Categorizing Etihus

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Re: Categorizing Etihus

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elemtilas wrote:In English we cán put the object first and the subject after the object and other such tricks (otherwise, no one would be able to follow what Yoda says!)
As an aside, this is not quite true. A key point to keeping Yoda understandable is that no matter what he moves around, he always keeps the subject before a verb or auxiliary verb, except in questions, where reversal is normal, or in copular sentences where it doesn't matter.
Spoiler:
a selection of quotes:
"Consume you, it will"
"Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you."
"Patience you must have."
"For eight hundred years have I trained."
"This one a long time I have watched."
"Forever will it dominate your destiny."
"Through the Force, things you will see."
"Found someone you have, eh?"
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by Sew'Kyetuh »

@ Clawgrip,
I am familiar with map-territory relationships and concepts behind The Treachery of Images. This is not a [sentence]. [:)] (I mention those because I assume you are familiar with them judging from what you have been trying to tell me, and hope you "see what I did there".)

elemtilas wrote: A featural script. Kind of like tengwar. Korean has a featural script, but it too was devised rather than sprung organically.
Ahhh. Cool. According to Wikipedia's article on such a thing: "Other alphabets may have limited featural elements. Many languages written in the Latin alphabet make use of additional letters with diacritics, which are sometimes considered separate letters." Which is similar to what Etihus does use.

So I'm adding that to the list. This is exactly the type of examination I was hoping for.

elemtilas wrote:Speak enough E for us, and comparing that with the chart of 40 or 60 named semaphonemes, anyone here can produce just such a chart of the sounds you use when speaking Etihus. Please understand: how your conlang "works" is not relevant to the sounds that are being made by its speakers. We English speakers make sounds that do not appear in what we write (we never write glottal stops, for example, yet they're all over the place; we have several "A" sounds that are distinct yet are all written with the same letter). This doesn't stop us from producing phonetic charts.
clawgrip wrote: You have successfully separated the word /æɾɪ/ into the vowels /æ/ and /ɪ/, and the consonant /ɾ/, proving that it does have vowels and consonants. Whether or not the native script can represent them separately is irrelevant.
You are absolutely positive and certain, that a language that either does not use letters or functions with rules to consonants and vowels in its phonetics, can have a phonetic chart represented without misleading someone into wrongly thinking or assuming how the language might function? You can guarantee that?

I'm afraid that what's going to happen if I list those sounds that the lot of you are going to examine them and align them up and then tell me how they can and cannot be placed together and start giving me a list of exact rules that are required to be followed universally which then destroys the language. I'm partly basing some of that on your references to "the script" whenever consonant/vowel sounds are mentioned, the written work. For Etihus, those individual sounds being called consonants and vowels aren't recognized in the speech either, even though you and I can hear them.

Ari /æɾɪ/ is not simply a word. It is also a letter in the alphabet. It is a grapheme. It is a gestured sign. It has meaning. It represents all of these in one and is written with a single glyph, not 2 or 3. I would like to not see it pulverized.
clawgrip wrote: As you can see, graphemes and phonemes are entirely dissimilar, and you cannot by any means have something that is a combination of them. A sound wave cannot simultaneously be all physical objects that could conceivably be used to represent writing. However, graphemes can and do represent phonemes in the same way a French flag represents France. They are entirely dissimilar things, but the representational relationship is very clear.
It is a whole of concept that culturally the Uhsey speakers of Etihus do not separate (I don't have any actual humans in my conworld). I realize now why oligosynthetic languages tend to enter philosophical territory.

And for Thrice Xandvii, this in tandem with notes below is conceptually why the language remained mostly unchanged for 1,000 years.

(1) I don't have people who think or entirely act 100% like earthly humans in my conworld.

(2) the language was given through instruction for 1,000 years, reinforcing the usage of the language (any deviation appearing was 'forcefully' corrected).

(3) The beings that gave the language come from a higher plane of existence and they were tasked with giving the language to the mortals. So they already came up with everything possibly required for the foreseeable future.

(4) Every nation and caste-race needed a language to effectively communicate universally while allowing separate groups to continue their own preferred reign of thought. This way the beings could give the same text and instruction that everyone everywhere can understand.

(5) The beings in question also gave them understanding about the world around them as it actually was (so they were given knowledge about time, space, farming, and forging from the beginning rather than learning it through discovery. They never worshiped their sun as a god; they know it is a giant ball of burning gas 100 million miles away).

(6) There were designs for a printing press for the future and how the writing would come together. So there hasn't been any technological evolutions or changes in materials that changes the way things are written which can change the way they are spoken or taught.

(7) They were given a list of over a million words, many of which the Uhsey did not understand until something was discovered or invented or a philosophy came into existence. So anything 'new' they would come across: there was already a word for it. Several of the words are still a mystery, and some might never be comprehended by most mortal beings.*

Most of the reasons that cause a language, culturally, regionally, written, by interpretation, or by invention, to change are thus removed. Since the beings haven't been around in awhile though, the modern usage of Etihus is seeing some dialects, shifts in style of writing, and assumptions.

Because of how Etihus functions, the Uhsey who use the conlang don't have any real dictionaries, not like what we do anyway. Speaking or writing the language describes the meaning of that which is being communicated. By breaking down the sounds, you break down the meaning.


*This is true even when I am building the lexicon for Etihus. Every now and then I will build a word that conceptually cannot be represented in English very well, or manages to represent unusual, if not near-impossible, concepts.
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by Sew'Kyetuh »

For the MSA, I don't want to interfere with the discussion too much (and I'm glad the concept of "marking" was well distinguished, which makes more sense to me now).

To a man named Marc Telfer who tried helping me with this last month, he concluded:
Marc Telfer wrote: Without any case marking at all going on, it's morphologically direct. However, since the subject and agent appear in the same place within a phrase, i.e. before the verb with the object appearing after it, you could describe it as syntactically nom-acc.
Morphologically direct, syntactically Nom-Acc. At least that's what he proposed. (I don't know if that helps the discussion or not, just thought it was interesting.)

But further...
Trailsend wrote: For Etihus:

1) How do you recognize the agent of a transitive clause? It comes before the verb.
2) How do you recognize the patient of a transitive clause? It comes after the verb.
3) How do you recognize the subject of an intransitive clause? It comes before the verb.

Therefore, nom-acc.
How would you approach the complete thought of an argument without verbs? Say, in a single word?

The reason some people have concluded to me that MSA doesn't even apply to Etihus at all is because MSA is about, again according to Marc Telfer I met:
Marc Telfer wrote:generally speaking, refers to the marking of the subject of intransitive verbs (S) and the "subject" of transitive verbs (A, sometimes called the "agent") and the object of transitive verbs (O) and how they relate to each other.

So, for example, where S=A (O), the subject and the agent are marked using the same affix/construction/whatever while the object is marked by means of something else. Languages like this are known as "nominative-accusative" languages, with examples including Russian, Latin, Finnish, and so on.
Now if Mr. Telfer's described definition of MSA here is correct, then which MSA would you use to represent a language that does not always need or use verbs? Or to one that treats some (mostly passive) verbs as descriptives like adjectives/adverbs?

For Etihus, I realized when I tried to redo a sentence as a double negative, that in order for the double negative to be interpreted correctly, I had to drop the verb.

Etihus as a conlang inadvertently helped me understand transitive vs intransitive by the way it handles transitive cases. Essentially, the "object" of the action or verb in question, is the subject. In a sentence like, "The moon shone." The moon shone what? Itself! Or "The snow fell." What fell? The snow fell itself.

To describe what is considered "transitive", it omits the verb altogether and instead treats the word as a descriptive. "The moon shone.", "The moon is shiny.", and "Shiny moon." All mean the same thing. In Etihus there is only one way to communicate this: Mayee'ait-ihff --> Moon-shining. No verb. "Shine/shining" as a concept is used as a qualifying word to follow the head, "moon".
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

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qwed117 wrote:I have a question regarding your verbs.
Are "Syh kye sgh" and "Syh kyehm sgh" different?
Spoiler:
My minicity is [http://zyphrazia.myminicity.com/xml]Zyphrazia and [http://novland.myminicity.com/xml]Novland.

Minicity has fallen :(
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by Sew'Kyetuh »

qwed117 wrote:I have a question regarding your verbs.
Are "Syh kye sgh" and "Syh kyehm sgh" different?
Short answer: Yes.

-hm (action, verb) modifies kye (strike, disturb, harm) into a verb.
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by qwed117 »

Sew'Kyetuh wrote:
qwed117 wrote:I have a question regarding your verbs.
Are "Syh kye sgh" and "Syh kyehm sgh" different?
Yes.

-hm (action, verb) modifies kye (strike, disturb, harm) into a verb.
I mean, does it have different meaning (as in "has just" or "will" or "had").
Spoiler:
My minicity is [http://zyphrazia.myminicity.com/xml]Zyphrazia and [http://novland.myminicity.com/xml]Novland.

Minicity has fallen :(
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by Ahzoh »

Ari /æɾɪ/ is not simply a word. It is also a letter in the alphabet. It is a grapheme. It is a gestured sign. It has meaning. It represents all of these in one and is written with a single glyph, not 2 or 3. I would like to not see it pulverized.
Yes we already know that it's a grapheme and a morpheme, just like a chinese logogram:

This Chinese character 火 is a grapheme and represents a morpheme "fire", but it is read and pronounced as "huǒ" and it will always be pronounced as such, no matter where in a word or sentence. and you know what (theoretically) you don't even have to consider it as a bunch of consonants. This nonsense of consonants and vowels? No, it's just "huǒ"!

But we are not talking in the mind of speakers but of people outside; we are meta and how it is actually pronounced has no bearing to the function of your conlang. So while we talk of and divide your words into little phonemes, this has no bearing to your speakers and no bearing to the structure of your language, but simply pronounciation.
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

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qwed117 wrote:I mean, does it have different meaning (as in "has just" or "will" or "had").
Ah crap, I knew I should've given the long answer, lol.

I'll do the second sentence since that should be easier. Syh kyehm sgh is (sort of) akin to "The girl is hitting the boy."

The first sentence, Syh kye sgh conveys the very basic symbolization of meaning with English's "Girl hit boy." Etihus however is a very exact language (I wish I knew a term I could use). The concept is satisfied and understood, but without -hm, you are still only using nouns. It would be like, "Girl hitting boy", which in English sounds awkward. Even "Girl hit boy.", while grammatically satisfactory, is still awkward.

More specifically, Syh kye sgh could be interpreted as "A boy-hitting girl", describing the concept of a girl in existence (is) who hit(s) boy(s). A girl that hits boy(s). Syh is the subject, kye describes the subject and sgh finalizes/describes the subject and its description.

... hmm... Consider it more from a "philosophical" approach with a forced logical standpoint in my conworld. What you do is what you are. If you are a moon that shines, you are naturally a shiny moon. "The shiny moon shines." is a redundancy. Shine is not something you do, it is something you are. It is your state of existence. If you are a girl who hit a boy, or you will have hit a boy, or you have in the past, you are a "boy-hitting" girl.

So to describe raw concepts like earlier, "Dog down" with cuffari-tik, a dog that is down, a downed dog. This is slightly different from cuffari tik "dog [pushing] down", which while conveys similar information, is more set up for something to receive the "downing" or to have further clarification added. Cuffari tikhm, or cuffari-tikhm "dog ducks", "ducking dog" is the same information but prepares it for following additional information differently.

In this way, Etihus separates the simplicity of raw concepts with possible philosophical meaning from the complex descriptions of actual events.

I can say "Girl runs." as a concept in Etihus cleanly and quickly: Syh-loba. The raw concept is satisfied, but transliterated it means, "Rapid-moving girl."

If you want, "The/That young female-child who is currently rapidly moving her legs to quickly change location" then you end up with: Sec falt'syh-pikxhm loba-hit. Edit: Now you are describing the actual event/action of a running girl, and not just a crude concept.
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

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Sew'Kyetuh wrote:a language that either does not use letters
A language that does not use letters can still have its phonology described. See the various unwritten languages of the world throughout history. See Chinese, Khmer, etc. that do not use writing that is akin to the Latin script.
Sew'Kyetuh wrote:[a language that] functions with rules to consonants and vowels in its phonetics
I'm afraid I don't understand this. Can you rephrase this?
Sew'Kyetuh wrote:can have a phonetic chart represented without misleading someone into wrongly thinking or assuming how the language might function? You can guarantee that?
It depends on how well the language is analyzed and the chart designed. For instance, I do not believe the chart of phonemic consonants of the Japanese language as listed on Wikipedia is accurate, but I don't have the energy or willpower to fight the Wikipediaites into changing it. So no, I can't guarantee it necessarily, but if it is a conlang with a single creator, then it should be much more likely to create a fully accurate chart.
Sew'Kyetuh wrote:I'm afraid that what's going to happen if I list those sounds that the lot of you are going to examine them and align them up and then tell me how they can and cannot be placed together and start giving me a list of exact rules that are required to be followed universally which then destroys the language.
Why are you afraid? You have asked people to help you analyze and classify the features of the language, and now when people try, you are afraid of it actually happening?

Why would it destroy the language? For example, Navajo was not a written language, and Navajo speakers had no knowledge of vowels or consonants until Western people showed up, analyzed the language, and wrote it down. The act of analyzing Navajo did not destroy it. Why would it destroy Etihus?
Sew'Kyetuh wrote:I'm partly basing some of that on your references to "the script" whenever consonant/vowel sounds are mentioned, the written work. For Etihus, those individual sounds being called consonants and vowels aren't recognized in the speech either, even though you and I can hear them.
If you and I can hear them, then they can be recognized. Whoever these people are who aren't recognizing them are irrelevant, because you and I do hear them, i.e. recognize them.
Sew'Kyetuh wrote:Ari /æɾɪ/ is not simply a word. It is also a letter in the alphabet. It is a grapheme. It is a gestured sign. It has meaning. It represents all of these in one and is written with a single glyph, not 2 or 3. I would like to not see it pulverized.
I understand that there is a gesture, a glyph, and a sound wave, all of which the speakers recognize as some representation of the word /æɾɪ/. Importantly, though, you chose to spell it ari and you chose to mark its pronunciation as /æɾɪ/ because you and I recognize (as mentioned above) the individual sounds that make it up.

Transliteration does not equal pulverization. 癖 is pronounced kuse in Japanese. Explaining the phonology of Japanese as comprising vowels and consonants does not "pulverize" 癖.
Sew'Kyetuh wrote:It is a whole of concept that culturally the Uhsey speakers of Etihus do not separate (I don't have any actual humans in my conworld). I realize now why oligosynthetic languages tend to enter philosophical territory.
What Uhsey speakers believe culturally is utterly irrelevant to linguistic analysis.

It's akin to saying, "this Neanderthal tool cannot be measured 10.3 cm in length because the Neanderthals had no concept of length measurement using predefined units, even though we can measure it. To them it was just one tool in size, so we cannot measure it further. Measuring the tool will destroy it."
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by elemtilas »

Sew'Kyetuh wrote:You are absolutely positive and certain, that a language that either does not use letters or functions with rules to consonants and vowels in its phonetics, can have a phonetic chart represented without misleading someone into wrongly thinking or assuming how the language might function? You can guarantee that?
Tell me what you mean by "functions with rules to consonants and vowels in its phonetics". Sounds like you're trying to weasel, and I want to make sure you get pinned before I make a guarantee! [;)]

Let's put it this way: if Etihus is a spoken language, and if Etihus speakers are relatively humanoid (i.e., they don't have multiple sound producing organs or three mouths or anything like that) and have human-like speech organs, then yes, such a chart can be made for Etihus. Just like with any other spoken langauge. The sounds we make, when we speak English, are not what makes this the English language -- this is why we can understand people with French or Spanish or Chinese accents. They speak English more or less with French or Spanish or Chinese phonologies, yet there is no bearing on the functionality of the English they speak.

You give a chart of somewhere between 40 and 60 'letter-word-meaning-syllable-wossnames' that comprise all valid basic & irreducible utterances of Etihus. Fine for meaning and langauge. Break those down into their constituent sounds, and you will have a chart of Etihus phonology.

Already, we can see you have [ɛ] [ɪ] [ʌ] [æ] [tʰ] .
I'm afraid that what's going to happen if I list those sounds that the lot of you are going to examine them and align them up and then tell me how they can and cannot be placed together and start giving me a list of exact rules that are required to be followed universally which then destroys the language.


Why would anyone want to do that? You're the conlanger; you already decided what sounds go where! I'm simply informing you that creating a chart of Etihus's phonology is trivially easy, not "impossible"! I don't care how you place them together; I'm not interested in giving you rules or requiring you to follow them. Can't speak for anyone else, but my philosophy on linguistics and language in general is "descriptive" -- describing what is, rather than "prescriptive" -- prescribing what ought to be. You're complaining already that "we" are prescriptivists prepared to dictate to you how your conlang ought to be. I think you should realise by now that this kind of martyr complex thing doesn't fly here. No one wants to tell you how to conlang. We just want to understand how the language you already made works! What other reason would we have spending our time with you in this thread?

I'm partly basing some of that on your references to "the script" whenever consonant/vowel sounds are mentioned, the written work. For Etihus, those individual sounds being called consonants and vowels aren't recognized in the speech either, even though you and I can hear them.


Someone already said that it does not matter what the language "recognises" or "does not recognise". And "the script" is no more relevant. Do you think that English lacks consonants and vowels when it is spoken by an uneducated and illiterate speaker? No, on the contrary, English has consonants and vowels because it is a spoken language, and because this spoken language is spoken by beings through the modulation of a vocal tract that causes some sounds to be uninterrupted (vowels) and others interrupted in nature (consonants). No different for Etihus. Doesn't really matter one way or the other to me whether you líke it or not; that is simply the nature of spoken languages as spoken by beings something like us.

Ari /æɾɪ/ is not simply a word. It is also a letter in the alphabet. It is a grapheme. It is a gestured sign. It has meaning. It represents all of these in one and is written with a single glyph, not 2 or 3. I would like to not see it pulverized.


All of that is fine! In the end, none of what you "want", none of how Etihus speakers "philosophise about" really matters. They speak Etihus using certain aural symbols called sounds and those sounds can be represented in ways other than only the native script. You yourself use English letters to represent these sounds in your videos. I fail to see how describing the phonemic inventory of your conlang "pulverises" it in the least. You're being paranoid now.

clawgrip wrote: As you can see, graphemes and phonemes are entirely dissimilar, and you cannot by any means have something that is a combination of them. A sound wave cannot simultaneously be all physical objects that could conceivably be used to represent writing. However, graphemes can and do represent phonemes in the same way a French flag represents France. They are entirely dissimilar things, but the representational relationship is very clear.


It is a whole of concept that culturally the Uhsey speakers of Etihus do not separate.


That's great! This is actually very interesting -- it's not often we get to hear how the speakers of conlangs view their own language! Please understand: whatever Uhsey may believe about their own language has no bearing on the facts of that language. For example, many people used to believe, even as late as the mid twentieth century, that English is descended of Hebrew. It's not true at all. But they believed it all the same. Scholars expended much energy in trying to prove it. If Uhsey believe there are no consonants or vowels, that's their choice to believe. They have them all the same, and the fact is proven by your speaking the very name of their language! It is proven by your showing us the phonetic shapes of the various syllables allowed in the language!

And for Thrice Xandvii, this in tandem with notes below is conceptually why the language remained mostly unchanged for 1,000 years.

(1) I don't have people who think or entirely act 100% like earthly humans in my conworld.


(2) the language was given through instruction for 1,000 years, reinforcing the usage of the language (any deviation appearing was 'forcefully' corrected).

(3) The beings that gave the language come from a higher plane of existence and they were tasked with giving the language to the mortals. So they already came up with everything possibly required for the foreseeable future.

(4) Every nation and caste-race needed a language to effectively communicate universally while allowing separate groups to continue their own preferred reign of thought. This way the beings could give the same text and instruction that everyone everywhere can understand.

(5) The beings in question also gave them understanding about the world around them as it actually was (so they were given knowledge about time, space, farming, and forging from the beginning rather than learning it through discovery. They never worshiped their sun as a god; they know it is a giant ball of burning gas 100 million miles away).

(6) There were designs for a printing press for the future and how the writing would come together. So there hasn't been any technological evolutions or changes in materials that changes the way things are written which can change the way they are spoken or taught.

(7) They were given a list of over a million words, many of which the Uhsey did not understand until something was discovered or invented or a philosophy came into existence. So anything 'new' they would come across: there was already a word for it. Several of the words are still a mystery, and some might never be comprehended by most mortal beings.*[/quote]

This is very instructive as regards their history and culture. It sounds like just the sort of thing "gods" would try to foist on lesser beings of limited understanding. And just like gods, they never bother to take into account how those lesser minds actually work...

I personally find the above scenario 100% improbable (I think it very unlikely that such primitive people will be able to maintain this kind of artificiality in thought and language for age after age). But this has moved very satisfactorily away from the facts of the language itself and into the realm of the culture and history of the place. As I asked before, I'd like to hear more about these things. Perhaps you can also start up a thread in the Conculture forum so you can describe these things in more detail?


Most of the reasons that cause a language, culturally, regionally, written, by interpretation, or by invention, to change are thus removed. Since the beings haven't been around in awhile though, the modern usage of Etihus is seeing some dialects, shifts in style of writing, and assumptions.


I.e. language change...

One thing the beings did not affect was the life time of the Uhsey themselves. Unless they were made into eternal beings themselves, each generation that comes along will have to learn Etihus anew, and this by definition leaves the language open to mislearning, misunderstanding, imperfect learning and mistakes that will eventually lead to a changed language. But even eternal beings speak a language that changes somewhat from age to age; though their mechanisms and principles that guide change differ from those that cause our mortal languages to change.

Because of how Etihus functions, the Uhsey who use the conlang don't have any real dictionaries, not like what we do anyway. Speaking or writing the language describes the meaning of that which is being communicated.


Whatever works for them! So, like I asked before: how would they say "car"? And why is that so? And how do you distinguish a "car" from a "truck" or a "tractor"? How do you distinguish a "cat" from a "dog" -- most of their most fundamental characteristics are, in fact, identical!

By breaking down the sounds, you break down the meaning.


How so?


This is true even when I am building the lexicon for Etihus. Every now and then I will build a word that conceptually cannot be represented in English very well, or manages to represent unusual, if not near-impossible, concepts.


Some examples would be very timely.
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by elemtilas »

Sew'Kyetuh wrote:
qwed117 wrote:I mean, does it have different meaning (as in "has just" or "will" or "had").
Ah crap, I knew I should've given the long answer, lol.

I'll do the second sentence since that should be easier. Syh kyehm sgh is (sort of) akin to "The girl is hitting the boy."

The first sentence, Syh kye sgh conveys the very basic symbolization of meaning with English's "Girl hit boy." Etihus however is a very exact language (I wish I knew a term I could use). The concept is satisfied and understood, but without -hm, you are still only using nouns. It would be like, "Girl hitting boy", which in English sounds awkward. Even "Girl hit boy.", while grammatically satisfactory, is still awkward.

More specifically, Syh kye sgh could be interpreted as "A boy-hitting girl", describing the concept of a girl in existence (is) who hit(s) boy(s). A girl that hits boy(s). Syh is the subject, kye describes the subject and sgh finalizes/describes the subject and its description.

... hmm... Consider it more from a "philosophical" approach with a forced logical standpoint in my conworld. What you do is what you are. If you are a moon that shines, you are naturally a shiny moon. "The shiny moon shines." is a redundancy. Shine is not something you do, it is something you are. It is your state of existence. If you are a girl who hit a boy, or you will have hit a boy, or you have in the past, you are a "boy-hitting" girl.

So to describe raw concepts like earlier, "Dog down" with cuffari-tik, a dog that is down, a downed dog. This is slightly different from cuffari tik "dog [pushing] down", which while conveys similar information, is more set up for something to receive the "downing" or to have further clarification added. Cuffari tikhm, or cuffari-tikhm "dog ducks", "ducking dog" is the same information but prepares it for following additional information differently.

In this way, Etihus separates the simplicity of raw concepts with possible philosophical meaning from the complex descriptions of actual events.

I can say "Girl runs." as a concept in Etihus cleanly and quickly: Syh-loba. The raw concept is satisfied, but transliterated it means, "Rapid-moving girl."

If you want, "The/That young female-child who is currently rapidly moving her legs to quickly change location" then you end up with: Sec falt'syh-pikxhm loba-hit. Edit: Now you are describing the actual event/action of a running girl, and not just a crude concept.
So, sometimes you can use all nouns to speak of actions. And sometimes you can use nouns and verbs together. Sometimes you want to be a little vague. Sometims you want to be a little more specific. Everything right of the subject (except the definite article) refers back to the subject/agent. What's the issue here?

What's wrong with "boy-hitting girl" or "running-girl"?? (In English)

Maybe the term you're looking for is "precise"? Sometimes it may not be enough to just say "she running girl" and you have to say something much longer and more precise like "she young female-child who is currently rapidly moving her legs to quickly in order to change location".

I'd suggest that you're using too many words and are perhaps making the issue seem more confusing than it actually is.
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by qwed117 »

Sew'Kyetuh wrote:
qwed117 wrote:I mean, does it have different meaning (as in "has just" or "will" or "had").
Ah crap, I knew I should've given the long answer, lol.

I'll do the second sentence since that should be easier. Syh kyehm sgh is (sort of) akin to "The girl is hitting the boy."

The first sentence, Syh kye sgh conveys the very basic symbolization of meaning with English's "Girl hit boy." Etihus however is a very exact language (I wish I knew a term I could use). The concept is satisfied and understood, but without -hm, you are still only using nouns. It would be like, "Girl hitting boy", which in English sounds awkward. Even "Girl hit boy.", while grammatically satisfactory, is still awkward.

More specifically, Syh kye sgh could be interpreted as "A boy-hitting girl", describing the concept of a girl in existence (is) who hit(s) boy(s). A girl that hits boy(s). Syh is the subject, kye describes the subject and sgh finalizes/describes the subject and its description.

... hmm... Consider it more from a "philosophical" approach with a forced logical standpoint in my conworld. What you do is what you are. If you are a moon that shines, you are naturally a shiny moon. "The shiny moon shines." is a redundancy. Shine is not something you do, it is something you are. It is your state of existence. If you are a girl who hit a boy, or you will have hit a boy, or you have in the past, you are a "boy-hitting" girl.

So to describe raw concepts like earlier, "Dog down" with cuffari-tik, a dog that is down, a downed dog. This is slightly different from cuffari tik "dog [pushing] down", which while conveys similar information, is more set up for something to receive the "downing" or to have further clarification added. Cuffari tikhm, or cuffari-tikhm "dog ducks", "ducking dog" is the same information but prepares it for following additional information differently.

In this way, Etihus separates the simplicity of raw concepts with possible philosophical meaning from the complex descriptions of actual events.

I can say "Girl runs." as a concept in Etihus cleanly and quickly: Syh-loba. The raw concept is satisfied, but transliterated it means, "Rapid-moving girl."

If you want, "The/That young female-child who is currently rapidly moving her legs to quickly change location" then you end up with: Sec falt'syh-pikxhm loba-hit. Edit: Now you are describing the actual event/action of a running girl, and not just a crude concept.
It seems as if -hm doesn't designate a verb like you think, it designates a non-perfective tense.

Second, phonemes are a basic unit of minimal understanding. Change inside a phoneme (say from pʰ to p) doesn't change meaning, but change from a phoneme to another phoneme changes meaning. Based on a quick glance at your original statement, it appears as if each phoneme is a morpheme, or a unit of meaning. A morpheme is the smallest size of information that is transmitted in a language. The difference between phonemes and morphemes is that phonemes have no meaning.
So if "p" is a morpheme meaning "potato" then "pp" (assuming pp is made of the same constituent morphemes as p) means "potato potato"
But if "p" is a phoneme (in this case a word) that means "laryngeal cancer", "pp"(assuming pp is made of the same constituent phonemes as p) doesn't necessarily mean "laryngeal cancer laryngeal cancer"
Spoiler:
My minicity is [http://zyphrazia.myminicity.com/xml]Zyphrazia and [http://novland.myminicity.com/xml]Novland.

Minicity has fallen :(
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by Vardelm »

Sew'Kyetuh wrote:Morphologically direct, syntactically Nom-Acc. At least that's what he proposed. (I don't know if that helps the discussion or not, just thought it was interesting.)
You could indeed describe it that way. Languages that people label as "ergative" are usually morphologically ergative but syntactically accusative. However, I don't remember seeing a language described this way simply because "direct" here means "unmarked", and people will usually just state that the language doesn't inflect its nouns for case.
Sew'Kyetuh wrote:How would you approach the complete thought of an argument without verbs? Say, in a single word?

Now if Mr. Telfer's described definition of MSA here is correct, then which MSA would you use to represent a language that does not always need or use verbs? Or to one that treats some (mostly passive) verbs as descriptives like adjectives/adverbs?
Doesn't really matter. MSA refers to the language as a whole, not to specific sentence types. If most or many of Etihus's sentences show an accusative pattern, then it's most useful to tell people that it's an accusative language. You're describing general trends, not every possible example. English is accusative, and yet it has verbs like "bake" that have ergative characteristics: "the pie baked" vs. "the chef baked the pie".
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by qwed117 »

Sew'Kyetuh wrote: How would you approach the complete thought of an argument without verbs? Say, in a single word?
There's a thing called an agglutinating-fusional language
"Bebo" is one word, but in Spanish, it has the meaning of an entire clause, "I drank". One can't just use this to say Spanish has no MSA, It would contradict "Yo estaba en el cafe" ("I was in the cafe)
Spoiler:
My minicity is [http://zyphrazia.myminicity.com/xml]Zyphrazia and [http://novland.myminicity.com/xml]Novland.

Minicity has fallen :(
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by Trailsend »

Sew'Kyetuh wrote:How would you approach the complete thought of an argument without verbs? Say, in a single word?
Just the same.

Again, remember what morphosyntactic alignment means: the relationship between the marking of agents of transitive clauses, patients of transitive clauses, and subjects of intransitive clauses. Remember also that a transitive clause is a verb clause with two arguments ("argument" here is the more formal term for "participant"), and an intransitive clause is a verb clause with only one argument.

A clause without a verb is neither a transitive clause nor an intransitive clause, so it is immaterial to the question entirely. As an analogy:

A: "How do you tell what a person's handedness is?"
B: "Well, a person who can write with their left hand but not right hand is left handed, with their right but not left is right handed, and with both left and right hands is ambidextrous."
A: "Okay, but how would you approach the handedness of a person who wears gloves?"
B: "...just like I would approach the handedness of anyone else?"

Whether or not a person wears gloves has nothing to do with their handedness, and whether a language allows clauses without verbs has nothing to do with morphosyntactic alignment.

MSA is like handedness in a number of ways:

- It is a general classification based on very specific traits.
- For a given person, you can apply some simple tests and observe that the person is left handed, right handed, or ambidextrous. But most of the time. they will be something like "mostly right handed except for X and Y situations". In the same way, real languages never perfectly fit the archetype; like Vardelm pointed out, English is almost always nom-acc, but if you pay attention you'll catch some ergative-absolutive alignment running around in some places.
- Like MSA, handedness tends to be correlated with other traits which you might not expect, which makes it interesting.
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by clawgrip »

Trailsend wrote:handedness tends to be correlated with other traits which you might not expect, which makes it interesting.
Such as a dislike of can openers.
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by Keenir »

Sew'Kyetuh wrote:[
To describe what is considered "transitive", it omits the verb altogether and instead treats the word as a descriptive. "The moon shone.", "The moon is shiny.", and "Shiny moon." All mean the same thing. In Etihus there is only one way to communicate this: Mayee'ait-ihff --> Moon-shining. No verb. "Shine/shining" as a concept is used as a qualifying word to follow the head, "moon".
this makes sense...so Etihus, I can do what I already do in English: I go outside & say one word:
"Freezing!"
Sew'Kyetuh wrote:
clawgrip wrote: You have successfully separated the word /æɾɪ/ into the vowels /æ/ and /ɪ/, and the consonant /ɾ/, proving that it does have vowels and consonants. Whether or not the native script can represent them separately is irrelevant.
You are absolutely positive and certain, that a language that either does not use letters or functions with rules to consonants and vowels in its phonetics, can have a phonetic chart represented without misleading someone into wrongly thinking or assuming how the language might function? You can guarantee that?


well of course a phonetic chart can mislead people. just because I can look at a phonetic chart of Cornish or Basque, doesn't mean I can pronounce it well, much less speak it.
I'm afraid that what's going to happen if I list those sounds that the lot of you are going to examine them and align them up and then tell me how they can and cannot be placed together and start giving me a list of exact rules that are required to be followed universally which then destroys the language. I'm partly basing some of that on your references to "the script" whenever consonant/vowel sounds are mentioned, the written work. For Etihus, those individual sounds being called consonants and vowels aren't recognized in the speech either, even though you and I can hear them.
can the speakers of Etihus hear them?
(you said they aren't human, so the question arises)

Ari /æɾɪ/ is not simply a word. It is also a letter in the alphabet. It is a grapheme. It is a gestured sign. It has meaning. It represents all of these in one and is written with a single glyph, not 2 or 3.[/quote]

ahh...like the Spanish y then?

And for Thrice Xandvii, this in tandem with notes below is conceptually why the language remained mostly unchanged for 1,000 years.

(2) the language was given through instruction for 1,000 years, reinforcing the usage of the language (any deviation appearing was 'forcefully' corrected).
ahh...a liturgical language...like Talmudic Hebrew or Church Latin. ...only moreso.
(6) There were designs for a printing press for the future and how the writing would come together. So there hasn't been any technological evolutions or changes in materials that changes the way things are written which can change the way they are spoken or taught.
one could ask why the printing press wasn't built at the time, but I'll save that for later.
At work on Apaan: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4799
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by Trailsend »

Alright. I haven't chimed in on the whole phoneme/grapheme/semaphoneme issue yet, so I'll give that a go next.

First, I want to call out something:
Sew'Kyetuh wrote:I'm afraid that what's going to happen if I list those sounds that the lot of you are going to examine them and align them up and then tell me how they can and cannot be placed together and start giving me a list of exact rules that are required to be followed universally which then destroys the language.
This is not what would happen.

Reiterating from my first post in this thread: my methodology here is descriptive. I am going to look at the data--the things your language says, the things it doesn't say--and try to describe what it is doing in the best way I can find. In case you're wondering, there is no "list of exact rules that are required to be followed universally". Such a thing does not exist, and that is not what we're doing here.

Okay.

I'm going to start by clarifying the meaning of some relevant terms.

A phone is a noise. It is a literal mechanical noise that you make with your mouth. It has nothing to do with letters, writing, or meanings.

A phoneme is a sound in an abstract sense, and is specific to a particular language. If a phone is what you say, a phoneme is what you hear. Importantly, phonemes also have nothing to do with letters or writing, and they also have little to do with the sounds speakers think of as part of their language. (For example, if you ask the average English speaker how many vowel sounds there are in English, they will probably say "five or six" because they are thinking of "aeiou-and-sometimes-y." In fact, you can show that English has more than a dozen.)

But if you can't rely on speakers' intuitions, how do you identify phonemes? You do it by looking at the behavior of the language, and finding sounds that have the power to change meaning.

In English, we have the words:

pit
bit

"Pit" and "bit" are completely different words that mean completely different things. And yet, they are almost exactly the same. The only difference between them is the very first sound of the word. In phonology this is called a minimal pair: a pair of two different words that differ in just one sound. The existence of such pairs indicates the existence of two different phonemes; in this case, /p/ and /b/ (linguists indicate that they're talking about phonemes by putting them between /slashes/; phones, on the other hand, go between [square brackets]).

So, looking at Etihus.

We can identify the phonemes of Etihus by looking for minimal pairs. For example:

ma
bullish, anger, wrath

ba
hasty, rapid, impatient

These are two different words that differ in just one sound. This indicates that Etihus has the phonemes /m/ and /b/.

To reiterate, this has nothing to do with what the Uhsey think about the sounds m and b. It is completely independent of whether /m/ and /b/ are represented in the Etihus writing system. It is just an observation that in Etihus, the difference between [m] and [ b ] is big enough to turn anger into hasty.

In the other direction, there are many (many many many) sets of phones in Etihus where the difference is not big enough to change meaning. For example, from the look of things I would guess that if someone said "ma" in a nasally voice, an Uhsey speaker would still interpret them as saying anger. Therefore, the non-nasalized phone [a] and the nasalized phone [ã] are both part of the same phoneme, which we can write /a/. (There are languages where this is not true: if you said "ma" with a nasally voice, it would mean something entirely different than "ma" with a non-nasal voice. Such languages have separate /a/ and /ã/ phonemes.)

Here is another minimal pair that has come up so far:

ut
simultaneous

et
knowledge

This minimal pair indicates that there are separate phonemes /u/ and /e/. Crucially, it does not matter that Etihus speakers think of ut as really being uh-alt-t, because phonemes have nothing to do with underlying structure, just sound. And when an Etihus speaker hears the sound "ut", they know that you said simultaneous and not knowledge because the noise at the front of the word was an /u/ and not an /e/.

Given more data, we would find more and more minimal pairs like this, with which we could start building an inventory of the phonemes that Etihus distinguishes. Again, this has nothing to do with how Etihus is written, or how Etihus speakers talk about the language themselves. It is purely the observation that in Etihus, [ u ] and [ũ] are not different enough to change a word into something else, but [ u ] and [e] are. This is an interesting observation because it is not true of all languages—it is one of the things that makes Etihus unique. So, even though the Uhsey do not utilize the notion of phonemes in their own philosophy of their language, it is still interesting for us to look at the phonemes that Etihus has.
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by cntrational »

I should note, Sew'Kyetuh, that the underlying issue is that you confuse how you think it works and how it actually works. You can't get around this except by learning about lingusitics and other languages, including English itself. It might frustrate you to know that what you've written turns out to have been wrong, but we'd never make progress if we never accepted our mistakes. You can't dismiss the truth simply because you don't like what it says.

You came here to know how Etihus was classified, but refusing to believe us because you don't like what we're saying defeats the point.
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Re: Categorizing Etihus

Post by Sew'Kyetuh »

elemtilas wrote: So, sometimes you can use all nouns to speak of actions. And sometimes you can use nouns and verbs together. Sometimes you want to be a little vague. Sometims you want to be a little more specific. Everything right of the subject (except the definite article) refers back to the subject/agent. What's the issue here?
I don't know. You tell me. Is there a problem? I hope not, because that's how Etihus works.
What's wrong with "boy-hitting girl" or "running-girl"?? (In English)
Not sure what's wrong. I just think it's silly it's considered grammatically incorrect as an incomplete thought in English.
Maybe the term you're looking for is "precise"? Sometimes it may not be enough to just say "she running girl" and you have to say something much longer and more precise like "she young female-child who is currently rapidly moving her legs to quickly in order to change location".
I was hoping you guys would know of a term. I know there is a concept of "not an exact language" which creates a lot of ambiguity, but Etihus is the opposite, a "very exact language".
I'd suggest that you're using too many words and are perhaps making the issue seem more confusing than it actually is.
If you meant "too many words" in Etihus to describe a complete concept, that's the difference between Etihus and English. The main target goal of Etihus was for there to be a simple, easy-to-learn oligosynthetic language that could function timelessly, allow a greater freedom of expression than English, removes almost all exceptions to grammar rules (unlike English, which is riddled with them) and removes as much ambiguity as possible.

If you mean "too many words" for my attempt to describe the language, then it's simply my hopeful strategy to approach a subject from so many POV angles in as simple a manner as possible to target everyone's personal preference for understanding so that irregardless of whose reading, some of the meaning gets through. But I've recently learned that my psychological personality of cognitive functions (i.e. the way I think) is on an almost opposite plane to a majority of people involved in conlanging as a hobby.

Trailsend wrote: A clause without a verb is neither a transitive clause nor an intransitive clause, so it is immaterial to the question entirely.

...

and whether a language allows clauses without verbs has nothing to do with morphosyntactic alignment.

MSA is like handedness in a number of ways:

- It is a general classification based on very specific traits.
- For a given person, you can apply some simple tests and observe that the person is left handed, right handed, or ambidextrous. But most of the time. they will be something like "mostly right handed except for X and Y situations". In the same way, real languages never perfectly fit the archetype; like Vardelm pointed out, English is almost always nom-acc, but if you pay attention you'll catch some ergative-absolutive alignment running around in some places.
- Like MSA, handedness tends to be correlated with other traits which you might not expect, which makes it interesting.
If that is true, which makes 10 times more sense to me, then I have been given and reading incorrect or over-complicated definitions of morphosyntactic alignment. The understanding I got, as given in the definitions provided, is that "MSA is a category of how a language handles two arguments of transitive verbs and the single argument of intransitive verbs." (Wikipedia, as one example) If there are no verbs to begin with, how do you categorize the MSA?

The understanding I got from some people, and the conclusion I was leaning towards, was that MSA doesn't apply to Etihus because Etihus can have arguments that omit verbs completely, and it can have arguments within a single word. A single word usually cannot be both a noun, and a verb, and an object all-in-one.

To follow through with your analogy of handedness, wouldn't it be more like, "Ok, a person has no hands. Are they left handed, right handed, or ambidextrous?"

=
=
cntrational wrote:I should note, Sew'Kyetuh, that the underlying issue is that you confuse how you think it works and how it actually works. You can't get around this except by learning about lingusitics and other languages, including English itself. It might frustrate you to know that what you've written turns out to have been wrong, but we'd never make progress if we never accepted our mistakes. You can't dismiss the truth simply because you don't like what it says.

You came here to know how Etihus was classified, but refusing to believe us because you don't like what we're saying defeats the point.
When I am given a term or a small phrase by someone to try and categorize my conlang, when the person giving me the term is not explaining it, or I didn't understand, I have to go and verify the information. Then I have to hope that what I am reading makes sense, that the sources I'm reading are correct, and that the information therein being described actually does apply to Etihus. After looking up examples in other languages, I can then try to conclude on my own without guidance (since I was given none) that this term or that term probably isn't.

When someone does explain it and it seems that I understand, I take what they say with less verification. But then I have to hope that person has the right idea. I quote those people word-for-word and then when someone tells me that is stupid or not how things work, now I have juggle figuring out who is right or wrong (or if both are wrong) and why. Based on that experience, its foolish for me to take information and try to go along with it just because X or Y person said so.

But since I am not a real learned expert, do not profess to be, nor do I have book references that build up the concept of linguistics from basic to advanced, I use terms like "I believe", "it is possible", "I don't think", "I assume", "I'm not sure"; these should be indicators that I am walking around only with speculation and without absolutes. I haven't outright denied anything, only speculated.

So my learning of linguistics is erratic and all over the place. Through private messages, chat sessions, and different groups, I get different answers everywhere I go. I'm a sponge and a mirror: I absorb information other people give me, filter out the ones that don't add up, and then reflect those things back to others. Except for oligosynthetic (which I found on my own), every term I use to describe Etihus came from another linguist.

MSA is the one that has the greatest amount of variable answers and different reasons why. Trailsend has given me the most objective, unbiased, and clearest definition of MSA so far, even though other linguists I have talked to and articles I have read have given me very different definitions.

All I know for certain, is that Etihus has been extremely easy to teach to people who don't know anything about linguistics.
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