Polysynthetic Conlang

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Post by Mecislau »

Eddy the Great wrote: I've added a new aspect
How many aspects do you have? :?

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

How many aspects do you have?
I have the perfect, imperfect, inchoative, cessative, habitual, iterative, and the tendency, so it has a lot of aspects, but it needs them to express what natlangs do, so I can't get rid of any.
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Post by DF »

Here's a sample of my new polylang, just so you can get a feel on it. I won't post much grammatical things yet, but here's a few things. The only consanant clusters allowed are 'qt' and 'tq', or a continuation of those ('qtq', which is uncommon). No more than two consecutive vowels are allowed.

The phonology is rather small; only eight consanants, but a rather large number of vowels when compared (9, including the glottal stop).

Here's a couple sample words. Q?sie:t?qtqonqitla:?ne:, 'He Who Walks on Air' (the name for the prophet of a currently-nameless religion), and q?siqe:t?m?iser?, 'He Who Always Sleeps' (a name I dubbed to myself).

The writing system is syllabic, and is written vertically.

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Post by Dudicon »

DarkFantasy wrote:Here's a sample of my new polylang, just so you can get a feel on it. I won't post much grammatical things yet, but here's a few things. The only consanant clusters allowed are 'qt' and 'tq', or a continuation of those ('qtq', which is uncommon). No more than two consecutive vowels are allowed.

The phonology is rather small; only eight consanants, but a rather large number of vowels when compared (9, including the glottal stop).

Here's a couple sample words. Q?sie:t?qtqonqitla:?ne:, 'He Who Walks on Air' (the name for the prophet of a currently-nameless religion), and q?siqe:t?m?iser?, 'He Who Always Sleeps' (a name I dubbed to myself).

The writing system is syllabic, and is written vertically.
Is there any reason for only allowing /q/ + /t/ and vice versa? Such oddly restrictive rules don't generally come about, except after certain long periods of phonological change, probably portending the impending loss of even those clusters.

Also, I would caution against translating your words in the form "he who...," unless they literally contain a relative clause. If they don't, this betrays their verbal nature and renders them in a different perspective from that which is most precise and in tune with the native language.

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Post by jburke »

Maknas wrote:
Eddy the Great wrote:
How many aspects do you have?
I have the perfect, imperfect, inchoative, cessative, habitual, iterative, and the tendency, so it has a lot of aspects, but it needs them to express what natlangs do, so I can't get rid of any.
N?yanla gets along with only perfective, imperfective, inchoative, and cessative, as well as subjunctive mood and a few evidentials.
Noyatukah has two moods, the manifest and unmanifest, and three aspects: the perfective, imperfective and continuative. Notions like habituality aren't properly aspects.

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Post by jburke »

Is there any reason for only allowing /q/ + /t/ and vice versa? Such oddly restrictive rules don't generally come about, except after certain long periods of phonological change, probably portending the impending loss of even those clusters.
That's why diachronic work is so important; you can choose at random which clusters are allowed and which aren't, or you can choose them historically. Noyatukah, e.g., allows about 35 of a possible 196 clusters; but at earlier stages of the language, many more were legal. These cluster-related changes gave birth to the language's complex sandhi interactions.
Also, I would caution against translating your words in the form "he who...," unless they literally contain a relative clause. If they don't, this betrays their verbal nature and renders them in a different perspective from that which is most precise and in tune with the native language.
I would tend to agree; but do realize that a Mohawk nominal can, with no morphological change, serve just as well as a relative. E.g., iekareni?:tha 'shovel' means 'it-carries,' but can also mean 'it-which-carries'.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

I'm try to figure out how I'd translate "Love is blind." I can express something similar to "Hate leads to suffering." like this:

K?tka'ik?t?mi @ik?kl?s?mi.
K?-tka-'ik?-t?-mi @i-k?-kl?s?-mi.
pain-create-3SOS-3SSA when/if-habitual-hate-3SSA
When one hates, they create pain.
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

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Post by Eddy(NLI) »

How would you handle something like "Theft is foolish."?

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Post by Rik »

Eddy(NLI) wrote:How would you handle something like "Theft is foolish."?
You're wandering into the territory of metaphor here, which various languages handle in very different ways.

I think it would be a mistake to transliterate the three phrases from English, as the transliterations would carry English baggage with them - love is blind is Shakespeareian, while hate leads to suffering reminds me of Star Wars. Theft is foolish is more original, though clearly patterned on the Shakespeareian, again.

My preference would be to build the metaphor from scratch, and then cast it in a pattern matching the language patterns of any conculture behind the conlang. For instance, you could translate a blind man walks in the night without a stick and then shorten it somehow and associate it to the concept of love through whatever metaphorical association tool is operating in the language. Some thought could lead to a shortening of the phrase, and a story for how the phrase came into being. Then you will end up with a translation of the phrase which isn't just an English relex. For hate, how about a phrase along the lines of the child cries over the shards of its smashed food bowl.

Don't mind me if I'm talking bollocks - it's just an idea ...

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Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:I'm try to figure out how I'd translate "Love is blind." I can express something similar to "Hate leads to suffering." like this:

K?tka'ik?t?mi @ik?kl?s?mi.
K?-tka-'ik?-t?-mi @i-k?-kl?s?-mi.
pain-create-3SOS-3SSA when/if-habitual-hate-3SSA
When one hates, they create pain.
I realize it takes a while to get out English nominal thought, but in "love is blind" you have two nouns when you could express the same thing with the verb 'love-blinds-one'. As for Yoda's "Hate leads to suffering," try 'when-one-hates, they-suffer'.

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Post by ran not in »

Eddy the Great wrote:I'm try to figure out how I'd translate "Love is blind." I can express something similar to "Hate leads to suffering." like this:

K?tka'ik?t?mi @ik?kl?s?mi.
K?-tka-'ik?-t?-mi @i-k?-kl?s?-mi.
pain-create-3SOS-3SSA when/if-habitual-hate-3SSA
When one hates, they create pain.
Don't do metaphors yet... by default, they differ between languages. Instead, do everyday sentences like "it's raining a lot these days" and "why don't we go get some pizza?". How much these "normal" sentences change through translation is a true test of ambiguity and realism.

Eddy the Great(NLI)

Post by Eddy the Great(NLI) »

I realize it takes a while to get out English nominal thought, but in "love is blind" you have two nouns when you could express the same thing with the verb 'love-blinds-one'. As for Yoda's "Hate leads to suffering," try 'when-one-hates, they-suffer'.
I see. I did more or less what you suggest for "Hate leads to suffering." I see your points about this being metaphor. It just doesn't translate. I think I can get the essential meaning of "Love is blind" byt saying basically one-falls-in-love-randomly or something to that effect.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

Is this a good idea?

|Xatskatq?|x'?ama.
|Xa-tska-tq?-|x'?-a-ma.
road-to.right.of-motion.to-walk-past-3SSA
I walked to the right of the road.

I use an affix to turn a stationary locative into one that indicates motion to that place.
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

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Post by Mecislau »

Eddy the Great wrote:Is this a good idea?

|Xatskatq?|x'?ama.
|Xa-tska-tq?-|x'?-a-ma.
road-to.right.of-motion.to-walk-past-3SSA
I walked to the right of the road.

I use an affix to turn a stationary locative into one that indicates motion to that place.
I think I've seen that in natlangs, so I don't see a problem.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

I think I've seen that in natlangs, so I don't see a problem.
I wonder what kinds. I also wonder how Mohawk and Cheyenne do it.

Is there some equivalent to "greater than", "smaller than", etc. in the langs you'vce studied, Jburke?
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

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Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:
I think I've seen that in natlangs, so I don't see a problem.
I wonder what kinds. I also wonder how Mohawk and Cheyenne do it.
The Cheyenne equivalent of your sentence you translate like: 'I-righted-(the)-road-by.walking', with 'righted' as the root.
Is there some equivalent to "greater than", "smaller than", etc. in the langs you'vce studied, Jburke?
There are ways of expressing those notions, sure.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

There are ways of expressing those notions, sure
Can you give some examples?
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

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Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:
There are ways of expressing those notions, sure
Can you give some examples?
ehaahp?ome naa ehahpe?oho 'he-is-great, but he(obv.)-is-greater'

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

So theres a verb inflection of some sort that indicates that the verb is comparing?
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

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Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:So theres a verb inflection of some sort that indicates that the verb is comparing?
No, the above is just two normal expressions joined by naa, 'but' (it can also mean 'and'.)

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

No, the above is just two normal expressions joined by naa, 'but' (it can also mean 'and'.)
So it means more literally: he-is-great but he-is-great and in that language, that indicates comparision?
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

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Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:
No, the above is just two normal expressions joined by naa, 'but' (it can also mean 'and'.)
So it means more literally: he-is-great but he-is-great and in that language, that indicates comparision?
-haahp- 'great' and -hahpe- 'greater' are two different (but related) roots. The former is used in the first expression, the latter in the second.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

-haahp- 'great' and -hahpe- 'greater' are two different (but related) roots. The former is used in the first expression, the latter in the second.
So Cheyene uses different words?
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

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Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:
-haahp- 'great' and -hahpe- 'greater' are two different (but related) roots. The former is used in the first expression, the latter in the second.
So Cheyene uses different words?
They use different root morphemes for that kind of expression.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

How is a situation where a locative has to be attached to a verb handled?
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

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