zompist bboard

Alright.

Since the first thread was a complete flop with me posting more than receiving replies, I decided to upload the reference grammar .pdf for you to look at, find errors, questions, or confusing parts of the grammar so I can fix it.

The pdf can be found here. (Current size: 2.26 MB, 53 pages).

As of now, the family tree is receiving a slight update as I work on sound changes into the first tier of daughters. The earliest daughter, to which a lot of this grammar is owed, is Ɛzɔṛḍ, or New Deithas, has its sound changes posted. References to its language will be made at a later date as I'm able to trump up more examples. [Update] I have worked out the Proto-North-Deithas sound changes, which mainly involve the generation of voiced aspirated plosives, and expanded the retroflex and palatal inventories. The sound changes have not yet made it into the grammar, if only because I need to fine tune some of the sound changes.

As well, syntax is coming along, but for those who are interested, the language is VSO, VAdv, AdjN, AdjMSt, GenN, and Rel Clause. More to come soon, of course.

Now! Read! Post!

I'm liking the way you do oblique case for monosyllables. Very quirky but well justified.

Only complaint so far is that the table of primary personal prefixes is crazy hard to read.

Very nice document layout, I must say. For some reason it's very aesthetically appealing. I assume you use LaTeX, I do too, but somehow my documents never look that organized I hope you don't mind I'll probably copy a few stylistic features from your document for mine (also CC-NC-SA).

Page 25 there's a typo, you write "thought" instead of "though".

As for the grammar, looks good. I might look back over it later.

I looked. It was nice. 10 voices is a bit much tho.

nebula wind phone wrote:I'm liking the way you do oblique case for monosyllables. Very quirky but well justified.

Only complaint so far is that the table of primary personal prefixes is crazy hard to read.

I'll probably go through and rework the tables. I dislike white cells on black lines, but I might try to use white lines instead.

The oblique in monosyllables, to be honest, was one of the hardest things to get down. Originally, I had no problems because the numerical affixes were compulsory. But I realized this was ass, so by making them optional, it meant monosyllables now had a problem forming their obliques. But there are always work-arounds.

Zoris wrote:Very nice document layout, I must say. For some reason it's very aesthetically appealing. I assume you use LaTeX, I do too, but somehow my documents never look that organized I hope you don't mind I'll probably copy a few stylistic features from your document for mine (also CC-NC-SA).

Page 25 there's a typo, you write "thought" instead of "though".

As for the grammar, looks good. I might look back over it later.

Thanks for pointing out the typo. I can't them all.

I produced the grammar based with Microsoft Word 2007 with Export to PDF--surprisingly, not LaTeX. OpenOffice has the same feature, to Export to PDF, so that would help. I haven't tried my hands on LaTeX yet, but if I can do this with out of the box software, who knows what sort of havoc I can cause?

MrKrov wrote:I looked. It was nice. 10 voices is a bit much tho.

Thank you! For the voices, they shouldn't really be called such, but have a few points in their favor.
1). They modify valency to a regular degree.
2). They are highly productive, grammatical, and not purely derivational. Depletive detransitives are very limited in their usage, and despite providing a lexical reason, they can't be derived any further. You, for instance, can't say, "I cause him to drown" with a depletive detransitive construction plus a causative. Some of them interact--but they don't all interact.

However, there's plenty playing against them.
1). The avalent is more or less an finite adverb or an affirmative, but it's probably not a voice.
2). The locative is the same thing, but for verbs of motions.
3). The malefactive/benefactive can be joined with causatives, for instance. Those two plus the causative can be joined with the detransitive. Voices shouldn't have this much freedom.

The issue boiled down: What else do you call a grammatical system of valency shifting? Organizing them together makes things easier--but no doubt, the analysts do go a little overboard.

Impressive work.

? 5.3.d gloss ?

That there sure is one quality Reference Grammar you got there, Neek.

I produced the grammar based with Microsoft Word 2007

O.o

I started out using MS Office (and then OpenOffice) for conlanging but never ever did they look like THAT. And I'm aware of export to pdf...

Yeah, I just assumed you'd LaTeXed it too. (It probably woulda been easier with LaTeX — but then again, I always think everyone's lives would be easier with LaTeX, even if the only thing they ever type is letters to Grandma.) That's a seriously impressive document to have wrung out of Word.

nebula wind phone wrote:Yeah, I just assumed you'd LaTeXed it too. (It probably woulda been easier with LaTeX — but then again, I always think everyone's lives would be easier with LaTeX, even if the only thing they ever type is letters to Grandma.) That's a seriously impressive document to have wrung out of Word.

Latex,, shmatex... I've tried to use latex a few times now and all I end up with are bland, generic, plain ugly documents. I can never get it to do what I want, instead of it doing what it wants, formatting things with OOTB format templates. I'm sure there are ways to go around this, but I don't know them.

No, it's true — as much as I love LaTeX, its default page layout and its built-in fonts are ugly as sin.

What bothered me most is that I had to look up the syntax of different commands for more elaborate stuff, which often took longer than actually typing it out. Nowadays I'm using OpenOffice, and for most purposes that's enough for me.



Except OOO still doesn't allow OpenType. Shame on it for not even supporting simple fi-ligatures.

nebula wind phone wrote:No, it's true — as much as I love LaTeX, its default page layout and its built-in fonts are ugly as sin.

so can I make my own format template, define fonts, and whatnot ?

As to this whole LaTeX/OpenOffice/MS Office thing, I wonder if I should post a tutorial on how to do it. Wouldn't hurt, would it?

Neek wrote:As to this whole LaTeX/OpenOffice/MS Office thing, I wonder if I should post a tutorial on how to do it. Wouldn't hurt, would it?

Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease!

Sounds like a good idea.

Neek wrote:As to this whole LaTeX/OpenOffice/MS Office thing, I wonder if I should post a tutorial on how to do it. Wouldn't hurt, would it?

MSOffice and OO.org are pretty easy, but still, wouldn't hurt. I'm particularly interested in someone doing a TeX thing, especially if it focuses on one of the many GUI for it, like Lyx; I tried to use Lyx and it was just headaches, crashes and ugly-ass docs.

Torco wrote:

nebula wind phone wrote:No, it's true — as much as I love LaTeX, its default page layout and its built-in fonts are ugly as sin.

so can I make my own format template, define fonts, and whatnot ?

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: You probably don't want to do most of this stuff yourself. The thing to do is to take advantage of extensions that have already been written — the single best thing about LaTeX is that most of the common formatting problems have already been solved by someone else, so you don't have to. Most people who use LaTeX regularly have a list of a dozen or so packages that they Just Can't Do Without. But yeah, in a pinch, you can define your own formatting commands and document styles and so on.

(As for fonts... the simplest solution is probably to use XeTeX. It's a TeX clone that's been rewritten to use modern font technology — so you can just use the normal fonts you've already got installed on your system, same as you'd do in Word or OO or whatever. Makes life much simpler.)

I'll check tex out again, sometime in the future.

Torco wrote:I'll check tex out again, sometime in the future.

If you want, I'll give you my LaTeX sources for the conlang document I'm working on (Proto-Makvilad). You can take a look at how I do things; I think it looks pretty nice, if not exactly like neek's. Just PM me.

Very nice! I'm always impressed when someone shows relationships between genealogically related languages like this ("word A comes from Proto-language *a", and so on).

I know it's a draft copy, though, so I hope you don't mind my little nitpick:
On page 20 (similar to Rik's picking-up of your 5.3.d gloss), the glosses for 5.5.k and 5.5.l are the same. The in-language sentences are different and the English translations are different, but the glosses are both relate to "him always eating turtle".

A nitpick (from page 33):

"Despite its Cartesian fullness, this system is hardly regularly, oftentimes triggering a sandhi process (5.6.a)."

I assume it should read hardly regular.

James0289 wrote:Very nice! I'm always impressed when someone shows relationships between genealogically related languages like this ("word A comes from Proto-language *a", and so on).

I know it's a draft copy, though, so I hope you don't mind my little nitpick:
On page 20 (similar to Rik's picking-up of your 5.3.d gloss), the glosses for 5.5.k and 5.5.l are the same. The in-language sentences are different and the English translations are different, but the glosses are both relate to "him always eating turtle".

I don't mind nitpicking at all (and those aren't nitpicks, those are actual errors. Nitpicking would be attempting me to cite obscure comma rules or modify a phrase very lightly). Thank you for catching that.

Gaxa wrote:A nitpick (from page 33):

"Despite its Cartesian fullness, this system is hardly regularly, oftentimes triggering a sandhi process (5.6.a)."

I assume it should read hardly regular.

Typo. Corrected.

On the road to syntax, because derivational morphology is dildos to right up.

Updated 9/25:
Fixed the typos. Expanded the phonology, started working on syntax. Link in my sig.

As I work on this, I'd also like to start on derivational morphology. Any suggestions?

I was absent when this was first posted so I didn't get a chance to comment, but now I will. Except I have a paper to write so...it'll be a few hours, or possibly a day? COMMENTS WILL BE FORTHCOMING HOWEVER, my friend.