tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jul 07 18:39:21 1993
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Re: House languages
Magick writes:
>If well written, possibly to use something like a LALR or BNF
That idea has succesfully been used in the conlang lojban (the succesor
to Loglan). Thus: go for it. it's been done already, so it should work.
>..."thwickie"...
Ok. What's a "thwickie"? Is this anything like a swiss-army-mouse?
> re: verb tenses, etc
That one alone could drive one mad if one opted to be overly creative
with one's interpretation of exactly what temporal relationships should
be denoted by specific `markers' in a language.
Japanese, for example, has one tense which represents future and present.
So does Welsh, but Welsh gets around that by relying very heavily on
what we would call the present progressive (x is y-ing ...).
Chinese technically has _no_ tenses, only aspects (completed action,
continuing action, not-speficied). The feeling there is if you
have, for example, the concept `yesterday' in a sentence, then
chaning a verb to indicate that an action which occured
occured `yesterday' is past is redundant.
German has several tenses which the average English speaker can hardly
follow without a great deal of instruction, but once learned, one can
rapidly become frustrated with English's lack of specificity.
In linguistics, there is an hypothesis named after the scientists who
first proported it (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, from the book
"Language, Thought, and Reality") which states that human langauge
limits human thought. Use this principle in reverse when designing
your language(s).
Example: the klingon language makes distinctions between things
which can use language and things which cannot. Does not matter if the
thing is sentient or not, or even alive or not. (well, maybe a talking
computer still falls into the not-using-language category.. i'm not sure)
Chinese has no spoken distinction between masculine, feminine, or neuter
third person pronouns. Written characters are different, but they are
all pronounced the same.
American Sign Language has conjunctive and disjunctive plural pronouns.
(example: we-including-`listener' vs we-not-including-`listener') and
also numeric pronouns (we-2 vs we-3 vs we-number-not-specified, etc).
If designing a language, take careful consideration as to what it may do
the the thought patterns of the speakers. If gender equality is desired,
for example, you may consider lojban's approach of no gender specification
in pronouns (ASL has this as well). If respect for elders is important,
different 2nd person pronouns for same-age, younger, and elder people
can be used (cf: Vietnamese). What about a singular 2nd person pronoun?
This is one feature of English which truly annoys me (it's lack of
a singular 2nd person pronoun).
In designing a language, one can make some _very_ powerful statements.
-querist