Lulani

Substantial postings about constructed languages and constructed worlds in general. Good place to mention your own or evaluate someone else's. Put quick questions in C&C Quickies instead.
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Ryan of Tinellb
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Lulani

Post by Ryan of Tinellb »

At long last here is the grammar summary for my language, Lulani.

Lulani.pdf
High Lulani and other conlangs at tinellb.com

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Sakir
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Re: Lulani

Post by Sakir »

Slowly going over it between compile times at my job; good work so far as I can tell. The first thing I felt odd enough to post about was your cardinal numbers with negative digits allowed: that's wild! Does this come from anywhere, or motivated by some quality of your conpeople? It's quite strange. :-D

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Re: Lulani

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A very old book in my university library ("The reverse notation : introducing negative digits with twelve as base" by James Halcro Johnston, published in 1938) seriously suggested that Earth humans should use a similar system in duodecimal. This system was also used for Shwa. My plan is to have the daughter languages use more common number systems, but have their words for 8, 9 to be derived from sahaki, sasiti.
High Lulani and other conlangs at tinellb.com

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Re: Lulani

Post by Sakir »

Are there really only three adjectives in your language? The ones you've listed seem to be concerned with specifying a subset of a set (some, different, certain), so I might expect adjectival strategies for other divvying-up, like 'all but one', 'this one alone', and so on. Is there a motivation for this particular relationship being shown as noun suffixes? In your noun-phrase section, you say slot 'vii' can take an adjective: are these drawing from the same class? In which case, how would your language handle an open-ended array of Crayola colors? Perhaps you would import words like 'cyan', 'chartreuse', 'summer half-marigold', or whatever nonsense as some kind of noun, and attribute it to referants with a noun phrase? Or perhaps as verbs? Just some random thoughts - chapter 12 just seems remarkably terse! :-D

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Re: Lulani

Post by Jūnzǐ »

Sakir wrote:Are there really only three adjectives in your language? The ones you've listed seem to be concerned with specifying a subset of a set (some, different, certain), so I might expect adjectival strategies for other divvying-up, like 'all but one', 'this one alone', and so on. Is there a motivation for this particular relationship being shown as noun suffixes? In your noun-phrase section, you say slot 'vii' can take an adjective: are these drawing from the same class? In which case, how would your language handle an open-ended array of Crayola colors? Perhaps you would import words like 'cyan', 'chartreuse', 'summer half-marigold', or whatever nonsense as some kind of noun, and attribute it to referants with a noun phrase? Or perhaps as verbs? Just some random thoughts - chapter 12 just seems remarkably terse! :-D
IIRC, Middle Egyptian had only one inherent adjective: Nb "every, all". All others were just derived from nouns or verbs. Also, many languages (including my own pet conlang :wink: ) lack adjectives as a separate class of words: Most Australian languages lack a distinction between nouns and adjectives; apparently Calusa lacked a distinction between adverbs and adjectives, as did Ventureño - in these two languages, they are respectively known as "modifiers" and "adjuncts".

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Re: Lulani

Post by Ryan of Tinellb »

There are more than three adjectives, but not many more. (I don't know how many, the dictionary is not finished yet.) The 'true' adjectives cannot be used predicatively, so my idea is that they are only for things that I feel could not really be derived from other parts of speech.

I've got this intuition on what could be a true adjective, but I'm finding it hard to put into words. They're not general qualities, they're more specific. There are lots of slow things or red things in the world, but only one referent for "a certain person" or "some person". I'm sorry if that doesn't make any sense.

Most English adjectives are Lulani verbs. The basic colours are verbs. If you want another colour, you use a compound verb, usually compounded with a noun. So, "to be red" is a basic verb, "to be red-apple" is a compound verb.

I'll put up what I've got of the dictionary so far. It's not great, I need to proofread it, expand some bits, and there's not necessarily a way to tell English homophones apart for the moment, but I'll keep updating the online version as the offline version gets updated. I'm going to start on the next descendant (Ptokan) soon, so Lulani may not be updated often, though.

As a thank-you for reading, if you look up "sakiri" (under "kiri") in the dictionary, it may (or may not) amuse you.
High Lulani and other conlangs at tinellb.com

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Re: Lulani

Post by Sakir »

Ryan of Tinellb wrote:There are more than three adjectives, but not many more. (I don't know how many, the dictionary is not finished yet.) The 'true' adjectives cannot be used predicatively, so my idea is that they are only for things that I feel could not really be derived from other parts of speech.
Makes sense, and I kind of suspected that to be the case based on your examples. Perhaps the thing you are feeling sensitive to here isn't so much something called an 'adjective' as the kind of words associated with determiners and such in other languages. I guess this includes things like "the", "a", "this", "some" and all those, if my memory serves. Your dictionary has "first", "second/penultimate","some","every", "none" as adjectives, so perhaps one could analyze your language as having a rich set of determiners?

All that said, the language is just fine having a small closed set of adjectives. It just seems you could analyze your language that way. I think the way to be 'sure' would be if those adjectives were felt by the speakers of your language to be common/obligatory, or if they are seen as very optional bits to add to your phrases. I (somewhat unjustifiably) would expect a rich determiner class analysis to predict they would use these terms very frequently.

As a random-sidethought... maybe you could have a word that meant 'all but one' that was etymologically related to mullu - might be neat to play with your negative digits as having extended semantic shades that was felt in other words.
Ryan of Tinellb wrote:As a thank-you for reading, if you look up "sakiri" (under "kiri") in the dictionary, it may (or may not) amuse you.
I grinned pretty broadly! Awesome :D

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Re: Lulani

Post by Ryan of Tinellb »

There isn't as much updating of the grammar as you'd expect in almost three years (hardly at all, actually), but the dictionary has been expanded. And it's online now!
http://www.tinellb.com
High Lulani and other conlangs at tinellb.com

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