Re: CONLANG: CONLANG IDEAS: for development

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

>From: blahedo@quincy.edu (Don Blaheta)
>Subject: Re: CONLANG: CONLANG IDEAS: for development
>
>Quoth Bruce R. Gilson:
>> Each full word, then, can be understood as noun, verb, or adjective, but the
>> rules for relating these are easy to see from these examples:
>>
>>                As noun                   As verb            As adjective
>>
>>                green thing               to be green        green
>>                house                     to be a house      which is a house
>>                one who sings (singer)    sing               singing
>
>Hm.  This sort of thing (trying to define "regular transformations" so
>you can use one root as any part of speech) has a few problems.

It has been proven workable with Loglan/Lojban (more so with the Lojban
version, as there is very little TLI Loglan that makes use of the
equivalence of parts of speech.

>For instance, how would you express "greenness"?

For the above transformations (which are really ENGLISH transformations)
there is no change in the Lojban.

ta crino
That is a green thing.
That green-s.
That is greenish.

ta zdani
That is a house.
That houses.
That is hous-ish.

ta sanga
That is a singer.
That sings.
That is singer-ish.

"Greenish" in Lojban is the "property of being green", one of several
abstractions of the basic concept.

ko'a ka ta crino
#1 is (green-ness/the property of being green)
#1 is the property of (That is a green thing).
#1 is the property of (That green-s).
#1 is the property of (That is greenish).

>  Or "song"?

Two meanings.  Lojban words are not all intransitive, so "song" is among
other things the second place of "sanga" - one of the "objects" under
English grammar terminology.

ta sanga ko'e
That is a singer of #2 (a song)
That sings #2
That is (singing #2)-ish.

But the "object" can come first under simple transformation with
identical meaning to the above, or it can be paraphrased differently in
English (but the above could be similarly paraphrased)

ko'e se sanga ta
That is a singer of #2 (a song)      #2 is a song sung by that.
That sings #2                        #2 is sung by that.
That is (singing #2)-ish.            #2 is (sung-by-that)-ish.

The act of singing is "song", and is a different kind of
abstraction (or actually one of several kinds:

ko'i nu ta sanga
#3 is song/an event of (that) singing.  (Omit the "ta" for generic "song".)
and of course
#3 is an event of (that being a singer).
#3 is an event of (that singing).
#3 is an event of (that being singer-ish).

But there are 4 "subcategories of 'nu'":

pu'u process (event) abstractor; x1 is process of [bridi] proceeding in stages
 x2
za'i state (event) abstractor; x1 is continuous state of [bridi] being true
zu'o activity (event) abstractor; x1 is abstract activity of [bridi] composed of
 x2
mu'e achievement (event) abstractor; x1 is the event-as-a-point/achievement of
 [bridi]

which modify the above with different flavors:
ko'i pu'u ta sanga
#3 is song/a process of (that) singing. (looks at a song as an evolving thing)
ko'i za'i ta sanga
#3 is song/a state of (that) singing.  (looks at a song as a steady-state thing
                                        you start singing and continue till
                                        stopping)
ko'i zu'o ta sanga
#3 is song/an activity (that) singing. (looks at a song as broken down into
                                        numerous subevents - singing individual
                                        notes/bars/phrases, as it were)
ko'i mu'e ta sanga
#3 is song/a point-event of (that) singing. (looks at a song as a brief point
                                             event in the long view of mankind
                                             or of the life of singer "ta" or
                                             of the life of the song that is
                                             sung).
>Or "sung"?

One meaning was covered there - in the "se" conversion above.  Another
is based on the simple past tense:

ta pu sanga
That sang/was a singer/was singer-ish.
ko'e pu se sanga ta
#2 was a song of that (singer)
#2 was sung by that.
#2 was (sung by that)-ish.

and we start exceeding the capability for English to follow the semantic
manipulations.

>Given a certain root, there are a number of ways to interpret it as a
>different part of speech.  Esperanto (at least as explained in the TY
>series) absolutely infuriates me on this count--its words have gender!
>Martel- (hammer) is fundamentally a noun, so we have "hammer", "to
>hammer" and "hammer-like".

One could say this about Lojban, but it works under tha same analysis as
above.  For the English verb "hammer" with an agent, you would make the
compound "hammer-use".

>But Sxovel- (shovel) is fundamentally a verb, so we have
>"act-of-shoveling", "to shovel", and "shoveling".

>From the Lojban perspective, "canpa" refers to what you are calling the
"fundamentally a noun" version.  The "fundamentally a verb" word
corresponding most closely to Eo's is "cnapli" (shovel-use(r)), but it
interprets a little differently than the above.

ta cnapli
That is a shoveler ... using an unspecified shovel.
That shovels ... using an unspecified shovel.
That is shoveler-ish (shoveling).

which suggests that Eo's "noun" interpretation is inconsistent.  "Act of
shovelling" in Lojban would of course be the event abstraction or one of
its subtypes as described above.

>Eo requires suffixes in each case to get other meanings
>"act-of-hammering" and "a shovel" (martelado, sxovelilo).  Yet the only
>way to know that sxovel- is a verb but martel- is a noun, is to memorize
>it.  Aagh.

That argument could be used about any English word that has a
predilection to be associated with a certain part of speech.  It is the
imperfect association with English meanings that you are finding
irregular, because English "shovel" has two weakly-related meanings:
the tool and the act of using such a tool.  That is a flaw of English,
not of Eo (though as I showed above, Eo is indeed inconsistent in a
somewhat different way than you describe).

If English "song" (the "tool" used by the singer") were the same word in
English as the using of a song (i.e.  "sing") you would say that Eo is
arbitrarily choosing the verb form there.

If English "green" also meant the "*method* used to produce the
observation of the color green (such as emiision of green light or
absorption of non-green light)", then you would see ambiguity there as
well.  But it is English ambiguity you are seeing, not that of the
conlang.  Other languages might distinguish between the shovel tool and
the using of that shovel, and to them Eo would appear no more arbitrary
about that word than any other.

>I guess all I'm saying is, whoever runs with this concept, *be careful*.
>It's all fine and good to have roots function as multiple parts of
>speech (esp. for an IAL, since even if you screw up you'll probably be
>understood), but it may not be as simple as you think.

The lack of simplicity is primarily becasue the speakers are so used to
thinking in terms of the parts of speech.  Perhaps a language like
Chinese that has less strong associations with the European parts of
speech would seem equally arbitrary to you, and they would have less
problem with Lojban's unitary "part of speech".

What Don is calling the "gender of a word" - its predilection for nounal
or verbal or adjectival usage - is really just an artifact of mapping
the meaning of the word itself to English usage, and the 'genderness' is
therefore really that of English.

In the final analysis, ALL word meanings are essentially arbitrary.
Conlang developers tend to try to devise meanings that are "useful".
But the root meanings do indeed have to be individually memorized within
the context of the semantic space of the conlang.  Any language that
does not cause the problem that Don notes with "shovel" is simply an
encoded English.

The legitimate complaint is that the conlang should consistently derive
the affixal changes to the root meaning.  In Eo's case that would mean
that the -o ending would ALWAYS give the noun that forms the subject of
the verb expressed by the -i ending (or some similar convention), and
-ado and -ilo would have similar conventional modifications that would
similarly always have the same correspondences to other affixes.  This
type of generalization works in Lojban (though Lojban has no suffixes
but relies on context to give any part-of-speech flavor), and presumably
could work in Bruce's concept.

Defining the effect of various affixes invariably in terms of each
other solves the "problem" of inherent 'genders' of roots.

(I think this agrees with Edmund for the most part, but I read his post
after writing this.)

----
lojbab                                                lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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