[YG Conlang Archives] > [ceqli group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
Rex May - Baloo wrote:
>
> Three languages impress the dickens out of me Ð Esperanto, Loglan, and
> Mandarin. I want Txeqli to have the best characteristics of each.
>
> Esperanto. I want Tx to be able to build words in much the same way that Eo
> does, from morphemes tacked together in a systematic way.
I'll try to get through all the new (to me) info on the Web, but for
now, I'll just ask questions to try to get up to speed on all that's
happened. (Also, I'm quite ignorant about conlangs in general.)
(I'll try to be consistent in saying "Mandarin" when referring to the
standard, Putonghua/Guoyu, and only use "Chinese" when talking about
the language family or the writing system.)
I've been doing more reading on linguistics--especially regarding
Chinese languages--since the last time I looked at Txeqli. One of the
things I see about Mandarin is that there are some fairly universal
structural principles. The ones that seem most basic are:
1) SVO: subject-verb-object word order is the sentence framework on
which everything else is hung.
2) modifier-head: Modifying morphemes/words/phrases precede the thing
modified. This principle is strongest in the construction of
compounds, more variable in the construction of sentences. Noun
modifiers precede nouns, verb modifiers precede verbs, and so on.
Like all natural languages, Mandarin is full of exceptions--some real
and some only apparent.
> Loglan. I want Tx to have a completely straightforward phonology, like
> Loglan did before they started messing around with it too much.
Here's a question I asked back in February of 1997: Is Txeqli intended
to have a native accent?
Also, have you made final decisions on:
1) permissible consonant clusters
2) permissible vowel clusters (diphthongs, triphthongs, etc.)
3) glides (on-glides and off-glides) vs. full vowels
4) syllable structure
5) word stress patterns
6) phrase/sentence stress patterns
> I also
> want it to have the ability to be completely unambiguous grammarwise.
I'm not sure "completely" is a real possibility. If by "grammar", you
mean "syntax", I think that you should look at the possibility of
reducing ambiguity through the phonology--especially word-stress patterns.
> Mandarin. I want Tx to have the terseness of Mandarin as well as its
> extreme simplicity.
Although Mandarin has little apparent morphology, its syntax is far
from simple. Y.R. Chao wrote 819 pages on the subject in _A Grammar of
Spoken Chinese_, and Li and Thompson then felt compelled to spend
another 672 pages in _Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar_.
To me, there are two big advantages for learners of Mandarin:
1) simple morphology: Mandarin tends to use separable affixes and
grammatical particles, rather than making them inherent parts of words.
2) optional syntactic categories: Mandarin permits the omission of
many syntactic categories that are mandatory in many languages:
gender, person, number, tense, aspect, definiteness. The implication
here is that there is no default setting for any of these. They may
truly be omitted. When the speaker decides that there is a need to
express any of these categories, he/she can do so by adding lexical
items ("yesterday", "male", "many", "one"), affixes (like the pronoun
pluralizer, <men>), or particles (<le>, <zhe>, <ne>, etc.).
The simple morphology makes rules more universal, in contrast, for
example, to all the irregular verb forms that occur in inflected languages.
The lack of mandatory syntactic categories means that the user can
learn a sort of all-purpose syntax in the beginning, and can put off
learning how to express more specific ideas until they are required by
the course of study.
While Mandarin is full of the messiness of any natural language, these
basic principles can probably be applied in a more regular way in a
language like Txeqli.
> Now, we can't have both unambiguity and simplicity. On the other hand, why
> not? Unambiguity can be _optional_! Here's my cunning plan.
>
> It will be quite possible to speak Tx like Mandarin or various kinds of
> pidgin.
>
> Kyu zi ten hon. Question you have book.
> Ten. Have.
>
> Now, theoretically, ten and hon could be construed as a compound in speech
> or by a computer listening, at least. So that possible ambiguity can be
> eliminated by the t-word 'te,' which simply means that a noun follows and
> isn't combined with anything before it.
Another approach could be to have word-stress patterns for compound
words. This could be revealed in the orthography by writing words
without spacing. There might also be an argument for having a set of
fundamental lexical compounds, with a particular type of stress and
written as a single word, vs. more user-created compounds, with a
different type of stress and written using some kind of hyphenation.
One of the big areas of discussion on sci.lang over the years has been
over how to define what a "word" is in a language like Mandarin, where
the traditional orthography shows only syllables. Y.R. Chao, John
DeFrancis, and dozens of other linguists have done a lot of work on
this problem, and there is still a lot of disagreement. However, the
latest work that I'm aware of shows that stress patterns play a big
part in clarifying word structure in Mandarin and many other Chinese
languages. The most obvious is the occurrence of the "neutral tone" in
the second element of many two-syllable compounds.
Frankly, if the phonological system is too permissive, you are giving
up a very useful element of the grammar.
[...]
> Another danger is the combination of the subject with the following verb:
>
> Kan kom te karn. Dog eat (noun) meat.
Here's a place where stress patterns might be used to disambiguate the structure.
> Well, we could do the parentheses thing again:
>
> Te kan bete kom te karn.
>
> Or, we can borrow a French trick and use the 3d person pronoun:
>
> Kan, da kom te karn. Dog, he eats (noun) meat.
Here are some ideas from Mandarin that all fit the SVO/modifier-head syntax:
(For simplicity, I'll stick with one verb form and one noun form in
the English.)
Kan kom karn.
Dog eat meat.
The dog eats the meat.
kan kom sa karn
dog eat GEN meat (where GEN is the genitive particle)
the meat eaten by the dog
kom karn sa kan
eat meat GEN dog
meat-eating dog/the dog that is eats the meat
kan sa kom karn
dog GEN eat meat
the meat-eating of the dog
kom kan sa karn
eat dog GEN meat
eating the meat of the dog
These are all phrases or sentences.
Compounds might be distinguished by the use of stress:
kom karn
/"kom 'karn/ (primary stress on object of verb)
eat meat
komkarn
/'kom "karn/ (primary stress on verb)
carnivorous
This could lead to:
kom kan sa dir
eat meat GEN animal
animal that is eating meat
komkan sa dir
carnivorous animal
komkandir (/"kom kan 'dir/?)
carnivore
Hope I haven't written up a lot of stuff that's already been
thoroughly discussed and thought over.
--
Mike Wright
http://www.CoastalFog.net
_______________________________________________________
In my experience, mental health is a lot like sex--
sometimes you just have to fake it.
-- Dee Dee Starr