If Shakespeare had created a #conlang, would it have had a null copula? That is the question.

— Peter Bleackley (@PeteBleackley) May 7, 2013

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” (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]

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

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?!

conlangers are ppl that sit down and are like hey yo imma make up a whole damn language. thats metal as fuck

— YA BOY NOAM CHOMSKY (@YABOYCHOMSKY) March 10, 2013

It’s just a parody account, but – I lol’d

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]

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.

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.”

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.