Author Archives: Carsten

“To be, or not to be …”

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Quoth Peter Bleackley on Twitter:

Indeed, besides Peter’s joke (that took me a while to recognize …), it would be interesting to compare how various languages with a zero copula translate Shakespeare’s probably most famous quotation (yellow marking mine):

To be, or not to be, that is the queſtion

“To be, or not to be, that is the queſtion” (William Shakespeare, Hamlet, III.1)

Since Ayeri is a language with a zero copula – that is, the copula, “be,” does not have a phonetic realization – I was wondering how to translate this quotation. However, I would rather expect from context that the way “be” is used in English here refers to existence: the verb “be” is used as a full, content verb rather than the copula as a function. That is, the way Hamlet uses “be” does not suggest that he is assigning a quality to the subject, as in “The king is dead,” or “I am suicidal.”

In spite of possessing a zero copula, Ayeri nonetheless has an overt verb for “be” in the meaning of ‘exist’: yoma-. However, what Ayeri still lacks is a proper infinitive – the only non-finite form there is, is the participle, but you can’t usually use this as a nouny standalone thing as in English.1 A possible solution to this problem is to use the noun, yomān ‘existence’. This raises another question, though: how do you negate that, that is, what do you get for ‘inexistence’? Searching the dictionary for nouns in in-/ir-/il-, dis-, un- doesn’t reveal any obviously negated nouns.2

Besides verbs, the only other category that can be negated are adjectives, which are rather noun-like in Ayeri. Adjectives may be negated by -oy and -arya (which has a variety of allomorphs), and since the negation of ‘existence’ we need here is categorical rather than transitory, I would choose -arya. This results in yomāryān as a possible negation:

yoma-
exist
-arya
-NEG
-an
-NMLZ

‘inexistence’

On the other hand, since yomān is already derived from a verb and verbs get negated with -oy, another possible derivation could be yomoyan:3

yoma-
exist
-oy
-NEG
-an
-NMLZ

‘inexistence’

I think the latter case is more succinct, so I’d translate the famous line from Hamlet as:

Yomān soyang yomoyan – adareng prantānley.

Yomān
existence
soyang
or
yomoyan
inexistence
–
–
ada-reng
that-A.INAN
prantān-ley
question-P.INAN

‘Existence or inexistence, that is the question.’

Note that in the first half of the sentence, the nouns are not case marked. I chose not to mark them for case since as far as I can tell, they do not fit into the case frame of any verb here, besides the fact that the sentence above does not include any overt verb.

Of course, using less enigmatic language while it still being a bit of a pun, I could also simply translate:

Ten soyang tenyan – adareng prantānley.

Ten
Life
soyang
or
tenyan
death
…
…

‘Life or death – that is the question.’

But that would’ve been boring.

[EDIT: David J. Peterson informs that the "[u]sual route is ‘to live or not to live’.” Phrasing it exactly that way doesn’t work in Ayeri either, though. —CB, 2013-05-08, later]

  • Shakespeare, William. The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke. London, 1604. [27.] The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke: An Electronic Edition. The Shakespeare Quartos Archive. Shakespeare Quartos Archive. Mar. 2009. Web. 8 May 2013. ‹http://www.quartos.org›. (The image the presented excerpt is taken from was published under CC-BY-NC.)
  1. I’m not sure if there’s something in the Grammar about this. If the Grammar allows participles to stand on their own, my usage has changed meanwhile. ↩
  2. A possible candidate would be tenyan ‘death’, though, since ‘life’ is ten‘; -ya is one of the allomorphs of -arya (cf. below). Ayeri quite loves -ya as a morpheme! ↩
  3. With the transitory adjective negation -oy, the outcome would indeed have been the same, so it really doesn’t matter here. ↩

What I work with

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Occasionally, fellow conlangers – especially beginning ones – want to know how other people work and what tools they use. Here is my stuff:

Desk
My desk. With my laptop on it.
Paper vocab list
Paper vocabulary list
Paper notes
Paper notes. These are taken in German, but I more often take notes in English so I don't need to translate them.
Books
Part of my language books shelf

I’m working on a 6 years old laptop currently running Ubuntu 12.04. Personally, I find that Linux is way more language friendly than Windows since it’s far more configurable and open for tinkering with input methods and such things. Besides that, I like to take notes on paper sometimes, especially when it’s vocabulary. Notes taken on the computer I often print out and put them into the ring binder where I keep my handwritten notes. Vocabulary lists are, however, always transferred to the computer from paper as quickly as possible. Also important, of course, are books for research. Whether my own or borrowed from my university’s library. One thing: university libraries are awesome! I already dread the day I won’t have access to one anymore.

On the computer, the mainly relevant software I use is:

  • WordPress for editing this website. I’m running it on my own, paid webspace so I have full control over it. However, WordPress is both a blessing and a curse because although maintaining a website is rather easy with it, it’s very popular, so you get lots of spammers and crackers trying to litter up and conquer your site for their own nefarious purposes.
  • Kate or any other text editor to quickly take digital notes and to edit code
  • phpMyAdmin and Django to maintain the MySQL database I keep my dictionary in. I wrote some things in PHP to tie the database querying frontend into WordPress myself. WordPress’ template system comes in handy here: the form you can see on the Dictionary page is an HTML template file that calls a PHP script which queries the database and returns the results.
  • LibreOffice Writer to take more fancy notes and prepare PDFs
  • LibreOffice Calc to keep lists

‘Locational’ Dative and Genitive with Prepositions

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In the Grammar (§ 5.4) I mention something I dubbed ‘locational dative/genitive’, where instead of the locative case marker you would use the dative and genitive case marker respectively to indicate simple ‘to’ and ‘from’ – so basically, the dative is coupled with a lative meaning and the genitive with an ablative meaning, respectively:

Ang
AT
nimp-ye
run-3SF.T
māva-yam
mother-DAT
yena.
3SF.GEN

‘She runs to her mother.’

The example with the genitive that is currently in the grammar is not really locational at all, actually, now that I look at it. But anyway, lest I forget, here’s something I came across while translating something for myself today:

Yam
LOCT
sarayan
go-3PM
ayonang
man-A
sam
two
manga
MOT
ling
top
natrang,
temple-T,
no
want
natratang.
pray-3PM.A.

‘Two men went up to the temple; they wanted to pray.’

In this case, it’s one of those ‘locational’ datives, but extended by a preposition unlike in the example from the Grammar above. Here, the preposition (manga) ling ‘(to the) top of’ does not trigger the locative case as usual, but the dative case. This is because with the locative, the phrase would imply that the two men were going literally to the top of the temple, that is, they end up standing on its roof. This is not the intended meaning, because they are only going up to the temple, that is, the temple is on a hill – Ayeri can’t distinguish ‘up’ from ‘to the top of’ just with the preposition. So, in order to differentiate going up to from going to the top of, the dative and the locative case are used respectively. The same works for ‘come down from X’:

saha-
come
manga
MOT
avan
bottom
X-na
X-GEN

as opposed to

saha-
come
manga
MOT
avan
bottom
X-ya
X-LOC

‘come to the bottom of X’.

Also, in the same translation challenge to myself, I discovered that it would make sense to allow div- ‘to stay’ to be used as a modal (ish), so that for example you can say diva bengyāng timangya ‘he remained standing at a distance’, as opposed to remaining seated at a distance. Now, what’s the difference between div(a)- ‘stay, remain’ and hang- ‘keep, hold; remain, stay’, though?!

The Name of the Game (Literally!)

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Today, I sent the following message to CONLANG-L:

On Fri, 8 Mar 2013 13:36:27 -0300, Leonardo Castro wrote:

On Fri, 8 Mar 2013 01:00:54 -0300, Leonardo Castro wrote:

A. “language-spoken-by-people-X”: English, Français, Português, tlhIngan Hol (?), etc.

* “language of linkers”, “language of community”, “language of this group”… “linker” has two senses: people who link themselves to others and the “verbs” that link a noun to another ;

And then, there’s German, whose self-designation, Deutsch, just meant ‘people-ish’ originally, from Germ.-MLat. theodiscus ‘belonging to one’s own people’, cf. PG *þeuðō ‘people’ + -isk- ‘adj. related to’ (OHG thiutisk, MHG tiutsch), according to the dwds.de entry for ‘deutsch’. It’s of course also the origin of the word Dutch.

I have nothing figured out yet for my own conlang, but it’s been peeving me for some time already that I made the name in -i, since -i is not a derivative morpheme in this language. People have suggested that it might be an exonym. OTOH, the people’s endonym might be Ayer, though that’d be an unusual word in the language, since only few words end in -r. I don’t remember if I coined aye ‘people, crew’ from that consciously; a word for ‘people’ I coined later anyway and which I used more frequently is keynam. As alternatives based on what was listed here before, there would be narān ‘language’ (< nara- ‘to speak’), narān ban ‘good language’, narān biming ‘understandable language’. ‘Language of the people’ would be narān keynamena.

I’m really tempted to pick one from the list of noun-plus-adjective phrases and make that an endonym right now, maybe with some wear and tear added. Having a proto-language to derive a term from and pipe that through the customary sound changes would certainly come in handy here. But how about Naramban, or Banaran (with inverted order for euphony), or just Bimingan ‘the Intelligible’?1 Since I also mentioned German, another route to follow would be something like ‘our’s’, possibilities for which include sitang-nana ‘of our own, ourself’s’ (nominalized sitang-nanān, could be shortened to just Nanān), da-nana ‘that of us’ (nominalized da-nanān). I think I like Bimingan and Nanān best.

[EDIT: Co-conlanger H. S. Teoh notes that names tend to fossilize and reflect older stages of the language, so that it wouldn’t be a problem to have Ayer or Ayeri even as the native name for the people and their language. Hadn’t thought of that, but yes. —CB 2013-03-10]

  1. Note that the Slavic word for ‘German’, PSl. *němьcь, originally meant ‘dumb, mute’ and, by extension, ‘foreigner’ according to Wikipedia. ↩

Pronoun worries

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By the way, I’ve lately been thinking that animate 3rd person pronouns in Ayeri are terrible from a naturalistic point of view: it’s -ya for masculine, -ye for feminine, -yo for ‘neuter’ (effectively, things considered animate but 1. whose gender is unknown; 2. which don’t overtly display, or don’t possess, sexual dimorphism; 3. also occasionally groups of mixed gender). I think it’s rather untypical for natural languages to exhibit that kind of regular vowel alternation to show changes in the same category?

Plus, animacy actually doesn’t play any important role in Ayeri, that is, there are no syntactic restrictions imposed on inanimate constituents, for example – which doesn’t preclude introducing some in the future, but I wasn’t aware of this for a long time and I am somewhat hesitant to break continuity. But anyway, animacy in Ayeri is mostly just a formal thing that is limited to third-person verbs, noun case suffixes, and pronouns (besides, 8 × 12 distinct personal pronouns – minus a few mergers – are also kind of silly). It could just as well be dropped and nothing would be lost. On the other hand, a certain level of redundancy in signals is actually a good thing if the transmitting channel is impaired. If you’ve ever had a conversation in a loud environment, you know what I mean. But still, meh.

Comments are open, should you have any suggestions or natlang evidence you want to share.

What I’ve been up to recently

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There hasn’t been much going on here recently. This is mainly due to working on the research for my BA thesis at the moment. However, I’ve also done a little general information hunting on causative constructions on the side that will eventually result in a blog article discussing Ayeri’s way of handling these things in more detail. I touched on the topic briefly and tentatively already in a thread respectively on Conlang-L and the ZBB. Especially in the case of the ZBB thread, be aware that I’ve corrected myself multiple times in the course of it. And I’m still not quite sure if I’ve understood everything correctly, so if you’re knowledgeable about Tagalog et al.,1 don’t hesitate to contact me for correction. Both threads are basically only about syntactic ways of handling causative marking, but Ayeri definitely also has morphologic causative marking on verbs (e.g. kond- ‘eat’, kondisa- ‘feed’) as well as some lexical causatives (e.g. tenya- ‘die’, tomba- ‘kill’). Some more thoughts on that will likely go into the blog entry as well, of course.

  1. Ayeri’s case marking was originally inspired by a misunderstood and simplified version of that by way of lacking linguistic background knowledge at the time. I’ve kept coming back to it recently in order to compare and see where I’ve been “wrong”. ↩

Correlative Conjunctions

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In the course of my website renovation I added a way to search the dictionary by semantic fields (‘tags’) so as to be able to list words thematically as well. While working on tagging words, I came across yet another bit about Ayeri that’s been annoying me for a longer time: correlative conjunctions, specifically either … or and its negative counterpart neither … nor. According to what is in the dictionary, these are formed as in … in and sing … sing, respectively.

While I don’t think it’s too odd a strategy to introduce both NPs with the same particle, what I now think is kind of stupid is that both in and sing do not occur in any other context and aren’t related to anything else. As particles, they’re not alone in this regard, but as a part of Ayeri’s esthetics, I was trying to keep its system of conjunctions as simple as possible, mostly relying on nay ‘and’, soyang ‘or’ and nārya ‘but, although’. So here are some thoughts on avoiding in and sing, which I haven’t used much in the past anyway.

1. AND

Ang
AT
vacye
like-3SF
Ø Mari
T.NAME
sa Jon
P=NAME
nay
and
sa Paul.
P=NAME.

“Mary likes John and Paul.”

Ang
AT
vacye
like-3SF
sano/kamo
both/same
Ø Mari
T.NAME
sa Jon
P=NAME
nay
and
sa Paul.
P=NAME.

“Mary likes both John and Paul.”
= “Mary equally likes John and Paul.”

The explicit emphasis of Mary liking both men can be produced by using sano ‘both’ or kamo ‘equal, same’ as an adverb.

2. OR and XOR

Ang
AT
vacye
like-3SF
Ø Mari
T.NAME
​​sa Jon​​
P=NAME
soyang
or
​​sa Paul​​?
P=NAME?

“Does Mary like John or Paul (or possibly both)?”

Since Ayeri is not supposed to be a loglang, i.e. a logical language, inclusive and exclusive OR are conflated and must be interpreted by the recipient according to context, just like in English and many (most? all?) other natural languages.

Ang
AT
vacye
like-3SF
sano/kamo
both/same
Ø Mari
T.NAME
sa Jon
P=NAME
soyang
or
sa Paul.
P=NAME.

Ang
AT
vacye
like-3SF
Ø Mari
T.NAME
sa Jon
P=NAME
soyang-soyang
either~or
sa Paul.
P=NAME

“Mary likes either John or Paul.”

The same construction as with nay ‘and’ above can be used here, but with soyang ‘or’. Alternatively, the conjunction can be reduplicated to soyang-soyang, compare naynay ‘and also, furthermore’.

3. NAND and NOR

The constructions here are like their positive counterparts above, but with a negated verb:

Ang
AT
vacoyye
like-NEG-3SF
Ø Mari
T.NAME
​​sa Jon​​
P=NAME
soyang
or
​​sa Paul​​?
P=NAME?

“Doesn’t Mary like John or Paul (or possibly both)?”

Ang
AT
vacoyye
like-NEG-3SF
Ø Mari
T.NAME
sa Jon
P=NAME
nay
and
sa Paul.
P=NAME.

“Mary doesn’t like John and Paul.”

Ang
AT
vacoyye
like-NEG-3SF
sano/kamo
both/same
Ø Mari
T.NAME
sa Jon
P=NAME
nay
and
sa Paul.
P=NAME.

Ang
AT
vacoyye
like-NEG-3SF
sano/kamo
both/same
Ø Mari
T.NAME
sa Jon
P-NAME
soyang
or
sa Paul.
P-NAME.

Ang
AT
vacoyye
like-NEG-3SF
Ø Mari
T.NAME
sa Jon
P=NAME
soyang-soyang
either~or
sa Paul.
P=NAME.

“Mary doesn’t like both John and Paul.”
= “Mary doesn’t like either John or Paul.”
= “Mary likes neither John nor Paul.”

The examples so far have only covered objects of transitive verbs, but conjunctions of course may also be used between adjectives, for example, in predicative constructions, which is what we want to deal with in the following paragraphs.

4. AND with predicative adjectives

Seygoreng
apple-A.INAN
tuvo
red
nay
and
paso.
sweet.

“The apple is red and sweet.”

This is the same as with the object NPs of transitive clauses. However, when emphasizing that both qualities are to be applied to the subject, the verb kama- ‘to be equal, to be as … as’ is used in place of the adverb kamo (or sano, respectively) above:

Kamareng
be.equal-3S.INAN.A
tuvo
red
nay
and
paso.
sweet.

“It is both red and sweet.”

Note that this is slightly different from adjective comparation – although the same verb kama- is used in that circumstance – in that there is no conjunction between NPs in comparation:

Eng
AT.INAN
kamāra
be.equal-3S.INAN
seygo
apple.T
paso
sweet
bilingley.
honey-P.INAN.

“The apple is as sweet as honey.”

Eng
AT.INAN
kamāra
be.equal-3S.INAN
seygo
apple.T
paso
sweet
tuvo.
red.

“The apple is as sweet as (it is) red.”

5. OR and XOR with predicatives adjectives

Adareng
that-A.INAN
tuvo
red
soyang
or
paso?
sweet?

“Is it red or sweet (or possibly both)?”

Again, the same construction as with regular object NPs is used for simple coordination.

Kamareng
be.equal-3S.INAN
tuvo
red
soyang
or
paso.
sweet.

“It is either red or sweet.”

This construction is a little more idiomatic and uses kama- as well, however with soyang ‘or’, not nay ‘and’ in order to express disjunction. The construction with reduplicated soyang does not occur here.

6. NAND and NOR with predicative adjectives

Of course, negation is possible with predicative adjectives as well.

Adareng
that-A.INAN
voy
not
tuvo
red
soyang
or
voy
not
paso?
sweet?

“Is it not red or not sweet (or possibly neither)?”

The same strategy as with simple predicative adjectives is used here for negation, compare:

Seygoreng
apple-3S.INAN
voy
not
paso.
sweet.

“The apple isn’t sweet.”

Since there is no verb that the negative suffix -oy can attach to, it is used in its free particle form, voy. For ‘neither … nor’, the following construction can be used in analogy to the positive version above:

Kamoyreng
be.equal-NEG-3S.INAN
tuvo
red
soyang
or
paso.
sweet.

“It is neither red nor sweet.”

Rhyming

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As a means of poetry, I’ve so far only used syllable count.1 What about rhyming word stems, though? For example, karon ‘water, sea’ and beson ‘ship’ rhyme – /rɔn/ : /sɔn/. Could they still be considered to rhyme even if arbitrary suffixes were stacked on them (or not), e.g.:

Silvu
ˈsɪl.vu
see-IMP
See
​​beson​​yeley,
ˌbe.sɔn.je.ˈlɛɪ
ship-PL-P.INAN
(the) ships,
Yam
jam
DATT
To₁
sarateng
ˌsa.ra.ˈtɛŋ
go-3P.INAN
they go
​​karon​​
ˈka.rɔn
sea.T
the sea₁
Mang’
maŋ
MOTION
Down
avan
ˈa.van
bottom
 
​​nongon​​ya.
nɔ.ˈŋɔn.ja
river-LOC
(a/the) river.

Or would that be too far-fetched? After all, in the case of beson and nongon, word stress shifts around wildly due to the added suffixes, which lessens the similarity in sound even further.2

I’ve so far avoided rhyming with suffixes because that wouldn’t really be too much of a challenge in terms of artificiality – it would be like using the same word twice to force a rhyme in English. On the other hand, it’s not like this wasn’t done in Latin (though post-Classical in that case), which prominently features suffixes as well. Though in the case of “O Fortuna,” the last syllable of a word stem is also taken into account, plus inflectional suffixes, creating a polysyllabic rhyme. Doing it this way would mean, though, that you’d have to make sure the rhyming words are inflected for the same grammatical categories, which in itself might be an interesting challenge as well.

On a completely unrelated side note, look what Miekko has been doing for the past three weeks: Miniature Conlangs.

  1. Exemplified in my take on Shelley’s poem Ozymandias and the LCC4 relay (PDF) ↩
  2. Note that all lines contain six syllables at least! ↩