These are centred on a particular hue within the gamut of
three colour additive colours. They represent the 'average' area
within which colours are perceived toi be the same. As far as I am
aware, these are reasonably constant between people and cultures,
although most people would probably hard pressed to specify the
colours by names (BTW my wife and ai have the same trouble with blue
and green - jerseys, shirts etc). I suspect that the best would be
to split the visible spectrum up into some convenient number of
ranges (I could argue quite convincingly for 6, 7 or 8) and give the
middle of each range a colour name. It might be better to make this
as differenr as possible from any of the colour names in any of the
target languages (recognisability of -1 would be great (%^). Other
spectrals could then be defined (as precisely as you wish) between
these fixed points. For the less saturated colours, probably the
easiest is to take one of the standards (Hickethier seems pretty
good, although I was not aware of it) and go from there giving names
to all the hues and saturations it can produce. Whatever you do is
going to be wrong, because people just do not see that way, but at
least you can be consistent (and possibly consistently wrong)

Chris Handley                                    chandley@otago.ac.nz
Dept of Computer Science                       Ph     (+64) 3-479-8499
University of Otago                           Fax     (+64) 3-479-8577
Dunedin, NZ

--------------------------------------------------------------------------


Date: Tue, 24 Sep 91 18:20:42 BST
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu
From: jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Color terminology

Bruce ("61510::GILSON" ) writes:
>dave@PRC.Unisys.COM writes:
>>In a language constructed in a modern scientific society, there would
>>seem to be absolutely no reason not to have standards for color names.
>>Instead of saying that "blanu" is "more or less like the English
>>'blue'", it could be precisely defined.

BS alert!  "A modern scientific society"?  What on earth is that?  Must we,
in "a modern scientific society", call oxygen "element 8", a tiger "tigris
longipilis", and bronze "an alloy of 60% tin, 40% lead"?  Loglan once
flirted with this trap, but (even before the Schism) avoided it.

Flame off.

Colour words name perceptions, not spectral composition.  If you want words
for the latter, go ahead, but they will not be "colour words".  Different
spectral compositions can appear the same colour; light sources of
identical spectral composition can have very different colours.  This was
studied by Land (he of the Land camera) but I don't have references.

As for the supposed imprecision and idiosyncratic use of words like "blue",
this is no different from many non-colour words.  Go on, define "brass". 
Or "vegetarian".  Or "computer".  Or "honour".  Etc.

It is true, that in a conlang the meanings of the colour words (and all the
others) must be decided by fiat of the designers, instead of, as in a
natlang, there being a consensus which is both discovered by new speakers
through experience and influenced by them.  But giving the official
definition in terms of CIE or Hickethier numbers is, IMHO, as absurd as
basing words for everyday animals on Latin biological nomenclature.

I would recommend Lakoff's "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things", for his
chapter on the colour systems of various languages.  It suggests to me that
a set of colour words can be defined in terms of human perception rather
than relative intensities of this or that electromagnetic frequency - the
"focal" colours which he describes.  It appears that colour perception is
language-independent (so much for Sapir-Whorf :-(), and that the focal
colours have culture-independent physiological correlates.  For those
looking for a usable and culture-independent system of colour words, this
would seem to be a good place to start.

If you must have a connection with the technical jargon of printing,
photography, paint manufacture, and computer graphics, I would suggest the
Colour Naming System.  It is a set of standardised verbal descriptions of
colours (e.g. "light greenish red", "medium grey", etc) that people who
know nothing about CIE, Munsell chips, etc. can use to specify colours in a
meaningful and standard way.  There are some computer graphics people here
who would know about it - I'll try and get some more info about it if
anyone's interested.

CNS is based on English, but you could make a version based on the focal
colours instead.

--
Richard Kennaway          SYS, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.
Internet:  jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk            uucp:  ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk

PS.  FWIW, as far as I know, my colour perception is normal, yet there are
several colour words (not names for Ciemunsellhickethier coordinates :-))
whose meanings I have only a vague idea of.  Such as:

        magenta         a slightly purplish red?
        cyan            fancy name for blue-green?
        turqoise        same as cyan?
        mauve           very pale purple?
        scarlet         definitely-not-pink red?
        maroon          same as scarlet?

And what, if any, are the distinctions between vermilion and pink, or
between purple, violet, and indigo?  I saw dave@PRC.Unisys.COM's message
about how he uses the last three, but it's not clear if this is a usage he
has simply decided to adopt, or a general consensus.

I suspect (I'll look up the OED when I get home) that many of these less
common colour words originated from names of particular dyestuffs or
artists' materials.  At one time, a scarlet robe would be just that - dyed
with scarlet, whatever that was.  You would never see one that was almost,
but not quite, scarlet, and everyone would have much the same notion of
what was meant by the word.  With improvement in the technology of dyes,
clothes can be any colour you like, and the sharp distinction between
things which are scarlet and things which are not has faded.  Perhaps the
English language is following suit.  How much agreement is there nowadays
among different people's use of the word "scarlet"?  Will the word have
become obsolete in another century?

PPS. How is "brown" described by the various colour standards?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: tdatirv!sarima@uunet.uu.net
To: uunet!buphy.bu.edu!conlang@uunet.UU.NET
Subject: defining colour terms in conlangs
Date: Tue Sep 24 09:52:38 1991

>Bruce Gilson asks how conlangs are to define colour terms. My proposed
>solution is to state which Munsell Colour [Color] Chips correspond to
>the senses of the colour terms. Munsell chips are an international 
>standard. Unfortunately I have been unable to locate a source for these 
>chips, though I have tried hard. Does anyone know how to get hold of a set?

I think it is time to bring a few results from 'experimental linguistics'.
While the 'boundries' of color terms appear to vary widely from language
to language, the core meaning of the *basic* color terms seems to be quite
stable.  The results show that each color term has a 'central' or 'basic'
hue, and other colors are included on the basis of *similarity* to this
central value.  It is thus inappropriate to mandate the exact range of
meaning of color terms, the natural way to do it is to specify the central
value, and let usage determine the boundries.  [Thus choose *one* Munsell
chip for each color term, and leave the rest to similarity - this is how
every natural language on earth does it]. 

You should try to find the psychologically most natural central colors.
Thus for the word meaning 'red', you should choose as the central color
one that is near the central color for red in most languages with the word.
And so forth for each basic color term.  [The most universal basic color
terms are white, black, red, blue, yellow, green, and brown].

>Somewhat trickier to define are terms for tastes and smells. Perhaps like
>English, languages in general have an impoverished vocabulary for tastes
>and smells, possibly because these senses are secondary for most of us. In
>this case the conlang inventor could define just a few terms, describing
>what things' taste & smell would be described by which term (e.g. "curry
>has taste X; lemons have taste Y"). But how to get any more precise?

This is indeed difficult, since even in my native language I was confused
about taste terms until my teens. [I had sour and bitter swapped].


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: riddle@is.rice.edu (Prentiss Riddle)
Subject: Sample texts
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu (ConLang list)
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 91 8:21:06 CDT
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL8]

It's been pointed out that there are many factors which go into the
selection of sample texts to illustrate languages, especially
conlangs.

But in the shower the other day I thought of an example which might be
worth mentioning:  Say you want a sample text which is not archaic, not
religious or overtly ideological in nature, not excessively skewed
toward modern industrial civilization, and deals in concepts which
approach universality in all cultures.

How about the third-world paramedical textbook "Where There Is No
Doctor"?  It was developed in rural Mexico and field-tested in various
cultures around the world so as to remove as much cultural bias as
possible (although there are culture-specific editions available as
well).  The medical concepts involved should be common to any culture
which has been exposed to the germ theory.  The language is simple and
straightforward and prefers everyday terminology over medical jargon.

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle@rice.edu
-- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 25 Sep 91 11:02:00 EDT
From: "61510::GILSON" 
Subject: Color terminology
To: "conlang" 
Cc: "lojban" 

Richard Kennaway 
   (jrk%INFORMATION-SYSTEMS.EAST-ANGLIA.AC.UK@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU) writes:

>Colour words name perceptions, not spectral composition.  If you want words
>for the latter, go ahead, but they will not be "colour words".  Different
>spectral compositions can appear the same colour; light sources of
>identical spectral composition can have very different colours.  This was
>studied by Land (he of the Land camera) but I don't have references.

I agree. A pure yellow and an equal mixture of red and green light can look
identical. However, CIE, Munsell, Hickethier, and all other systems with
which I am familiar take this into account. Colors are described as identical
if they are matched by an observer whose color perception is normal.

>As for the supposed imprecision and idiosyncratic use of words like "blue",
>this is no different from many non-colour words.  Go on, define "brass".
>Or "vegetarian".  Or "computer".  Or "honour".  Etc.

Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc -- how hard is that? A vegetarian is
a person who will not eat meat, and to anticipate your follow-up question,
meat is food prepared from animal bodies (as opposed to animal excretions
such as milk -- but some total vegetarians will not eat that either.) The
last two words I grant you.

>It is true, that in a conlang the meanings of the colour words (and all the
>others) must be decided by fiat of the designers, instead of, as in a
>natlang, there being a consensus which is both discovered by new speakers
>through experience and influenced by them.  But giving the official
>definition in terms of CIE or Hickethier numbers is, IMHO, as absurd as
>basing words for everyday animals on Latin biological nomenclature.

I disagree. Is the word we translate as "blue" going to cover the terri-
tory of English "blue," or that of Welsh "glas," which means blue/green/gray
in English terms.

>I would recommend Lakoff's "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things", for his
>chapter on the colour systems of various languages.  It suggests to me that
>a set of colour words can be defined in terms of human perception rather
>than relative intensities of this or that electromagnetic frequency - the
>"focal" colours which he describes.  It appears that colour perception is
>language-independent (so much for Sapir-Whorf :-(), and that the focal

Color perception is language-independent? Why then do I consider a yellowish-
brown and a reddish-brown both examples of "brown," while to a Frenchman the
first is "brun" and the second is "marron"? Why does a Russian think that
light blue and dark blue are different colors, and why do English speakers
equally well distinguish light red ("pink") from darker red ("red")?

>colours have culture-independent physiological correlates.  For those
>looking for a usable and culture-independent system of colour words, this
>would seem to be a good place to start.

>If you must have a connection with the technical jargon of printing,
>photography, paint manufacture, and computer graphics, I would suggest the
>Colour Naming System.  It is a set of standardised verbal descriptions of
>colours (e.g. "light greenish red", "medium grey", etc) that people who
>know nothing about CIE, Munsell chips, etc. can use to specify colours in a
>meaningful and standard way.  There are some computer graphics people here
>who would know about it - I'll try and get some more info about it if
>anyone's interested.

>CNS is based on English, but you could make a version based on the focal
>colours instead.

My point is you could _not_. Are blue and green different colors? In English
they are, in Welsh not.

--

>PS.  FWIW, as far as I know, my colour perception is normal, yet there are
>several colour words (not names for Ciemunsellhickethier coordinates :-))
>whose meanings I have only a vague idea of.  Such as:

>        magenta         a slightly purplish red?

Sort of -- I would say a reddish purple.

>        cyan            fancy name for blue-green?

Yes.

>        turqoise        same as cyan?

To me, a light cyan, in fact, but probably a bit closer to blue than green.

>        mauve           very pale purple?

You have me there - I know it's somewhere in the violet-purple area but I don't
know for sure.

>        scarlet         definitely-not-pink red?
>        maroon          same as scarlet?

Now that is interesting. I had a post-doctoral fellowship at Rutgers University,
whose school color is scarlet. To me I saw various shades of red on things, but
none are as dark as what I'd call maroon. So scarlet, whatever it is, is not
the same as maroon, which is to me quite definitely a very dark red.

>And what, if any, are the distinctions between vermilion and pink, or
>between purple, violet, and indigo?  I saw dave@PRC.Unisys.COM's message
>about how he uses the last three, but it's not clear if this is a usage he
>has simply decided to adopt, or a general consensus.

Vermilion is bright, slightly orangish red, while pink is pale, often slightly
purplish red.

>.. How much agreement is there nowadays
>among different people's use of the word "scarlet"?  Will the word have
>become obsolete in another century?

As I said, given my experience at Rutgers, not much agreement!

>PPS. How is "brown" described by the various colour standards?

Basically, a dark orange.

Bob LeChevalier (lojbab@grebyn.com) writes:

>MY own feeling is that formally defining the colors is a waste of time.
>I, being slightly color-blind, will make errors.  people do not walk around
>with colors standards in their hands, and will use some more nebulous 
>standard anyway.  Lojban has the capability to add a place "by standard ..."
>to any color predicate, which is sufficient.

I have often wondered what would be used in the "by standard" places in Lojban.
Can you give me an example of a Lojban sentence in which something appears
in this place?

tdatirv!sarima@uunet.uu.net writes:

>>Bruce Gilson asks how conlangs are to define colour terms. My proposed
>>solution is to state which Munsell Colour [Color] Chips correspond to
>>the senses of the colour terms. Munsell chips are an international 
>>standard. Unfortunately I have been unable to locate a source for these 
>>chips, though I have tried hard. Does anyone know how to get hold of a set?

>I think it is time to bring a few results from 'experimental linguistics'.
>While the 'bound[a]ries' of color terms appear to vary widely from language
>to language, the core meaning of the *basic* color terms seems to be quite
>stable.  The results show that each color term has a 'central' or 'basic'
>hue, and other colors are included on the basis of *similarity* to this
>central value.  It is thus inappropriate to mandate the exact range of
>meaning of color terms, the natural way to do it is to specify the central
>value, and let usage determine the bound[a]ries.  [Thus choose *one* Munsell
>chip for each color term, and leave the rest to similarity - this is how
>every natural language on earth does it]. 

>You should try to find the psychologically most natural central colors.
>Thus for the word meaning 'red', you should choose as the central color
>one that is near the central color for red in most languages with the word.
>And so forth for each basic color term.  [The most universal basic color
>terms are white, black, red, blue, yellow, green, and brown].

"Brown" in French is divided into two areas; "blue" and "green" in Welsh are
one. Yoruba has three color words, usually rendered as "black," "white," and
"red," but blue items are presumably "black" and yellow ones are "white."

                                                   Bruce

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1991 08:58:48 +1000
From: Major 
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Terminology (WAS: Color terminology)
X-Mailer: GNU emacs 18.57


"61510::GILSON"  writes:

> >As for the supposed imprecision and idiosyncratic use of words like "blue",
> >this is no different from many non-colour words.  Go on, define "brass".
> 
> Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc -- how hard is that?

Is 0.001% copper and 99.999% zinc still brass? Or is it polluted zinc?
When does it stop being polluted zinc and become brass? If you keep on
adding copper, when does it stop being brass and become polluted
copper?

This is actually a _lot_ like the color question.

Major


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Sun, 22 Sep 91 14:01:18 EDT
From: harvard!scubed!pro-micol.cts.com!psavoie@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (Pierre Savoie)
Subject: Text samples; religious texts
Message-Id:  <9109221700.aa07882@generic.UUCP>

>   Mark Shoulson's comments are apt ones.  The trouble with literal
>translations is that the theologians don't want them.  When Zamenhof
>translated the Old Testament, a bunch of theologians actually revised his
>text to make sure the Bible meant what they wanted it to mean...although
>the original un-edited translations are now also available.

Permit me to split my sides laughing. Zamenhof's translation *literal*? As
literal as any 19th century liberal Jew would have it, with roses for anemones
and violins for harps. The extent of revision has always been unknown; the
Full Analytical Grammar abounds with comparisons between the published ori-
ginals (half the Hebrew scriptures were published separately before the war -
is it these you're referring to?) and the revised version, with the original
showing features of Zamenhof's late style (omission of the suffix -ec, for
example) discarded by the committee. As for the theory that malicious Anglicans
perverted the true nature of a Jewish translation... sorry, that doesn't hold.

Because the rest of the scriptures were translated in wartime, and I'm not
aware of Zamenhof's manuscript surviving, I don't know if Z did complete it,
though he did say so in early 1917. If the manuscript *has* surfaced, tell me
about it.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Thu, 26 Sep 1991 09:13:00 EDT
From: "61510::GILSON" 
Subject:      Color terminology vs. non-color terminology
X-To:         conlang 
X-Cc:         lojban 
To: Mark Shoulson 

Major  writes:

>"61510::GILSON"  writes:

>> >As for the supposed imprecision and idiosyncratic use of words like "blue",
>> >this is no different from many non-colour words.  Go on, define "brass".
>>
>> Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc -- how hard is that?

>Is 0.001% copper and 99.999% zinc still brass? Or is it polluted zinc?
>When does it stop being polluted zinc and become brass? If you keep on
>adding copper, when does it stop being brass and become polluted
>copper?

>This is actually a _lot_ like the color question.

There is a _major_ (pardon the pun) difference here. Everyone has an identical
concept of what "copper" and "zinc" (or "Kupfer/cuivre/etc." and the equivalents
of "zinc") are. If a sample of copper is purer than our instruments (precise or
not) can detect, it is "copper" or "Kupfer" or "cuivre." Otherwise it is brass
or whatever the word is in the appropriate language. There is no disagreement
in the _languages_ there. But the daylight sky and the field of the Australian
flag (or the Union Jack or the canton of the US flag, for those who are more
mamiliar with those emblems) are both the _same_ color, _blue_, to an English
speaker. They are _not_ to a Russian speaker; one is "galuboi" and the other
is "sinii." On the other hand, both the Russian and English speakers would
agree that living grass is yet a third color, which in English is called
"green" (In Russian, I do not know the word). A Welsh speaker would disagree
with them. All _three_ are "glas" to him.

The only other area where languages vary as much as in color terminology is
kinship terminology. But then, this is partly tied up with culture. If a
father's brother and a sister's brother are treated identically, a single
term like English "uncle" is appropriate. If their responsibilities to the
child are different, it makes sense to use different words. (Even though,
German distinguishes "Vetter" from "Kusine," while English makes both
"cousin," and I can determine no reason for this difference between the
languages.)

                                             Bruce

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 25 Sep 91 12:14:55 -0400
From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu
Subject: response to Bruce Gilson

bruce gilson writes:
>I have often wondered what would be used in the "by standard" places in
>Lojban.  Can you give me an example of a Lojban sentence in which
>something appears in this place?

In the case of colors, we've seen three types of values for standard:

1. "mi" by standard 'me'; i.e. my own internal standard which may differ
from everyone elses;

2. la munsel la rygybym. (RGB); i.e by naming the formal standard you
are using;

3. loi jungo (the Chinese); i.e. by stating a culture "according to".
Jim Carter gave an example on Lojban List a few months ago of a
situation where a painting was 'black' by his "merko" standard, but
'red' by the Chinese standards.

Note that in effect by changing standards, you are changing the
semantics of "xunre" ('red') slightly, but this is to be expected.  We
in effect eliminated the need to define a semantic standard for colors
(and everything else in Lojban), by allowing people to label a Lojban
concept with, for example, an identifier of another language, at which
point the semantics is probably that of the corresponding word from that
other language.  The "by standard" place can be attached to any Lojban
predicate, and is explicitly a part of several words that have almost
no meaning without a standard (e.g. "virtue" and "evil")


>You are saying exactly what I did.  I said JCB's method does not take
>into account the fact that consonants count for recognizablity more than
>vowels do.  So how does that differ from your statement that he counted
>them equally?

I read your statement as meaning exactly the opposite of what you
intended, either by missing a 'not' or otherwise inferring that you were
saying that JCB's method DID treat consonants specially.  Sorry.

>We might disagree about what is "close to 0" here. The point is that
>if a similar case involved an English word (with a higher language
>weight) the argument still applies.

Even with English or Chinese, the difference would still only be a few
points.  Possibly enough to put blanu ahead of another approximately
equally good word, but not enough to make a totally worthless word
accepted unless it happened in several languages at once.  In general,
the top 30 word possibilities for a concept range over about a 10-20
point score spread, but I would generally consider even the lowest of
these better than a random word.  Note that we occasionally took a word
as much as 10 points lower than the top scoring word either to get a
good rafsi or to resolve conflicts where the same word(s) were top
scoring for several concepts.  Most noteworthy if I recall, was
"cinta" (Lojban for 'paint') which was the top scoring word for maybe a
half dozen different gismu concepts.

>Some of those ideas, I think, are good.  However, are you prepared to
>completely rework your gismu list, as you will have to if a new
>recognizability measure is developed?  I suspect the proportion of the
>gismu that would be optimal under the new criterion would be less than
>5%.

No.  We decided at the time of baselining the gismu list that
recognition score was no longer to be the most important factor in
determining the Lojban word for a concept.  >A< factor, but not most
important, and far behind language stability.  We are not even
considering changes where we made errors in reading the results.

Note that I had most of these ideas for improvement while we were still
making the gismu.  We consciously chose to minimize a) changes to the
set of words being made and b) changes to the algorithm other than
re-researching the population weights and source words; in order to
still be validly called 'Loglan' and keep the possibility for
reconciliation and remerger with the other version alive as long as
possible.  There is little question that the words we came up with are
not particularly biased toward English other than as forced by the
algorithm weight on English, so we accomplished the goals of cultural
neutrality and consistency with the Scientific American definition of
the language.  But the real purpose was to get a gismu word list that
had no silly copyright claims on it that prevent people from talking
about the language without permission.

(Political digression:  I encourage the apolitical to skip this. 1) JCB
says of course that no one is stopped from talking about Loglan, because
blanket permission is given for purposes he approves of.  But such
loosely defined permission has no legal meaning.  If the list is
copyright, you need explicit license to use it.  If you don't, then the
list is public.  But the issue is moot anyway, since no one except JCB
is ever likely to publish any text in his version of the language.  I am
NOT trying to open this as a thread for discussion and flaming.  But
some features of the Lojban design are justified solely by our then
attempt to keep reconciliation a possibility and later to ensure that we
had as much right to the name 'Loglan' as anyone.  This is similar to
the Esperanto/Ido situation in one way:  regardless of whether
'betrayal' is applicable, the Idists were trying to devise a language
acceptable to the body of Esperantists while incorporating some set of
'reforms'; they were not trying to create a perfect new AL.  Ido failed
precisely because it did not achieve its principal goal, which was to
gain the approval of the Esperanto community for some set of reforms.  I
thus find Bruce's constant arguing about the virtues of Ido over
Esperanto to be a waste of time.  Loglan/Lojban on the other hand did
succeed in its initial goal of gaining the support of the bulk of the
excisting Loglan community, since prior to his republication of Loglan
1, we had over 10 times as many subscribers as did the Institute and
half of his subscribers are also subscribers to Lojban materials.  We thus
now make language design decisions on internal consistency and linguistic
criteria, because we have fulfilled the commitment to our readership to
deliver a public domain Loglan to them. End of digression.)

lojbab@grebyn.com


P.S.  On 'brass' - I'm not sure that the bounds between brass and copper are
that culturally independent, but I have no evidence either way.  Certainly there
are many examples of things that we see as firm categories in English that
have different categories in other language.  My favorite examples being 
'morning' and 'arm', the extent of each varying from culture to culture.
Alas, (or maybe not), I agree with Richard Kennaway that the semantic
definitions of terms is within us, and cannot be based on scientific standards
that not everyone knows or will agree upon or follow.  The meaning of 'blanu'
will be negotiated in Lojban like it is negotiated in evry other language.
We have the added benfit, of course, that any speaker can be more precise by
invoking the RGB or whatever standard through adding the appropriate place.

lojbab

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 1 Oct 91 13:48:00 EDT
From: "61510::GILSON" 
Subject: A Novial sample
To: "conlang" 

For you who want a sample, I will put on a sample written by Jespersen
himself, which is the same text that I put on sci.lang a few months ago
in Esperanto, Ido, Occidental, and a couple of other languages. (Perhaps 
someone who captured it to disk could put the text on the PLS or somewhere.)

Li idee pri monde-literature, kel Herder e Goethe had konsepte esentialim
fro li vidpunktu del arte, ha nun gana even multim plu grand importanteso.
Den ek li koses kel li homaro posese komunim, nuli es tam verim general
e international kam sientie. Or omni komuniko e mediatione del sientie usa
li moyene del lingue, dunke li internationaleso del sientie demanda 
non-resistablim li internationaleso del lingue. Si nus konsidera ke disdi
pluri siential verkes, partikularim lerno-libres, es traduktet en dekdu e
plu multi lingues, tand nus komprenda qui imensi quanteso de laboro povus
bli spara, si libres povud omnilok sur li globe bli komprenda samiman kam
exemplim musikal notes o tabeles de logaritmes.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 3 Oct 91 12:51:00 EDT
From: "61510::GILSON" 
Subject: Response to Mark Shoulson
To: "conlang" 

Mark E. Shoulson  writes:

>However, I am most certainly *not* anti-Esperanto.  You may have gotten the
>wrong impression, Bruce, but I am at least as much an Esperantist as a
>Lojbanist.

In that case, as I said earlier, I apologize for omitting you from that
short list of open-minded Esperantists. I never saw you saying much
on here that made it clear that you were an Esperantist.

> ...  Having seen Nick's review on Ido and Rick's sketch of Intal
>(not to mention books on such languages as Olingo, Langue Bleue, etc,
>etc.), I felt that while they certainly recognized and fixed many of the
>dumb points in Esperanto, they also succeeded in replacing them with their
>own boo-boos.  (For example, one point about Esperanto I particularly like,
>though others often hate, is the famous "table words"--the correlatives.
>Not the exact forms, those contain some of the sillier problems with
>Esperanto, but rather the basic concept.  Of course, the table-words are
>rooted out in many Esperantoid conlangs.  Subjective?  Personal preference?
>Yes!  But not blind chauvinism).

Actually, though Rick did not see fit to present it, you might actually like
the Intal table (page 23 of ther Standard-Gramatik) entitled "Tabel de
Korelativi Vortos." I have one problem with it myself because I cannot
distinguish what Weferling meant by "manir" versus "modo". But there it is.

                                              Bruce


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Organisation: Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Melbourne
Subject: A mess of paternosters
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 91 16:21:40 +1000
From: nsn@mullian.ee.Mu.OZ.AU


A whole swag of paternosters - Idos and protoIdos. From the 2nd volume of
"Leteroj de L.L.Zamenhof", ed. Gaston Waringhien, S.A.T., Paris 1948, and from
"Lingvo kaj Vivo", Waringien, Stafeto, La Laguna (Canary Islands) 1954.

Adjuvanto (de Beaufront, 1890s?) (quoted from Couturat's History of ALs [I
forget the exact title, and am too lazy to see where Waringhien quotes it]):

Patro nua, kvu estas in el cjelo, estez honorata tua nomo; venez regno tua,
estez volo tua kome in el cjelo, tale anke sur el tero; pano nua c^askaj^orna
donez al nu hodje; ed pardonez al nu debi nua, kome nu pardonas al nua
debanti; ed ne konduktez nu en tento, ma liberifez nu di el malbono.

And from a letter by de B. to Corret, 1907-1-4

Metante avan l' okuli ed en le mani di l' personi, kvin vu volas adtirir,
hoca nekontestebla dokumenti(n) pri el internacjoneco d'el Adjuvanto, vu
prekse sempre venkos ilua heziti(n).

Waringhien's comments:

"There is often doubt on the very existence of Adjuvanto... if one compares
the first document with the text of the same prayer in our Esperanto and in
the reformed Esperanto of 1894 (see below), especially if, in the latter text,
one keeps the primitive "nu" and "nue" (later corrected to "nos" and "nose"),
one cannot avoid Cart's conclusion, that Adjuvanto was not a ready language,
but only a project to reform Esp, halfway between the language of 1887 (ours)
and that of 1894. To the detailed demonstration by Cart ("Lingvo Internacia",
May 1908) I can add a decisive fact: the only trait, in which the above texts
are distinct from the system of Esp, is the double locative preposition for
state (in [in]) and motion (en [into]); well, in a letter in January 1902 to
Bourlet, Beaufront already spoke of that double preposition, but quoted them 
in the forms: "en: state, ejs: motion towards"!
In fact, if one considers the afore-quoted letter... Beaufront did not even 
consider the removal of circumflexes, and the points which took his fancy
were the plural in -i and the sexing of personal and demonstrative pronouns.
This last point (and the unfortunate imperative ending -ez) are the true limits
of his contribution to the prohect Ido."

Couturat's (?) proposed reformed Esperanto submitted to the Delegation, under 
the pseudonym Ido (late 1907)

(the identity of Mr Ido does not concern me; Esprerantologists seem to have
arrived at a consensus that it was Couturat).

Patro nua, qua esas en la cielo, honorizesez tua nomo; venez regno tua, esez
volo tua quale en la cielo, tale anke sur la tero; pano nua omnadiala donez
a nu cadie; ed pardonez ad nu debi nua, quale nu pardonas ad nua debanti; ed
ne enduktez nu en tento, sed liberigez nu de la malbonajo

Metante davan l'okuli ed en la mani di'l personi, quin vu volas adtirar, ista
nekontestebla dokumenti pri la facileso ed simpleso di l'Ido, vu preske sempre
venkos lia heziti

Esperanto without Circumflexes, 1906-11-8, Couturat 

Patro nia, kiu estas en la cielo, honorateskes tua nomo; venes regno tua,
estes volo tua, kiel en la cielo, tiel anke sur la tero; panon nian chiutagan
dones al ni hodie e pardones al ni shuldoyn niayn, kiel ni anke pardonas al
niay shuldantoy; ne kondukes nin en tenton, sed liberiges nin de malbono

Esperanto, Zamenhof, 1887

Patro nia, kiu estas en la c^ielo, estu honorata via nomo, alvenu via regno,
estu via volo, kiel en la c^ielo, tiel ankau^ sur la tero. Panon nian
c^iutagan donu al ni hodiau^ kaj pardonu al ni niajn s^uldojn kiel ni ankau^
pardonas al niaj s^uldantoj; kaj ne konduku nin en tenton, sed liberigu nin
de la malbono.

Reformed Esperanto, Zamenhof, 1894

Patro nue, kvu esten in cielo, sankte estan tue nomo, venan regito tue,
estan volo tue, kom in cielo, sik anku sur tero. Pano nue omnedie donan
al nu hodiu e pardonan al nu debi nue, kom nu anku pardonen al nue debenti;
ne kondukan nu in tento, sed liberigan nu de malbono

Sketches for 1894 Reformed Esperanto (originally thought to be part of 1881
Esperanto)

Patro mie, kvo sah in celo, sante suh te nomno, venuh te regito, suh te volo
kom in el celo sik ak sur tero! Mie omnudie panon donuh a mi hoj, e parduh
a mi mie debin, kom mi ak pardah a mie debani! Ne dukuh min in tenton, sed
libriguh min de el malo!

Patro ne, ku sah il celo, sante suh te nomo, venuh te regitto, suh te volo,
ke il lo celo, ke anku sur lo tero. Ne cudie panon donuh a nu hoy, e pardonuh
a nu ne debos, ke nu anku pardonah a ne debantos! No dukuh nun in tento, sed
liberiguh nun de l'malbono!

Mis patro, kel seh in celo, sante suh tos nomo, venu tos regno, suh tos volo,
ke in celo ak sur tero. Mis skelghorne panon donuh a mi hoy, e skuzuh a mi
mis debin, ke mi ak skuzeh a mis debori. Ne dukuh min in tenton, sed liberiguh
min de malo. Car tos seh gloro e forto ternu. Amen.

(That these are sketches for 1894 and not 1881 is concluded by Waringhien
by these text's inconsitency with the 1881 texts)

Stabilised Ido (1913)

Patro nia, qua esas en la cielo, honorizesez tua nomo, advenez regno tua,
esez volo tua quale en la cielo, tale anke sur la tero; panon nia omnadia
donez a ni cadie; e pardonez a ni debi nia, quale ni pardonas a nia debanti;
e ne enduktez ni en tento, ma liberigez ni de la malajo

Adjuvilo, Colas (1910): a Trojan Horse against Ido

Patro nosa, qua estan en cielos, santa esten tua nomo, advenen tua regno,
esten tua volo, quale en cielos, tale anke sur la tero; nosa panon omnadaga
donen a nos hodie; nosas ofendos pardonen a nos, quale nos pardonan a nosas
ofendantos e ne lasen nos fali en tento, ma liberifen nos de malbono.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Nick Nicholas, Melbourne Uni, Australia.  nsn@{munagin.ee|mullauna.cs}.mu.oz.au
"Despite millions of dollars of research, death continues to be this nation's
number one killer"  	- Henry Gibson, Kentucky Fried Movie 
_______________________________________________________________________________



--------------------------------------------------------------------------


Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1991 16:27 EDT
From: Ronald Hale-Evans 
Subject: UNIFON
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
X-Vms-To: CONLANG
X-Vms-Cc: EVANS

Hey conlangers, enough with the colour terms already! I have a new question:
have any of you ever seen or heard of UNIFON, the alphabet designed to replace
the Roman alphabet for English? I seem to remember having heard someone
disparage it on this group before, but I did a search on my archive of Conlang
and found nothing.

For those who are interested, UNIFON appears twice in the mag SCIENCE DIGEST in
the early 80s: August 81 and August 82, both by J.M Culkin. I have a clipping
of one of those articles, which also explores calendar reform. Unfortunately, I
can't find it, and Brandeis has never carried that magazine. So for the moment,
I'm out of luck.

The reason I'm asking is that I'm working on a language project, New English,
which attempts to go E-Prime one better. I thought UNIFON might be a good way
to reform the spelling. By the way, if any of you have seen UNIFON, have you
ever seen lower-case letters? Reading blocks of capital letters can be very
tiring to the eyes, and UNIFON is not displayed with lower-case in my clipping.

Ron



--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 7 Oct 91 10:16:00 EDT
From: "NRLVAX::UMPAC::GILSON" 
Subject: Alternative writing systems for English
To: "conlang" 

I have not seen more about Unifon, about which Ron Hale-Evans asked,
than the name. However there are several other alternative writing systems
which have been proposed for English:
1. The Shavian system, developed with money from a bequest by George Bernard
   Shaw;
2. The Augmented Roman alphabet, which seems essentially to have been turned
   into Pitman's "initial teaching alphabet."
3. A system, described in a book I own, which also included a few modifications
   to the language itself, called "Amerikai spek" -- using some new letters so
   this is an approximate transliteration.
(and others I cannot think of now, or never heard of, I'm sure.)

                                           Bruce


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 8 Oct 91 10:44:09 PDT
From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt)
X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.3 5/22/91)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Possessives

Mark makes some good points, but I want to add more support for my
notion of a, what would you call it, mating possessive??

He's quite correct in pointing out that although one has only one mother,
there's every reason to nonetheless categorize her under familial.

My point is that the marriage/mating/sexual/whatever possessive is
significantly unique; it reflects quite a bit about attitude and
behavior. If I say "my (friend possesive) Cindy", then anyone might
reasonably assume they too could be Cindy's friend without problem.
But if I say "my (marriage/sexual possessive) Cindy", then it implies
that one should walk carefully, since I may defend the uniqueness of
that relatiionship just as much (i.e. potentially violently) as I
would protect the uniqueness of my property ownership.

Really, think about it; this is a very different case than every other
kind of "family possessive".

I realize it is not politically correct to talk this way, but I rather
think that anthropology & sociology & psychology bears me out. ;-)
        Doug


--------------------------------------------------------------------------


Date: Wed, 9 Oct 91 09:29:34 PDT
From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt)
X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.3 5/22/91)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Spelling reform?

Y'all should be careful to distinguish spelling reform from a mandate
of dialect and accent. If you use IPA or some such to spell English,
then you are effectively mandating accent.

Spelling reform, on the other hand, need not result in a one-to-one
mapping between alphabet and lexeme, it could simply be a removal
of extreme inconsistencies, while leaving the consistent alone,
regardless of how baroque and "illogical" the spelling.

The comparison with Chinese orthography is a good one. We read English
by recognizing the overall pattern of words and sentences, not by
a letter-by-letter process. In both Chinese and in English, a new
word (one we don't already know) that we hear does not necessarily
allow us to write it down correctly. A new word we read does not
necessarily have sufficient information for us to pronounce it
correctly, nor to know its proper modern meaning.

Chinese to a limited extent makes use of combinations of "radicals",
primitives of meaning and stroke combination. This sometimes allows
a guess as to the modern meaning of the entire character, but not
usually. There has been considerable drift over the centuries. And
of course the pronunciation completely varies over the different
dialects, and varies even more when a character is used in Korean or
Japanese, with meaning sometimes unchanged from Chinese, but with
the pronunciation 100% unrelated to any in Chinese.

People sometimes think that English surely must be the most illogical
and hardest to learn of all natural languages, but that's not true.
All natural languages are inconsistent and illogical, for both good
reasons and bad.

Bottom line: I used to be in favor of spelling reform in English; now
I am not. It will reform itself over the centuries in some ways, but
it doesn't matter anyway. Supposedly logical spelling systems just do
not have any big advantage, because of the huge variations in accent
and dialect, and because once one has learned the language, consistency
of spelling is irrelevent to speed of reading.

Indeed, there is every reason to think that the error rate of reading
might rise, or that one might have to read more slowly to compensate,
precisely because the new regularity makes many more words similar
to each other, and thus harder to recognize overall at a glance!

These same issues tell me that constructed languages should probably
use simple spelling for simplicity's sake, sure, but that they should
then compensate for that weakness by making sure that relatively few
words are pronounced (and therefore spelled) in a highly similar way.

In a theoretical sense, this is a means of encoding that avoids a 
high error rate by increasing the distance between points in the
coding space.

So I'm a heretic, burn me at the stake. ;-)
        Doug


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Organisation: Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Melbourne
Subject: Yet another Paternoster
Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 15:05:12 +1000
From: nsn@mullian.ee.Mu.OZ.AU

Esperanto-II, for which Rene de Saussure is responsible.

La lordprejo - Patro nina, kay estas en la cielo; estoy Via nomo sanktigita;
venoy regno Via; estoy Via volo farata, kiel en la cielo, tiel sur la tero.
Panu nina chataga donoy al nin hodie; pardonoy al nin ofendun nina, kiel nin
pardonas lun al lulon, kayn ofendis nun, ey ne instigoy nun al tento sed
liberigoy nun dey lo malbona, kar al Vi apartenas la regno, potenco ey gloro,
ye centyaron de centyaron. Amen.

As for Esp, but: Nouns: -o nominative, -u accusative, -n plural.
Adjectives & Pronouns: -y nominative, -w accusative, -n plural
-oy imperative. Extra prefix: ruk- for return, distinct for re- repetition.
(Didn't Ido distinguish these too?). Extra suffixes: -eri trading place (in
Esp just -ej, place), -ev becoming (-igx), -iz to provide with (rare in Esp),
-or the title of a function eg. ambasad-oro, -uk male (animals only).
Personal pronouns: mi,(xi - thou),vi (you), hi, shi, ji, si (reflexive), oni, 
nin, vin (you plural), lin, sin. As far as I can tell, no accusative after
prepositions. The tabelvortoj are: la (the) (!), ta (this), ka (which), za
(some), na (none), cha (all).

Oni ofte diras, ke lingvo artefarita tute ne povas progresi, ey ke niam la
homon akceptos jia uzadu. Pro to za personon proponas, ke oni internaciigoy
za lingvu, exemple la francaw, or la englaw, or la hispanaw. Lin diras, ke
yam multa homon parolas ta lingvun, ey ke oni estas certa pri lina econ. Oni
do ne devus fabriki nova idiomu, kiam oni povas cherpi el la naturo ey tie
preni za bona ey bela lingvu. Sed lulon, kayn tiel parolas, tute forgesas du
grava punktun: unue, la popolo, de kay la lingvu oni akceptus kale internacia,
farevus potenca ey balde estus la mastro de la mondo; la alia popolon ne
akceptus do humilevi anter unay ey doni al unu sola popolo tia fortu. Due, cha
natura lingvon estas malfacila ey Esperanto estas dekoble pli facila, ki ayna
lingvo nacia. Se oni elektus natura lingvu, lulon, kayn povus lerni ta lingvu,
estus poka; kontere, se oni elektus Esperantu-II, chulo povos facile, sen
profesoro, pos kelka monaton, paroli la helplingvu. Vis milon da personon,
nin vidos milionun, kayn lernos ey uzos la lingvu.


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Nick Nicholas, Melbourne Uni, Australia.  nsn@{munagin.ee|mullauna.cs}.mu.oz.au
"Despite millions of dollars of research, death continues to be this nation's
number one killer"  	- Henry Gibson, Kentucky Fried Movie 
_______________________________________________________________________________



--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: eric floehr 
Subject: The Language of Space
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 22:57:49 EDT
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL0]

Dear All,

I was roaming around the dark hall of the OSU main library, and I came across
this interesting book.  It is called _aUI:_The_Language_of_Space_ by Dr. John
W. Weilgart.  It is quite fascinating!  The title page reads:

For the first time represented and
adapted to the needs of this planet

              by
     Dr. John W. Weilgart

Dedicated to the cosmic-conscious youth,
the young Spacemen of the Atomic Age.
With hundred Illustrations by Elisabeth Soderberg.


Pretty wild, eh?  It was published by the Cosmic Communication Company,
100 Elm COurt, Decorah, Iowa 52101, U.S.A.  Believe me, it is actually
a serious attempt!  It is a philosophical language like Solresol, with
philosophical groupings, etc.  And it is like Lojban in that it has
basic "core" words that others are built upon.  For example, the name of
the language: aUI.  a means "space", U means "mind, spirit" and I means
"sound".

Then, "fu iOv" means "I see."  "f" means "this", and "u" means "person"
thus "this-person" means "I".  "i" means "light (brightness)", "O" a
"feeling, sensation" so "iO" means "light-sense, or sight".  "v" means
"active-doing".

It then has *MANY* translations.  It starts out pretty mild: pater noster,
ten commandments, some Hindi texts, etc.  But it has many "spaceman"
references, and then texts.  For example after a lesson it says:

(First translate all this into English, then turn the page, ....
 If more than 20, the Spaceman gives you an "A,", and the Spacegirl a
space-kiss (a-ubogta)).

and after another:

(Let your space-girl-friend review you, or ask her. .... Write space-letters
to your friends.  Play space-card games.)

And the texts are like:

What would happen, if the space-man would appear in this country?  How
would he be received by us?  Where would he land (come-to-land)?  Perhaps
the space-man would come to New York.  Would we greet the space-man.  No!
The policeman would take the spaceman prisoner.
 (etc...)

It is really incredible.  And here for all to see (and the PLS):
the pater noster:

fnum ytu, bu, xu cEv ag kna;
fUI cEv UI, bu gUyv Ud xE
bum fUI ykwuryv ag U
pI A Ub bum wU terv at fnu!
can, bu brOv xE, Eryv!
ag bEn fUd jOm ag kna.
bu serv fnum iAm nod at fnu!
bu yc serv jyrt at fnu, yUt Ub fnum rym vU!
bu yc Urv Ul fnum rym vU, jOm fnu yc Uv Ul pIn rym vU,
    yf u EpAv xEn yd fnu!
Ib bu yc verv fnu tag rym Us!
fUwerv fnu yt yrU!
yUt kU-una, wU, nam fUI, cEv bum - -
rUt can A Ib can A. fUd sE cErv!

More literal translation:

Our parent, who thou art in heaven,
Name is word, thou art-known by which.
Thy name be-served in spirit
The time of your power come to us!
All you love (which), shall-be-done!
In earth thus like in heaven.
Thou give our daily bread to us
Do not give us punishment because of our bad deeds.
Thou think not about our bad acts, as we think not about
   the bad deeds which other men did against us!
And thou not move (drive) us into bad thought(s)
Free us from evil!
Because (the) God-realm, the power, the great name (glory) are thine --
for all time and all time.  So it be!



Enjoy,
Eric Floehr
(floehr@cis.ohio-state.edu)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Re: The Embedding
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 17:26:08 +0000
From: And Rosta 

Ron H-E writes:
>Just read THE EMBEDDING, by Ian Watson. This book was on that list of SF books
>for linguists I posted some time ago.
>Didn't like it very much. It centers around the linguistic phenomenon of
>syntactic embedding, which seems to resemble recursion in computer science. I'm
>not sure why Watson and his characters find it so important. Do you?
I might be able to add to Prentiss Riddle's earlier answer.

The sentence

	Fish cats dogs people artists I like paint own chase eat swim

is, according to me and Noam Chomsky (we're both universally renowned 
gurus, as I'm sure everyone knows...), grammatical - generated by the
grammar, but a real mind boggling bugger to parse. This could, for 
agument's sake, be seen as evidence for a hardware-software distinction 
between the grammar-software and parser-hardware (I suggest this on the 
grounds that my PC used to crash when my programs used recursion rather 
than iteration!).
By the way, the sentence means "Fish swim; cats eat the fish; dogs
chase the cats; people own the dogs; artists paint the people; I like
the artists". 
-----------------
And



--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 22 Oct 91 08:37:59 EDT
From: ross@buphy.bu.edu (John Ross)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Re:Arabic Morphology for Conlangs


I was also thinking about a tri-consonantal system of morphology though
not consciously patterned after Arabic. My scheme involved words of the
form CVCVCV which are to represent nouns or verbs. 

A non-nominative case for a noun amounts to flipping at least one CV to
VC. So, take a word like 

Nom.		ka-na-ta	0 0 0

then 7 other cases could be generated as follows:

		ka-na-at	0 0 1
		ka-an-ta	0 1 0
		ka-an-at	0 1 1
		ak-na-ta	1 0 0
		ak-na-at	1 0 1
		ak-an-ta	1 1 0
		ak-an-at	1 1 1

I hadn't decided what cases these would correspond to exactly, nor had I
figured out what to do to pluralize my nouns. On second glance, maybe
the last four of the above cases could count as the plural forms of the
first four. I dunno.

A further stipulation on any CVCVCV form to be a noun would be that it
must have at least two back vowels. Verbs will then be any CVCVCV form
with at least two front vowels, which means that the 8 flipped syllable
forms would indicate tense, or person, or whatever.

I hadn't thought too much about adjectives and adverbs, although I
suppose I could have all modifiers sharing the same vowel majority as
their "modifiees".

All words of the form CVCV or just CV would be various "structure
words", like prepositions, conjunctions, etc.


Comments on this new "bitlang"???

		-- JR



--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From shoulson Tue Oct 22 10:52:40 1991
To: dorai@cs.rice.edu
CC: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: conlangs borrowing directly from Skr

Well, I'm not sure that I know enough about the histories of Skt, Tamil,
Hindi, etc., to answer this well, but that never stopped me before.  From
what I've been told by various teachers, Hindi is a very definite
descendant of Sansrit, as Dorai points out.  Tamil, on the other hand, went
out of its way to excise Skt influences (with varying degrees of success)
as a sort of rebellion against Brahmanical authority (sorry if my history
is way wrong; I'm just repeating what my teachers said).  Hindi is, of
course, influenced by Arabic pretty strongly, and there are many roots (esp
common ones) which, according to someone I heard, appear to be neither
Sanskritic nor Arabic in origin, but rather originating from somewhere else
(and we don't know where).

I started reading a book on Hindi, and saw some very strong relationship to
Sanskrit (which I studied more formally), and my Sanskrit teacher compared
the relationship of Skt and Hindi to that of Latin and French.  Make of it
what you will.

~mark



--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 24 Oct 91 09:03:08 MDT
From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Re: The fate of DLT
Cc: mnu@inel.gov


Dorai Sitaram writes:
>
> Has any of you heard anything about the status of DLT, the
> Distributed Language Translation (Distribuita LingvoTradukado)
> project in Utrecht? I've seen some indirect rumors lately to the
> effect that something's not all right, and that Esperanto has been
> abandoned as the machine interlingua.  What's afoot?  Is a
> postmortem in the works?  The only previous information I have is
> rather old: it's an early-1986 document on DLT written in Esperanto
> by Klaus Schubert, and describes the IL (interlingvo) used, a not
> too unwieldy superset of Esperanto.
>
DLT is essentially finished. Here's a copy of something I wrote in a
different forum that should answer your questions, as well as those
of other conlangers that are not familiar with the project:

    I wrote this in July, 1991:

	Incidentally, there was a recent and somewhat controversial
	attempt to make Esperanto more logical and unambiguous. I'm
	referring to the Distributed Language Translation project
	(henceforth DLT) recently concluded at the BSO Corporation
	in the Netherlands. This was a multi-year project funded by
	BSO and the Netherlands government whose purpose was to
	develop machine translation technology using Esperanto as
	an interlingua.

	In 1986, about midway through the project, DLT distributed a
	long document (about 35 pages) written in Esperanto which
	discussed the changes that would be needed in the language
	in order to make it more suitable for machine translation.
	I understand that their proposals went over like a lead
	brick. Esperantists were either outraged or simply ignored
	the proposals. I was personally disappointed by their
	reaction. (In case you're wondering, I do not consider myself
	an Esperantist, even though I know the language fairly well.)
	The proposals were very reasonable, and, if adopted by the
	Esperanto community, would have eliminated much of the
	criticism normally targeted at Esperanto by those who dislike
	the language. Too bad.

	For those who may be interested, the DLT project ended about
	a year ago. I contacted the DLT project manager in an attempt
	to get a copy of the final technical report, but he said
	"Unfortunately, no final report of the DLT project is
	publicly available" (I presume there's a Dutch accent in
	there somewhere :-). However, he did send me a short,
	non-technical report on how the project was a great success,
	and on how BSO created a subsidiary to carry on the
	technology. (This short report was later posted to the Usenet
	group "soc.culture.esperanto". Those among you who have
	access to Usenet may have seen it.) From now on, the
	subsidiary will be happy to develop custom solutions to all
	your machine translation needs *if you have the bucks*. (By
	the way, in this last report, no mention was made of
	Esperanto. I find the omission extremely odd.) Considering
	that fifty percent of the project was funded by the Dutch
	government, I can't help but wonder why the results are being
	kept secret. Perhaps their claims of success were somewhat
	exaggerated. I certainly have my suspicions, but I won't go
	into them here. At any rate, whether or not they were truly
	successful, I'm sure they learned a lot. Enough, certainly,
	to justify the creation of the subsidiary.


    I wrote this follow-up in September, 1991:

	In my previous zine, I discussed how the BSO company in the
	Netherlands was using Esperanto as an interlingua in a
	machine translation project called DLT (Distributed Language
	Translation). I recently discovered that the DLT project
	abandoned the use of Esperanto as an interlingua. The source
	of this information was a posting to the Usenet newsgroup
	"sci.lang" by Harold Somers, a well-known and highly
	respected figure in the machine translation world. (I mention
	the author of the posting only to emphasize its reliability.
	Information posted to Usenet can often be misleading or
	wrong.)

Let me comment on this a little further. Also, let me warn you in
advance that the *first* comment below is pure speculation. (If
anyone knows the real facts, please enlighten the rest of us.)
The second comment is based on my own not-inconsiderable knowledge
of machine translation technology.

1. DLT was started by a group of Esperantists, most of whom were, I
believe, computer programmers (i.e., software engineers or computer
scientists). I am convinced that their primary goal was to further
the spread of Esperanto. They simply saw machine translation as a
potential vehicle for their proselytization. Obviously, if Esperanto
had been a successful interlingua in machine translation, it would
have had a considerable, positive influence on the future growth of
the language. (If I have offended any Esperantists reading this, I
sincerely apologize. I am simply stating what I honestly believe to
be true.)

2. The project abandoned the use of Esperanto because it had almost
all of the flaws of a natural language, including syntactic, semantic
and pragmatic ambiguities. The fact that it had a regular system of
inflections is effectively meaningless, since inflectional
irregularities are one of the easiest problems to deal with in
machine translation. In other words, they might as well have used
English as the interlingua - Esperanto did not offer any significant
advantages.

Well, I believe I've said enough. Can anyone correct or add to it?

Rick

--
*=*= Disclaimer: The INEL does not speak for me and vice versa =*=*
=  Rick Morneau            Idaho National Engineering Laboratory  =
*  mnu@inel.gov            Idaho Falls, Idaho 83415, USA          *
=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= NeXT Mail accepted here! *=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1991 10:51:45 PDT
From: Jonathan Pool 
Subject: DLT
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu

Rick Morneau wrote today some opinions about the value and fate of the DLT
project, and he asked for additional information.  He mentions his "own
not-inconsiderable knowledge of machine translation technology".

I can't offer the additional information he requests, but I am puzzled by the
implication in his message and the previous one by Dorai Sitaram that there is
little information publicly available about the project.  I am aware of the
following DLT publications, which I would think any expert in machine
translation would consult before evaluating the DLT project:

Witkam/A.P.M., Distributed language translation: feasibility study of a
multilingual facility for videotex information networks, BSO, 1983.

Papegaaij/Bart C.+Sadler/V[ictor]+Witkam/A.P.M., Word expert semantics: an
interlingual knowledge-based approach, Foris, 1986.

Papegaaij/B.C., Word expert semantics: an interlingual knowledge-based
approach, Foris, 1986.

Schubert/Klaus, Syntactic tree structures in DLT, BSO/Research, 1986.

Schubert/Klaus, Metataxis, Foris, 1987.

Papegaaij/B.C.+Schubert/Klaus, Text coherence in translation, Foris, 1988.

Sadler/Victor, Knowledge-driven terminography for machine translation, pp.
311-335 in Schubert/Klaus, Interlinguistics: aspects of the science of planned
languages, Mouton de Gruyter, 1989.

Sadler/Victor, Working with analogical semantics: disambiguation techniques in
DLT, Foris, 1989.

Maxwell/Dan+Schubert/Klaus+Witkam/Toon, New directions in machine translation,
Foris, forthcoming.
-------


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 25 Oct 91 08:30:00 EDT
From: "61510::GILSON" 
Subject: "Reversed Japanese" as a model for a conlang syntax?
To: "conlang" 

Lately I've been involved in a discussion, partly on the lojban-list and
partly in private with lojbab, relating to the mixture of dissatisfaction
and confusion I feel over the Lojban usage of places in a relationship, and
particularly my feeling that Lojban's rule that an omitted place is somehow
"still there in the relationship." I have also had repeated brushes with
Esperantists who feel that a word-order-based indication of the accusative
is insufficient and that the freedom of order that the Esperanto -n provides
is desirable, claims that I do not feel to be correct. Between the two of
them, I almost feel I am taking opposite positions in the two arguments:
favoring less reliance on word order than Lojban has, but more than Esperanto
uses. However, I think that is really an illusion, because it is not so much
the reliance on word order in Lojban but rather the implications of omission
of a place that are the sources of my difficulty.

For some reason, I was thinking about how Japanese handles relationships in
a predication. In Japanese, as in Hebrew, the idea of "accusative" is expressed
by a word (in Hebrew, this is only true when the object is definite, but Japa-
nese does not have this complication) analogous to a preposition. (In Japanese,
one speaks of postpositions rather than prepositions, since they follow their
nouns. I will in what follows use PP to mean "preposition" or "postposition" as
appropriate for the language under discussion.) In addition, even the _subject_
is so marked; _every_ noun in a sentence has a PP to show its relation to the 
predicate verb in the sentence. I do not know of any other language that goes 
to that extent in using PPs to show relations.

I think that this Japanese approach makes some sense. For one thing, in Japa-
nese, there is a different PP for two kinds of subjects, sometimes called
"subject" and "topic." In a _conlang_ based on this idea, a distinction could
be made between different types of _objects_ as well. To me, there is a big
difference between the function of the word "house" in the three sentences:

                   1. I built a house.
                   2. I painted a house.
                   3. I demolished a house.

In (1) the house did not exist until the action was performed; in (2) it
existed both before and after, but in some way was changed; in (3) it existed
at the start of the action, but did not at the end. In fact, we could even
distinguish at least 2 more cases:

                   4. I photographed a house.
                   5. I envisioned a house.

In (4), as in (2), the house continued to exist throughout, but it was not
even modified by the change; if my photographing it was not observed, nobody
would know it took place, while anyone who saw it pefore and after I painted
it, regardless of whether they actually saw me paint it, would know _someone_
had painted it. In (5), on the other hand, the house never needed to exist at
all (except as a mental construct). In an ideal concept-language, the PP used
with the word for "house" would be different in all these five cases [except
that if (5) were thought of as my creating a mental image, it could be sub-
sumed under (1)].

One thing I would recommend if anyone wanted to follow up these ideas, however:
The Japanese word order, with postpositions and sentence-final verbs, is so
foreign to most of us that I would think it easier for most of us if it was
reversed: the verb at the _beginning_ of the sentence, and all relationships
marked by _prepositions_.

Since _all_ relations in this type of language would be marked by PPs, the
special role of the accusative would drop out. In addition, _no_ Lojban-like
baselining of the places to be filled would be necessary; any speaker would
use those PPs he felt necessary to express the relationships needed to say
what he wanted to.

Is anyone interested in following this idea up? 

                                                   Bruce



--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From shoulson Fri Oct 25 14:38:19 1991
To: gilson%61510.decnet@ccf3.nrl.navy.mil
CC: conlang@buphy.bu.edu,lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu
In-reply-to: "61510::GILSON"'s message of 25 Oct 91 08:30:00 EDT <9110251604.AA17507@buphy.bu.edu>
Subject: "Reversed Japanese" as a model for a conlang syntax?

Hmmm.  Interesting idea you have there, Bruce.  Looking at it using ideas
from Lojban, I'm not sure it'll hold water:  You'd want markers for just
about every "modal" (BAI) and then some.  I fear that may start to get
infinite.  But not necessarily; the Japanese do fine with their finite set
and the language is still fairly clear.  Perhaps a large but finite set
will do.

I'll have to try to find a good way to talk about this; I need some
examples.  I think there are some problems, but it's still worth
discussing.

As to your different ways of expressing "the house" when it existed only
after the action was finished vs. only before vs. not necessarily ever etc.
I seem to think that Loglan, or at least one of jimc's variants (nalgol?)
had distinctions like that.  I get this from comments on an old story jimc
wrote in Loglan.  Bob, jimc, can you enlighten us?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Fri, 25 Oct 91 16:56:45 PDT
From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt)
X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.3 5/22/91)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Re: Totally a priori languages

Ronald Hale-Evans said:
>Now, it may be that all utterances in the universe
>can be parsed by humans, in which case we could define "a priori" to mean
>"having a vocabulary not derived from a known language". 

I won't beat a dead horse, but there's one tangential tidbit of interest
here: The original theory of innate deep structure is probably wrong,
but there's evidence for a different form of it.

To wit, all creoles have the same grammar, regardless of their history
and parent languages. This can be interpreted as evidence for some
kind of innate grammar hardwired in the brain, with the ability to
learn transformations of this grammar layered on top.
	Doug


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: tdatirv!sarima@uunet.uu.net
To: uunet!buphy.bu.edu!conlang@uunet.UU.NET
Subject: Re: Totally a priori languages
Date: Mon Oct 28 10:54:05 1991

From: uunet!netcom.com!doug (Doug Merritt)

>To wit, all creoles have the same grammar, regardless of their history
>and parent languages. This can be interpreted as evidence for some
>kind of innate grammar hardwired in the brain, with the ability to
>learn transformations of this grammar layered on top.

Well, or at least so *one* researcher claims.  Many other linguists
strongly disagree with this conclusion.  They claim that he is ignoring
contrary data in his analysis.

Now, from what little I have read, his conclusion do *seem* reasonable,
and the grammar he claims to have found is suitably simple.  But to say
that this thesis is established is far too strong a statement.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: a simple conlang syntax
Date: Wed, 06 Nov 91 00:01:13 +0000
From: And Rosta 

Below I give a brief outline of a simple syntax. It is not Sta grammar,
but it might resemble a demotic version of Sta that could develop from
Classical Sta. (Info on Sta coming eventually.)

The intention is to produce a simple, clear, and (reasonably) unambiguous 
syntax. Obviously the intention is not to emulate the much freer word
order of most natural languages and many invented ones.

(1) I assume a dependency grammar, so that syntactic relations are relations
between two words. One word depends on the other, its head.

(2) Heads always precede their dependents.

(3) Each dependent is marked to show the following:
(a) whether the dependent is argument of its head, or vice vers
(b) the case relation between them.
E.g.:
	The man kissed ==> kissed the man
		the man is arg of its head & the case is (say) 'nominative'
	The man was kissed ==> kissed the man
		the man is arg of its head & the case is (say) 'accusative'
	The man that kissed ==> the man kissed
		kissed is predicate of its head & the case is 'nom'
	The man that was kissed ==> the man kissed	
		kissed is predicate of its head & the case is 'acc'

(4) Each word is assumed to depend on the preceding word, unless it is
prefixed by a word meaning (sort of) 'and'.
So _Sophy likes Jane to kiss Arthur_ is:
	likes --> Sophy
	      --> & kissing --> Jane
			    --> & Arthur

(5) If a word depends not on the previous word, nor on the head of the
previous word, but on some word before either of these, its head is
repeated, being marked as a repetition.
_Susy wants Jim to like Jane to kiss Arthur and Leo to laugh 
and wants Sophy to leave_:
want --> Susy
     --> & like --> Jim 
		--> & kiss --> Jane
			   --> & Arthur
	 * like --> laugh --> Leo
* want --> leave --> Sophy
	
(6) Extraction is permitted if a word is marked as extracted and its 
extraction site is marked:
_Sophy I thought I knew you wanted to laugh_
X-Sophy think --> me
	      --> & know --> me
		    	 --> & want --> you
				    --> & laugh --> X
	
---
And

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
From: DWOLFF@ENB.Prime.COM
Subject: What speech to use in this group
Date: 08 Nov 91 13:24:28 EST

Hi folks,

I have seen the talk about what speech to use here in this group. Well,
some friends a few years back had a thought that can SOLVE this prob! They
came up with a speech that is not hard: the rules are not hard, the words
are not hard, and most of us now know most of the words!

We use plain Eng speech words 'cept: all words must have just one part.
This way, no one can use big words like law folk use to mess up our minds.
No one can use big words like gov folk use to hide the truth or make one
thing seem to be what it is not.

And best of all, Bruce Gils will love it 'cause one can not use Zam talk
AT ALL! Of course most words in Zam talk have more than one part! So,
'cept for some words in place of nouns, some verb change words, and one or
two small words like "la" ("the"), you can not use Zam talk at all!

They thought re this speech with some care. Some words are hard to
change to this talk, eg for "computer" they chose "high priced toys that
think." We are a smart bunch of folk who know lots of words and can change
words from one talk to a not same talk with great skill. I think we can do
this with ease.

By the way, the name of this speech is "Small Talk." I urge us all to use
just Small Talk in this group, as our speech for all men (and of course,
all wim).

Dave Wolff
Note re claims: this is not a thought of the folk who pay me.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Mon, 11 Nov 91 18:40:52 CST
From: dorai@cs.rice.edu (Dorai Sitaram)
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: German sine some of the flexione


I may have heard wrong, but isn't this group (among other things)
supposed to encourage crank conlang suggestions that one is too
ashamed to put forward anywhere else?  I also remember that someone
had a version of his very own conlang based on Italian and Spanish and
that he was going to present it later this year.

Anyway, this brings me to something that I've been toying with in a
very experimental way.  Something light for interested folks to chew
upon and criticize (really).  Zap now if you think this begins to
sound pathetic already.  (Oh yeah, this will make sense only if you've
had a little exposure to German grammar (not vocab).  However, you
_don't_ need to know German fluently at all, although it may help.)



The language -- one can't exactly call it a _con_lang -- is German,
but with a few changes.  So let's call it German 1.1 (in contrast to
G1.0).  My aim was to stay as close to G1.0 as possible, so that one
can machine-translate existing literature in G1.0 to G1.1 very
trivially.  (The reverse will be tougher, hopefully -- because, I want
G1.1 to be that much simpler.)

Why G1.1?  G1.1 is a (deliberately) half-assed sine flexione of
German.  Verbs (strong and weak) are kept as is.  However, gender and
case are banished.  This means a slight restructuring of the article
system and the adjective endings.  This imho makes G1.1 much easier to
learn, while at the same time doesn't make it too dissimilar from G1.0
(which is an important criterion for mutual understandability).

I have not tried to make any standard endings for nouns, adjectives,
tenses, etc., since it changes the language too much, and I don't see
if it's all that helpful anyway.  Admittedly, I'm adding things only
where the syntactic (or sexist) clutter strikes me as just too much,
and sticking to tradition as much as I can.

Here's the G1.1 `fundamento'.  For some time now, I've been mentally
translating G1.0 into G1.1 while reading G1.0 material, and it looks
kind of supple: it's still German, but without _some_ of the fat.  But
maybe I'm just biased. :-> 

The G1.1 fundamento (which I'm (and anybody else who's interested)
going to change every week!):

1. No (accusative, dative, genitive) cases (except some pronouns); no
genders (except some pronouns).

2. Definite article de; die for demonstrative and relative pronoun:
	De Mann, die ich gestern in de Schule sah, war sein Vater.

3. Indefinite article en; ein for one:
	En Kuh hat nur ein Schwanz.

4. Standalone (ie. without preposition) dative noun _may_ be preceded
by zu for clarity:
	Zu Rom sind viele Leute gekommen.

5. Standalone accusative noun _may_ be succeeded by on [I can hear
some snickers already :-> ] for clarity:
	De Kuh frisst Gras.  Gras on frisst de Kuh.

6. Preposition preceding accusative of motion takes additional zu:
	Ich gehe in zu de Schule.

7. Genitive noun followed by possessee (object possessed) takes 's:
	De Mann's Augen waren grau.

8. Genitive noun preceded by possessee is prefixed by von:
	De Augen von de Mann waren grau.

9. Adjectives take the -e ending (ie. no -er, -es, -em, -en) when
attributive, and no ending when predicative (as in G1.0).  Adverbs
look like predicative adjectives (once again, as in G1.0)
	De schnelle Zug.  De Zug ist schnell.  De Zug lief schnell.

10. Han, er, sie, es, zie (pr: tsie) are resp genderneutral, masc,
fem, neut, plural pronouns; hoen, ihm, ihr, het, zem are resp the
objective (accusative/dative) case forms; hoer, sein, haar, hets, zer
are resp the genitive forms.

11. Plurals remain same, except when it's identical with singular, in
which case add (e)n:
	De maedchen, de maedchenen.

12. Most nouns are genderneutral; to emphasize maleness, add -etz; to
emphasize femaleness, add -in:
	De student, de studentetz, de studentin	(but koenig = king,
koenigin = queen).

13. G1.0 XundYig written YigundX in G1.1:
	Zwanzigundvier, achtzigundein(s).

14. (Catchall) Everything else -- vocab _and_ grammar -- is the same
as in G1.0.

--d

Disclaimer: Note, this is a private _crank_ attempt, based on what I
found were the "plej malfacilaj trajtoj" in G1.0.  I'm doing it as an
experiment purely out of personal interest, and not trying to push it
or anything.  So, lovers of G1.0 needn't worry dass ich ihre Sprache
zu verstuemmeln versuche.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: craig@peter.cs.andrews.edu (Allyn Craig)
Subject: AYUCoL
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 91 8:48:00 EDT
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.2 PL0]

Hi all,

A couple of weeks ago, when Gilson first mentioned his reverse Japanese
I was thinking about his proposal in my 'English Grammatical Analysis'
class and so I went and found a Japanese grammar at the library and, 
well, I got carried away, and came up with the following AYUCoL 
(As-Yet-Unnamed-Con-Lang):

It's not polished by any means (I only had two hours to work on it plus
a couple minutes as I was putting it on computer) but here it is for
what it's worth. By the way, I did intentionally put some irregularities
into the language as I was more interested in creating something that
was a more or less closer approximation of human language. A lot of my
words that I used are bastardized Polish roots. Something else I also
had fun with was creating different forms of speech for Familiar, Polite
and Formal. I'm not completely satisfied with my results in that area,
but I think I've made a pretty good start (especially since this is
going to be the world language someday with it's own religion, etc. :-)


Consonants:
b, d, f, g, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, z like English (g is
only hard as in Good)
Others:
c = /j/
j = /zh/
x = /sh/
q = /ch/

Vowels:
a, e, i, o, u like Spanish.

Apostrophe:
The apostrophe is also used as either a schwa between consonants 
or a glottal stop between vowels.

Grammar notes:

Number not always indicated.
If necessary to meaning then reduplicate first syllable.

particles (to denote function of a word in sentence):
(NOTE: These are not used in the Familiar form of speech)
de subject
ga object
no possession (of, 's, from)
i position (in, on, at, with)
e direction (to)
(NOTE: -ga, -no, -i, and -e can often also come with prepositions)

Word order not necessarily rigid except for verbs with MUST come at the
end of the sentence (and in the familiar forms of speech in which word
order is a very strict SOV):

Polite                         Familiar
Conde kitega me donasen.       Con kite me donase.
John-S book-O to-me give(PR).  John book to-me give(PR).

Kitega me Conde donasen.       Same as above.
Book-O to-me John-S give(PR).

Possessive comes before what is possessed:
Conde m'no kitega Dane donasen.
John-S me/us-POS book-O to-Don give(PR).
John gives my/our book to Don.

Pronouns:
These are based on a root m, t, s, v referring to 1st, 2nd, 3rd and
reflexive respectively. The following chart shows the changes they
"undergo" when the noun suffixes are added:
m'de      m'ga      m'no      mi        me
t'de      t'ga      t'no      qi        te
s'de      s'ga      s'no      xi        se
v'de      v'ga      v'no      vi        ve
(NOTE: t and s change to q and x before -i)
(NOTE: in Familiar speech these become
me        ma        mo        mi        me
de        da        do        ci        de
se        sa        so        xi        se
ve        va        vo        vi        ve)

Verbs:
There are Familiar, Polite and Formal versions of each verb in all
tenses and so on. The following chart shows their endings.
Familiar  Polite    Formal
-se       -sen      -senna    Present
-set      -setto    -setudo   Present Q?
-ki       -kin      -kinne    Past
-kat      -katto    -katudo   Past Q?
-bi       -bai      -baine    Future
-bo       -baitto   -baido    Future Q?

-ra- infix for negative
-ku (-ko) suffix for passive
For commands in 'you' form use the future. For commands in 'Let' form
use the future with reduplication of the first syllable.
i.e.--
Vixa'e poicebai.  S'de po-poicebai.
Go home!          Let him come!


OBPATERNOSTER:

First with literal translation underneath:

M'no otsa t'de katra nive'i sen, t'no tiruga sa-savetobai.
ofus Father you who inheaven are, your name let-be-holy.

T'no qarlode po-poicebai.
Your kingdom let-come.

Zemla'i waxni niva'i t'no volaga ro-rovebai.
Inearth like inheaven your will let-be-done.

Lobega tenno dino me donabai, wa me m'no zolega xopubai
Bread ofthis ofday to-us give, and to-us our evilnesses forgive

waxni m'de m'no zolerovmega xopusen.
like we our evildoers-to-us forgive.

M'ga bezolervi pirovabaitto, wa m'ga zoleqoveno kesuvabai.
Us to-possible-evildoing do-not-lead, but us from-evil-one save.

Bo t'no qarlode, wa motsede, wa falade xedi'i sen.
For ofyou kingdom, and strength, and glory in-all-days are.

Alone:

M'no otsa'o t'de katra nive'i sen, t'no tiruga sa-savetobai.
T'no qarlode po-poicebai.
Zemla'i waxni niva'i t'no volaga ro-rovebai.
Lobega tenno dino me donabai, wa me m'no zolega xopubai,
waxni m'de m'no zolerovmega xopusen.
M'ga bezolervi pirovabaitto, wa m'ga zoleqoveno kesuvabai.
Bo t'no qarlode, wa motsede, wa falade xedi'i sen.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From shoulson Wed Nov 13 10:31:03 1991
To: cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan@uunet.UU.NET
CC: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
In-reply-to: John Cowan's message of Tue, 12 Nov 91 12:59:24 EST 
Subject: E Prime (was Small Talk)

Actually, E' is simply English with all forms of the verb "to be" excised.
I consider it more of a mind-game than a conlang. I find it useful to try
to paraphrase something into E' in order to see what the "to be" verb is
hiding.  It's also fun to do the same with other common verbs, like "to
have" and "to do".

So you can assert identity, just don't use "to be": "This sheep does not
differ from that sheep" or some such.

Admittedly, this is a simplistic view of E', but it does serve E''s major
purpose: to bring to light what hides behind "to be" verbs that we use so
freely.

~mark


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Sta phonology & script
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 91 23:08:37 +0000
From: And Rosta 


PHONOLOGICAL SEGMENT INVENTORY

p        bilabial plosive
t        alveolar plosive
k        velar plosive
m        bilabial nasal plosive
n        alveolar nasal plosive
N        velar nasal plosive
f        voiceless labiodental fricative
v        voiced labiodental fricative
T        voiceless dental fricative
D        voiced dental fricative
s z      as in English.
S Z      as in _leash_ & _beige_
x        voiceless velar fricative
j        voiced velar fricative
B        bilabial trill
R        alveolar trill or tap
G        uvular trill
p'       bilabial ejective
t'       alveolar ejective
k'       velar ejective
m'       bilabial nasal click
n'       dental/alveolar nasal click
l'       lateral alveolar nasal click
r'       retroflex/palatal/'palatoalveolar' nasal click
l        lateral alveolar approximant
L        voiced lateral alveolar fricative
h        as in English.
r        r-coloured schwa (as in American English _bird_)
i        high front unrounded vowel, quality as in RP _tea_
u        high back unrounded vowel, quality as in French _vous_
U        high front rounded vowel, quality as in French _tu_
e        mid front unrounded vowel, quality as in RP _bet_
E        mid central unrounded vowel: schwa
o        mid back rounded vowel, quality as in RP _paw_
O        mid front rounded vowel
a        low back unrounded vowel, quality similar to RP _shah_
A        low front unrounded vowel, quality as in Italian _la_
~        nasalizes preceding vowel
-        level tone
/        rising tone
\        falling tone
/\       rise-fall tone
\/       fall-rise tone

A note on the tones: these occur only in one word-class (similar to
Lojban selma'o UI). The tones can be sequences of stepped level tones
rather than continuous glissando: so \ can be -_ ; / can be _- ;
/\ = _-_ ; \/ = -_- . (This would be a great challenge to a librettist.)
Tones are associated with words, not syllables.


SCRIPT

The Sta script is designed to be written with a pen, in rows going
from left to right from top to bottom of the page. (There is an
inchoate script, which is completely different, that runs in
columns from top to bottom of the page, the columns going from
left to right.)

Spaces are optional: there is no established convention for inserting
spaces into Sta text.

Certain grammar words have shorthand forms. In handwriting, the text
is sometimes laid out in a way that reflects the syntax.

There is no punctuation.

Sta characters are similar to roman lowercase: they have an x-part,
and an ascender or descender ('b' has an ascender; 'q' has a descender;
'o' has only an x-part).

There are three types of ascender/descender:
(1) "straight": straight up/down: b q
(2) "curve": curving away from the x-part (a leftward curve in ascenders
    & rightward curve in descenders)
(3) "L-curve" - used in laterals: a rightward curving ascender

In the table, when R & B occur in the x-part column it means the R-form
& B-form are of x-height. When p and b occur in this column it means the
x-part of the letter, not the ascender/descender.

         x-part              ascender                 descender
p        u                   -                        straight
t        R                   straight                 -
k        n                   -                        straight
m        u                   -                        -
n        R                   -                        -
N        n                   -                        -
f        q                   -                        straight
v        q                   -                        curve
T        like dotless i      -                        straight
D        ,,                  -                        curve
s        ,,                  straight                 -
z        ,,                  curve                    -
S        B                   straight                 -
Z        B                   curve                    -
x        b                   straight                 -
j        b                   curve                    -
B        u                   -                        straight & barred
R        R                   straight & barred        -
G        n                   straight & barred        -
p'       u                   -                        curve
t'       R                   curve                    -
k'       n                   curve                    -
m'       q                   -                        straight & barred
n'       R                   straight & barred        -
l'       barred dotless i    L-curve                  -
r'       B                   straight & barred        -
l        dotless i           L-curve                  -
L        dotless i           L-curve                  curve
h        dotless i           straight                 straight
r        v                   -                        -
i        B                   -                        -
u        q                   -                        -
U        b                   -                        -
e        e                   -                        -
E        dotless i           -                        -
o        d (with ascender)   -                        -
O        p (with ascender)   -                        -
a        inverted e          -                        -
A        o                   -                        -
r~       v                   curve                    -
i~       B                   -                        right curve
u~       q                   left curve               -
U~       b                   -                        right curve
e~       e                   -                        left curve
E~       dotless i           -                        left curve
o~       d (with ascender)   -                        right curve
O~       p (with ascender)   left curve               -
a~       inverted e          right curve              -
A~       o                      a generous flourish in any direction
-   -
/   /
\   \
/\  /\
\/  \/

There are no capital letters at present.

-----
And

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Sta
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 91 21:26:48 +0000
From: And Rosta 

For Eric Floehr & Pierre Savoie:

Nru Sta piDASta sn'ikhaiZ

Nr        u Sta            pi DA   Sta sn'i kha           i Z
not_exist P representation P  NAME Sta P    temporally_at P this_discourse
['P' = syntactic particle]

"At present it is not possible to say anything in Sta."




I shall soon send out a description of the Sta phonology and script.

In the meantime, I have written an explanatory document about the
making of Sta, discussing:
    - my reasons for inventing it
    - its cultural context
    - its linguistic goals & aesthetics
    - its usage

Sta has not been designed for any practical purpose.
Nor can it yet claim to be a language ( - it hasn't a proper lexicon).

I shan't post the document to the list because (a) it contains no
properly linguistic information, and (b) it is personal in content.
I'll post it directly to whoever requests a copy.

---
And

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Richard Kennaway CMP RA 
Date: Sun, 10 Nov 91 17:32:42 GMT
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Dutton Speedwords (was Re: Zam Talk dead in Procrustean bed?)

Jonathan Pool writes:

> La^u D. Wolff, ne as ebl' Esp' sen du a^u pli da "a" a^u "e" a^u "i" a^u "o"
> a^u "u" en vort'.  Sed ja as ebl'!  Jes, ja!  Jen pruv'.  Do, u ^goj' ^ce Ross
> kaj Bruce!  U venk' ^ce Esp'!  U glor' ^ce L. L. Z.!  U verd' tra la mond'!  U
> tim' tra la ret'--tim' pro la grand' (a^u eg') de la fleks' de la lingv' de la
> Majstr'!  Kaj for la multsilablingvimperiismemularregpostulakceptpretecmalsano!

Could you pro' a trans' of that, so we can und' it?  And is
"multsilablingvimperiismemularregpostulakceptpretecmalsano"
real' an Esp' word?

Wow!  You can om' ev' but the first syll', and still be comp'!
Does this work in all lang'?

'pose you 'it 'thing but the last 'ble?

r js lv t th vwls?

More seriously, this has reminded me of something which is primarily a
writing system, but with conlang leanings: Dutton Speedwords.  It's
a system of abbreviations for writing not only English, but any other
language (though I suspect it would have to be reasonably similar to
English - say, any Standard Indo-European language).  Unlike systems
intended purely as a substitute for shorthand, the abbreviations were
based not only on English, but on several European languages.  They are
also names for concepts, rather than abbreviations of particular words.
Examples:

	and		e	(French 'et')
	one		u	(French 'un')
	high		ho	(German 'hoch')
	know		sa	(English 'sage', Spanish 'saber')
	continue	du	(English 'duration')
	building	ry	(English 'bakery', 'library', etc.)

The information in the third column above is simply a mnemonic clue,
not a definition.

Most inflections are dropped.  The English word "to" is omitted when used
to form infinitives (e.g. "I want to go" is "j des go").  There is a set
of suffixes which are used to modify the meanings in various ways:

	    Suffix		    Root		Affixed root
	-u	favourable	ry	building	ryu	school
				on	man		onu	sir
	-m	thing		af	business	afm	commodity
	-y	cause		id	same		idy	copy
	-n	negation	x	if		xn	unless

I find such use of affixes rather reminiscent of Esperanto.
Note that one cannot actually deduce the meaning of a compound from
those of its components.  In addition, since nearly every letter
can be used as a suffix, one cannot automatically resolve a compound
into its components.  The construction should be thought of as just a
mnemonic hook.

The prefixes y- and u- construct the past tense and present participle.
The English distinction between simple present and present continuous is
dropped.  Future tense is expressed by the word 'r' ('will').

There are also compounds of multiple roots:

	albe	already		from 'al be' = 'all before'
	zenav	shipment	from 'ze nav' = 'send ship'

The author proposed that Dutton Speedwords be adopted as a medium for
writing in directly, which could be used as a common international
language, and also save greatly on printing and telecommunication costs
(due to its brevity).

One can point out some obvious imperfections, such as the English-based
tense system, the non-metaphysically parsimonious definitions of some
compounds (e.g. 'ryu' = 'school' = 'favourable building'), and so on,
but I rather like it nonetheless.  In fact, I still use it for note-taking.

The books I have are "Teach Yourself Dutton Speedwords", by R.J.G.
Dutton (yes, a Teach Yourself book), and "Dutton Speedwords Dictionary"
(printed by Dutton Publications).  I got these a long time ago, and
they are probably out of print by now.  TYDS lists several other books,
which I tried to get, but were out of print even then.  These were
of two classes: books developing the shorthand side of the system, and
books developing the interlanguage side ("world speedwords").

According to TYDS, the world speedwords books further develop Speedwords
into an interlanguage.  (TYDS is primarily directed to the shorthand
market.) The basic vocabulary of the international language consists of
493 radicals, corresponding to the 493 divisions of Roget's Thesaurus.
(491 according to the Speedwords Dictionary.)  The 22 suffixes provide
the means for extending this basis to a complete language.  There are
rules for pronunciation (e.g. that unpronounceable-looking 'nx' is
pronounced 'nex') and presumably a fuller working out of an
international syntax than appears in TYDS.

A closing example:

j e La kid by l vu d c co d bel matz D Ny je par d l kos.  bi vus gret
su qe U nou ra d So ho kla.

"I am greatly moved by the sight of this collection of beautiful
materials from almost every part of the world.  Life seems rather
better when one regards work of such a high class."

--
Rich' Kenn'                       SYS, Univ' of East Ang', Nor', U.K.
Int':  jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk		u':  ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From shoulson Fri Nov 15 11:21:52 1991
To: riddle@is.rice.edu
CC: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
In-reply-to: Prentiss Riddle's message of Fri, 15 Nov 91 8:44:19 CST <9111151444.AA19394@llano.is.rice.edu>
Subject: Ambiguous compounds in Esperanto

Prentiss writes:

>My gut feeling is that Esperanto suffers less from this than English
>(to name one natlang) suffers from ambiguous homonyms and homophones.

Agreed.  Any language which allows this kind of thing is going to have some
real howlers.  I do think that E-o is beter than many natlangs when it
comes to this kind of error, but even it has its difficulties.  Almost
everything will, with the possible exception of the various languages
designed to avoid such (e.g. Lojban, Loglan, heaven-knows-what-else).

~mark


--------------------------------------------------------------------------



From shoulson Mon Nov 18 13:54:05 1991
To: lojbab@grebyn.com
CC: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: AL morphology

Some AL's did a slightly decent job of hinting how to disassemble compound
words (before Loglan, Lojban)

In Volap"uk, the initial word in a compound was put in genetive (ending in
"a"), and since most words were monosyllabic that was pretty easy to find.

Langue Bleue had an even better approach.  Compounds could only consist of
two roots, no more.  They were joind by an audial hyphen (and Bollack even
called it that, long before Lojban's 'y'), which was the vowel 'u', which
appeared in no content-word (except as plural or feminine marker or both,
or as perfective or passive marker in verbs, where it didn't conflict
with this usage.)

~mark

--------------------------------------------------------------------------


From shoulson Mon Nov 18 14:34:56 1991
To: doug@netcom.com
CC: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
In-reply-to: Doug Merritt's message of Mon, 18 Nov 91 08:17:17 PST <9111181617.AA19671@netcom.netcom.com>
Subject: Personal opinions on conlangs

   Date: Mon, 18 Nov 91 08:17:17 PST
   From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt)
   X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.3 5/22/91)

   > I do _not_ attempt to become fluent in Japanese, useful
   >as it could be to me, because it is difficult to learn.

   You state this as a fact. It is not; it is a personal opinion. Japanese
   is, as a matter of fact, an uncommonly regular language, making it potentially
   *easier* to learn than many other languages, at least in its spoken form.

   (In its written form, of course, many Westerners are intimidated by the
   two syllabic and one logographic form, but even there I've heard that
   it is actually no harder than learning English. Which perhaps is damning
   it with faint praises, since English is often said to be the hardest
   language to learn. [I'd be happy to explain why to anyone surprised by
   that].)

   >I _despair_ of ever
   >learning to read Arabic, because its alphabet is so difficult, though I know
   >a fair amount of a cognate language, Hebrew.

   Despite being related, again from what I hear, knowledge of one does not
   help a great deal with learning the other. In other words, the two members
   of the family are no longer on speaking terms. :-) And politics bears
   that out. :-)
	   Doug

I will *not* get into the E-o/anti-E-o discussion. But I will nibble at the
edges regarding things that are meaningful from other viewpoints.

My experience has been that Hebrew is *very* helpful in learning Arabic.
The main reason I never got far in Arabic is a failing I have in language
learning: for some reason, except for conlangs, unless I have some kind of
formalism like a class to keep me going, I tend to just lose interest (or
stop studying, or something) in a language after getting the orthography
and very basic grammar down.  So I started Arabic, learned the writing
system (very cool), and started on the grammar (quite similar to Hebrew's)
and then sort of gave up.  I still intend to get back to it someday; it's
high on my list (along with Japanese, btw).  And the orthography isn't
really all that bad, it just looks daunting. I doubt if I could read realy
fancy calligraphy at this point, but text is at least comprehensible.  It's
also not that far from Hebrew's (not the letter-forms, but the letters and
the use of vowels.  A bit cleaner in many ways; Hebrew has more vowels and
very picky distinctions between them (most Israelis probably couldn't tell
you when to use a kamatz and when a patach)). 

BTW, something that came up before. Bruce said that Sanskrit was never a
spoken language.  I don't think I can agree, though I haven't much in the
way of references to back me up.  I know that the great Sanskrit works of
literature (e.g. _Ramayana_) were always sung long before they were written
down.  Most of them were transmitted by word of mouth.  Besides.  I flatly
refuse to believe that a written-only language could develop such a
sophisticated method of sound-changes for euphony's sake.  The changes are
just too reasonable for someone trying to maximize euphony (by a
comprehensible definition of euphony).

~mark



--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From shoulson Mon Nov 18 18:21:47 1991
To: gilson%61510.decnet@cfe1.nrl.navy.mil
CC: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
In-reply-to: "61510::GILSON"'s message of 18 Nov 91 15:36:00 EST <9111182046.AA03033@buphy.bu.edu>
Subject: Kametz/Patach

   Date: 18 Nov 91 15:36:00 EST
   From: "61510::GILSON" 

   Mark E. Shoulson  writes:

   >A bit cleaner in many ways; Hebrew has more vowels and
   >very picky distinctions between them (most Israelis probably couldn't tell
   >you when to use a kamatz and when a patach)). 
   That's because Israeli Hebrew prounces the vowels in the Sephardic standard,
   so they are alike. In the Ashkenazic Hebrew _I_ learned, they are Kometz,
   with roughly a Spanish o sound, and Pasach, with a clear a. The vowel marks
   were clearly put in by people whose Hebrew pronunciation made this
   distinction.

I also learned Ashkenaz Hebrew, and when I pray or read from the Bible or
Talmud, that's what I use (in conversation, I use Sephardic standard, like
everyone else).  In fact, I have made a rather careful study of the
grammar, so I'm better than all but a few people in my synagogue at knowing
when to say komatz and when patach (and when komatz-katan: can you tell
that at a glance?  And there the pronunciation is *very* different, even
for Sephardim), and sh'va na ("moving schwa"-pronounced) and sh'va nach
("resting schwa"-not pronounced).  Very few bother to distinguish these
carefully, and in Arabic they don't have to:  a sukun is a sukun and a
fathah is a fathah and a kasra is a kasra and that's it.  They can be
lengthened or tanwined, and these are well-known and well-reflected in
orthography and everyone's pronunciation.

Besides, even if you pronounce a komatz and patach distinctly, do you know
when to use each?  In third-person-singular-masculine-past tense in the
simple construction, (e.g. for Sh.M.R.), are you *sure* (without looking it
up) that it's "shamar" or "shomor" or "shomar" or "shamor" (using "o" for
the komatz, which isn't an all-the-way-"O")?  I believe it's "shomar", and
I could probably go through an entire conjugation with only a few mistakes,
but I bet even an Israeli would flub some.

~mark


--------------------------------------------------------------------------



Subject: Truce! (short) and two non-flame comments
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
From: DWOLFF@res-c4.prime.com
Date: 20 Nov 91 13:31:09 EST

Ronald Hale-Evans writes:
(...)
> For the record, I
> don't (...) see
> why Bruce should link his stopping his flamage to David's, but David, you heard
> the man; you'll be my hero if you can get Bruce to stop flooding Conlang.
>
> Ron H-E

Wow!  I can be a hero *and* reduce the wear-and-tear on our overworked
mailer, overflowing disk, worn-out fingers, etc etc etc?

DONE!

Well, more or less.  Following are a couple of items, *not* a reply to
Bruce but info for the edification and amusement of conlangers.

Re number of speakers of Esperanto.  I wrote to Prof. Sidney S. Culbert,
University of Washington, about his numbers.  He seems considerably tired
of people complaining that he has overestimated or underestimated, people
who claim Esperanto should not be counted since no one learns it as a
native tongue (the list is *speakers*, not *native speakers*), etc.  He
did have this to say about his methodology:

(begin quote)
...I have personally conducted an on-the-spot stratified sampling of
populations in dozens of countries during a period of over twenty years,
using hundreds of hours in attempting to trace down every person within
the selected areas of the selected countries who meet my criteria of
"speaker of Esperanto."  In addition, I have the largest collection of
items in and about Esperanto to be found in the Western Hemisphere -- a
collection which has been thoroughly searched for any clues which could
improve my estimate.  In short, I know more about the topic under
discussion than any other person...

...It is, however, annoying to go to elaborate, carefully-planned, and
time-consuming efforts to obtain data nowhere else available, and then to
have the results incompetently criticized by someone who bothers neither
to read the material carefully nor check on the "facts" which he offers in
criticism...
(end quote)

Regarding accusative endings, I had a lot of trouble with these when I
learned Latin, too.  However, the problem was not that the endings existed
-- it was that there were so d**n many of them!  My personal experience in
teaching Esperanto to Americans is that they have no trouble learning and
using four endings (singular/plural, subject/object), especially since the
adjective endings exactly parallel the noun endings.  (This is not a
defense of Esperanto, flaming or un-, merely personal observations offered
in lieu of more objective facts.)

Hoping to remain this brief in the future --

David.

(PS:  If anyone has other questions about E*******o, or about Bruce's
comments, send them directly to me and I'll answer privately, to avoid
overflowing the list with a continuance of previous long-windednesses.)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Organisation: Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Melbourne
Subject: A sample of 1881 Esperanto
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 91 15:36:04 +1100
From: nsn@mullian.ee.Mu.OZ.AU


The following fromm Gaston Waringhien's Lingvo kaj Vivo, p. 30-31 and 41-42.

Waringhien's "Plena Gramatiko" of 1881 Esperanto:

1. The alphabet contains both accented vowels and consonants; these vowels are
stressed, and these consonants express affricates; the affricate gx is shown
by two letters: d'z.
2. There is no indefinite article; the definite article is la, invariant. But
after a preposition the vowel is elided and the consonant glue onto the prepo-
sition: "de la" becomes "del", etc.
3. Nouns end in -o, the plural -oj. Female names end in -a~u, plural -a~us. 
There are no cases.
4. Adjectives end in -a, plural -aj. Comparison with pli and plej.
5. Numbers as in Esp apart from un and cen. The complement of the noun form of
numerals is not introduced by a preposition: cenoj princa~us, kvardek miloj
dukatoj. To denote ordinal numbers, one adds -a; for multiplicatives, -obl-;
for fractions -on-; for distributives the word pej. (Note: the aforementioned
expression lasted even into the first years of Esp: "dek milionoj adeptoj" (in
the Second Book of 1888), "kiom fojojn" (in "La Esperantisto", 1890); but in
the First Exercises Book we already read "tri milionoj kristanoj (a~u da
kristanoj).
6. Personal pronouns: mo, to, ro (used for both he and it), 'so, no, vo, po
(they); also, so (reflexive) and o (one). They thus have the same endings as
nouns, but they have an accusative, formed by the addition of -l: mol (me).
Possessive adjectives are formed by changing -o to -a: ma (my) etc.
7. Verb: Present tense -'e, imperfect -'a, past -u, future -uj, conditional -as,
imperative -'o, infinitive -i. Participle: active present -enta, past -aga;
passive present -ita, past -assa.
8. Adverbs end in -e
9. Table words:

	-o	-u	-a	-e	-al	-el	-am	-om
I-							kan
TI-	fo	fu	fa	fi	fej	fe	fan	
KI-	kvo	kvu	kva			kve	kvan
CXI-	'cio	'cia		'cii			'cian
NENI-	fio	fiu					fian

In the Schiller translation, which shows a language in flux (hesitations in
lexicon, accusative with nouns, the relative pronouns are simplified to ko,
ku, ke, kan).
The tabelvortoj are an Esperanto feature; from top to bottom, some-, this-,
which-, all-, none-, and across -thing, -person, -sort of ,-where, -reason,
-manner, -time, -quantity.

And a poem more famous in its 1887 version in the Fundamento:

PINTO (i A~ugusto 1882)

Bella sero jal urbetto
Lue fio bru'e
E il rondo un puetta~u
Dol'ce deklam'e.
E pri vivo pri nantassa
Sante 'so palla
E ma blesso ne koprassa
Plescie veks'a.

Oh, maj pintoj, oh maj revoj,
Ne mol perig'o!
A la gloro e al devoj
Mad'za opru mo.
De ma vivo la plej kara
Pu mo for est'e:
Ma junedo bal altaro
Opre forbrul'e.

Igno mo sant'e il kordo,
Vivi mo vol'e, ---
Sej dil gavaj mo malporda
Esti koj pot'e.
Oh! plejhota! ej la sorto
Tropi mol vol'e,
Nuk e tuj romp'o ma forto,
Dum mo es sper'e!

In 1887 Esperanto (Warenghien's literal translation):

PENSO (en Auxgusto 1882)

Belan vesperon, ekster-la urbeto
Malproksime nenio bruas,
Kaj en-la rondo unu knabineto
Dolcxe deklamas.
Kaj pri vivo pri detruita
Sente sxi paroladis
Kaj mian vundon ne kovritan
Senscie incitadis.

Ho miaj pensoj, ho miaj revoj,
Ne min pereigu!
Al la gloro kaj al-la devoj
Multan oferis mi.
De mia vivo la plej kara
Por mi for estas;
Mia juneco sur-la altaro
Ofere forbrulas.

Fajron mi sentas en-la koro,
Vivi mi volas, ---
Sed cxe-la gajaj mi maloportuna
Esti nur povas.
Ho! Plejalta! Se la sorto
Trompi min volas,
Nun kaj tuj rompu mian forton
Dum mi ankoraux esperas!

And my English version:

THOUGHT (August 1882)

A beautiful evening outside the little city
Far away nothing makes noise
And in the circle a little girl
Sweetly recites
And about the life about the destroyed one
Emotionally she was speaking
And my wound uncovered
Unknowingly irritated.

Oh my thoughts, oh my dreams,
Do not make me perish!
To the glory and to the obligations
Much I have sacrificed.
Of my life the dearest
For me is away:
My youth on the altar
is sacrificially burning away.

A fire I feel in the heart,
I want to live ---
But with the happy I can
only be awkward.
Oh Highest one! If fate
wants to deceive me,
now and immediately break my strength,
while I still hope!

Waringhien believes, in my opinion rightly, that this poem is superior to the
1887 version, which clumsily interposes the girl asking the poet why he's blue.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Nick Nicholas, Melbourne Uni, Australia.  nsn@{munagin.ee|mullauna.cs}.mu.oz.au
"Despite millions of dollars of research, death continues to be this nation's
number one killer"  	- Henry Gibson, Kentucky Fried Movie 
_______________________________________________________________________________


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From shoulson Thu Dec 12 13:21:15 1991
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: part-of-speech marking

This came up a little while ago, and I thought it so funny and germaine
that I figured I ought to share it with you.

There's a commonly-used programming convention, a teacher of mine once
called it "Hungarian", I think (for no particular reason that I know of,
and it may be that Hungarian is different from what I'm talking about), for
naming variables in a program.  It involves prefixing the (hopefully
descriptive) variable name with an abbreviation of its type, so instead of
an integer value "count", you have "iCount" or "piVar" (pointer to integer
var), and so on.

Someone was complaining about getting used to it, and said he felt that he
should go around saying "gHi, qHow vAre pYou?" (greeting, query, verb,
pronoun).

iWhatever.  pI avJust vThought pIt vWas avToo ajFunny vTo vPass avUp
vTelling pYou.

~mark


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From shoulson Thu Dec 12 13:39:34 1991
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: L'aadan

Well, the folks over at SF3 *finally* got around to sending me a copy of
their _A First Dictionary and Grammar of L'aadan_.  I'll not say much about
the language, partly because I just got it, and partly because many of you
probably know much more about it than I do.

At first glance (the only one I've taken so far), it seems that the
language has some rather interesting features.  The various ways of marking
attitudes here and there (there are two variants of the Accompaniment case:
one neutral, and one "with pleasure", etc), the Evidence Morphemes which
indicate where the speaker got the information in the sentence, etc, the
rich lexical field of certain emotions, etc.

The language seems to have its quirks and a few irregularities, but not
many, and they're to be expected and usually fairly natural (e.g. adding
vowels or consonants before endings so as to retain the usual CVCV
alternation of the language.  The additions are regular, but they can
sometimes obscure the original form of a word:  for example, a word that
ends in "-eth" may be (among other things) a word ending in "-e" in the
Object case, marked with "-th", or a word ending in a consonant in the
Object case, which would take an "-eth" to keep the alternation.  As I
said, that kind of exception is very natural, so it makes sense).  The
word-order took a little while to get used to, but not too long: basically
it's VSO, but that's to broad a way to put it.  First comes a marker to
indicate the kind of sentence (omitted if same as earlier sentence), then
the verb, negative if applicable, and then the case-phrases, usually with
subject first.

I have a few problems with the book, though, on a purely technical level.
There are a fair number of subtle typos, which can only be detected by
close reading of everything else to tell you that an accent was ommitted or
some such.  And there are a couple of inconsistencies I can't fathom at
all.  Lesson 3 says that the plural marker for a verb (usually "me-") is
changed to a syllabic "n-" (optionally "ne-") for verbs starting with a
"d".  The example given is "ndi" (plural-speak).  All well and good, except
that throughout the rest of the book, wherever a plural "di" shows up, it's
always "medi", as if that rule somehow was forgotten.  Also, the (rather
free) translation of Psalm 100 consistently uses a form of the *first*
person pronoun to refer to God, while the translation of the 23rd uses the
third person (and second, where God is addressed).  (If you don't feel like
looking it up, first person makes no sense for #100, but #23 looks fine).
It looks to me like the language was developing but someone didn't have
time to re-edit the older things to conform to newer usage as stuff
changed.

Whatever.  If people are interested and I feel confident enough, maybe
someday I'll post something meaningful about this.

~mark


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From shoulson Fri Dec 13 13:22:59 1991
To: mnu@inel.gov
CC: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, mnu@inel.gov
Subject: L'aadan

Hmmm.  I'm working on a proper thumbnail sketch to be posted soon, but
since Rick just asked for some sample sentences, I can throw out a few.
Note that I'll use an apostrophe before a vowel to mean that the vowel is
accented, which means it is said with a high tone, or if you prefer,
stressed like English heavy stress.

B'ii hal with wa
declarative-sentence.  work(singular) woman observed(evidence morpheme)
The woman works (evidence morpheme indicates that the data is observed by
the speaker).

To negate that, add "ra" after "hal".  For plural women, the noun doesn't
change, but the verb becomes "mewith".

B'aa eril benem ne?
question-sentence. past. stay(singular) you(singular)?
Did you stay?

"eril" indicates past tense, while "aril" does future, and others for other
tenses.  No evidence morpheme on a question.

B'ii eril den be witheth wa.
decl. past. help(singular) she/he/it woman-obj observed.
She helped the woman.

"-(e)th" is the marker for accusative.

B'ii l'aad le neth oyinan wa
decl. percieve I thee eye-instr observed.
I see you (lit.  I percieve you with my eyes).

Sensation is usually done with "percieve" (l'aad) and organ in
instrumental.  Emotions are felt using "lal'aad" (percieve internally), and
no instrumental.

Whatever.  I better hold off until I can put all this data into the letter
under construction, so I can keep it all in one place.

~mark


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From shoulson Mon Dec 16 13:46:31 1991
To: maxwell@ltb.bso.nl
CC: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
In-reply-to: maxwell@ltb.bso.nl's message of Mon, 16 Dec 91 09:55:44 +0100 <9112160855.AA01617@lt5.ltb.bso.nl>
Subject: elgin & martinet

I know practically nothing about either.  I know Elgin wrote "The Gentle
Art of Verbal Self-Defense", but I never read it.  I'm told she's a pretty
respected linguist, but I'm not really up on my linguists.  She also wrote
some science-fiction, and came up with L'aadan when working on her "Native
Tongue", which I also never read.  I could list lots of other books which I
never read, but that wouldn't help much. :-)  Oh!  here, I'll check the
"other works by SHE" in the front of the grammar:

Assorted fiction, I see, including "The Communipaths, Furthest, At the
Seventh Level..." I imagine you'd be more interested in the non-fiction.
"Guide to Transformational Grammar (with John Grinder), What is
Linguistics? (1st & 2nd edition), Pouring Down Words, The Gentle Art of
Verbal Self-Defense, More on the GAoVS-D, The Last Word on the GAoVS-D."
Of all these, I've read none, save the grammar I have.  I have a copy of
_Native Tongue_, maybe one day I'll read it.

~mark


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From shoulson Mon Dec 16 14:57:20 1991
To: EVANS@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU
CC: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: Klingon verbs

I, too, have a copy of _The Klingon Dictionary_ (a rather interesting book
and language, actually), and noticed the odd conjugation of verbs.  As RHE
said, you prefix the verb with a prefix which indicates the person and
number of both the subject and object (there's a table).  It should be
noted that some of these prefixes are duplicates, so there is ambiguity,
and quite a few are null (i.e. a zero prefix, just the bare verb is used).
I should also point out that there is a column in the table for "no
object", used when the verb is intransitive.  Verbal markers, including the
"indefinite subject" marker, affect what a given verb will take, of course
(the example cited is cited because its effect is a little strange:  it's
the closest thing Klingon has to a passive voice, and when it's used the
prefixes are used differently:  the first- and second-person subject with
third-person singular object prefixes are used instead to indicate
indefinite subject and first- or second-person _object_).

The only example of something similar that springs to my mind at the moment
is in Biblical Hebrew, where it's possible to tack on objects as sort of
contractions onto verbs.  Verbs already indicate the person almost uniquely
in most conjugations, and you can attach pronominal suffixes to them to
indicate the object.  Eeg, this is more or less right, but it sounds wrong
to me.  Anyway, as an example, the famous phrase from the New Testament,
"Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani" uses this form.  "Sabachta" is recognizable as
second-person singular masculine past tense "simple" form, and the "-ni"
ending indicates first-person singular object "Thou hast abandoned me".  A
modern Hebrew speaker would break it out into a separate word (as was done
in Biblical Hebrew, too), as "Sabachta oti" (oti=declension of
"et"/accusative particle + "ani"/I), assuming anyone still uses that verb,
which I never heard outside of the phrase given.  Other examples are common
throughout the Bible, at least the Hebrew Bible.

This isn't quite the same thing, as it's not inextricably bound up like the
Klingon is, but it's something.

~mark


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From shoulson Mon Dec 16 22:38:15 1991
To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu
Subject: L'aadan, erratum

Needless to say, I made at least one boo-boo.  In the bit about the "wo-"
prefix, the relativizer for adjectival use of verbs, I have:

>with "wo-" prefix:  "balin"=to-be-old, "with"=woman/person --> "wobalin
>wowith"=old woman, "womebalin wowith"=old women (note plural prefix)
                     ^^^^^^^^^
You can probably guess that I should have "mewobalin wowith" there.  The
plural marker always comes first, THEN the "wo-".

~mark

P.S. someone has already asked me about the missing spots in the second
declension matrix.  I don't know why they're empty.  Presumably SHE decided
those places (no reason but with blame and/or futility) were not plausible
or common.  Possible that the language allows for them and she just chose
not to mention it in the book, but that's unlikely.  Ask her if you're
really curious.



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