Random ideas: semantics

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Hyolobrika
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Random ideas: semantics

Post by Hyolobrika »

A few of the posts in the morphosyntax thread seem more appropriate here.
Post your vocabularies etc here

Other random ideas threads:
Phonology
Morphosyntax
Yay or nay?
Also see:
Interesting spectra and categories
Lexicon sculpting 1
Lexicon Sculpting 2 (in parallel to above)
Last edited by Hyolobrika on 05 Mar 2018 12:28, edited 2 times in total.
Hyolobrika
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Re: Random ideas: semantics

Post by Hyolobrika »

Since in English the 3rd person singular verb form is the only differently formed one in the present tense, in a conlang based on English it could come to mean other, different from speaker and listener, distal and appear in the plural as well. The 1st and 2nd person forms could come to mean proximal, even for the actual 3rd person.
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Re: Random ideas: semantics

Post by Hyolobrika »

A root for "light source" and sun translates as "main light-source".
English uses "light" to mean both what is emmited and where it is emmited from but what about having different words for that?
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Re: Random ideas: semantics

Post by Creyeditor »

A language where full situations are coded into single words, so the radical absence of compositionality.
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k1234567890y
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Re: Random ideas: semantics

Post by k1234567890y »

a language where it is impossible to express certain ideas like "fair play", "freedom", "equality(between people)", "process", "procedure", "efficiency" and even "thing" or a single word for "to measure" or an equivalent of English "-ness" without the use of loanwords or very long derived words.
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Omzinesý
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Re: Random ideas: semantics

Post by Omzinesý »

Hyolobrika wrote: 02 Mar 2018 14:13 Since in English the 3rd person singular verb form is the only differently formed one in the present tense, in a conlang based on English it could come to mean other, different from speaker and listener, distal and appear in the plural as well. The 1st and 2nd person forms could come to mean proximal, even for the actual 3rd person.
It could mean epistemic distance, non-egophoric knowledge.

I wents home. 'I seem to have gone home.' or 'I'm told I went home.'
He am a master of arts. 'He is a master of arts (I know it because I represent the uni that gave the title.'
My meta-thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5760
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Random ideas: semantics

Post by eldin raigmore »

Hyolobrika wrote: 21 Apr 2018 09:05 A root for "light source" and sun translates as "main light-source".
English uses "light" to mean both what is emmited and where it is emmited from but what about having different words for that?
This is a difference in grammatical case, in some natlangs, according to the author of “the case for case” (starotsin?) IIANM.
Anyway according to some school of linguisticians, in some work.
If I’m right, probably at least a few such natlangs are oceanic.

So it’s not different roots; it’s different inflexions.

OTOH I don’t see why it couldn’t be separate roots.
as i inderstand it some split-S languages (Proto-IE apparently among them) have unrelated roots for “water” as an agent vs “water” as a patient; and the same is true of several other nouns.
Different cases of the same noun could be suppletive wrt each other.

—————————————————

BTW I like the other ideas here too.
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k1234567890y
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Re: Random ideas: semantics

Post by k1234567890y »

a language with verbs meaning "to give", "to help", "to receive", etc. having two variants, and the choice of verbs depend on the relationship between the speaker, the agent and the recipient, like the distinction between Japanese あげる, くれる and もらう.
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Re: Random ideas: semantics

Post by Vlürch »

This could go in either this or the morphosyntax thread, but the idea started from "grammatical auto-antonyms" and how they could be handled in a cool way, so I'm posting it in this thread.

"Read" and "write" being the same word, distinguished only by whether the subject is a patient or agent. Other concepts related to one another but differentiated by some kind of passive/active distinction could be handled similarly, including "eat" and "cook" (or even "vomit", but I think that'd better contrast with "swallow"), etc.

It'd make sense for such a language to be ergative and have SVO word order and not distinguish transitivity in a way that's more or less identical to English (ie. "swallow" can be transitive or intransitive) and have a fairly sophisticated past/present/future tense system, and even go as far as having case prefixes rather than suffixes (at least for the ergative case), I think, but it could of course be nom-abs and/or have any word order or whatever.

For example:
ki - to read/write
bu - to eat/cook
glo - to swallow/vomit

h - past tense suffix
hu - past progressive tense suffix
he - past habitual tense suffix
yu - present progressive tense suffix
ye - habitual tense suffix
d - future tense suffix
du - future progressive tense suffix
de - future habitual tense suffix

wen - book
yum - pizza
ni - 1st person pronoun
ko - 2nd person pronoun

e - ergative case prefix

Ni kih wen. = I read a book.
Eni kih wen. = I wrote a book.

Ni kiyu. = I'm reading.
Eni kidu. = I'll be writing.

Ni buyu yum. = I'm eating a pizza.
Eni budu yum. = I'll be making a pizza.

Ni buye yum. = I tend to eat pizza.
Ko buye wen. = You tend to eat books.

Ni gloh. = I swallowed.
Eni glod. = I'm gonna throw up.

Ko kihe. = You used to read.
Eko kide. = You'll be writing a lot.
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Re: Random ideas: semantics

Post by Hyolobrika »

I actually meant an inflection.

Also
eldin raigmore wrote: 23 Apr 2018 01:29 OTOH I don’t see why it couldn’t be separate roots.
as i inderstand it some split-S languages (Proto-IE apparently among them) have unrelated roots for “water” as an agent vs “water” as a patient; and the same is true of several other nouns.
Different cases of the same noun could be suppletive wrt each other.
Who considers proto-IE a split-S language? I don't think I've heard that before, please tell.
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Re: Random ideas: semantics

Post by Hyolobrika »

Vlürch wrote: 04 May 2018 02:04 This could go in either this or the morphosyntax thread, but the idea started from "grammatical auto-antonyms" and how they could be handled in a cool way, so I'm posting it in this thread.
...
That's a really cool idea but I don't understand why the tense system.
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Random ideas: semantics

Post by eldin raigmore »

Hyolobrika wrote: 12 Jun 2018 19:05 Who considers proto-IE a split-S language? I don't think I've heard that before, please tell.
E.g.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... o-European
for an article that marshals evidence against that hypothesis. But it has references to works that support it.

Wikipedia says something about Pre-PIE: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active– ... _languages

I Googled what was early proto-IE's alignment? and got several hits mentioning the idea.
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Re: Random ideas: semantics

Post by Hyolobrika »

eldin raigmore wrote: 12 Jun 2018 21:39
Hyolobrika wrote: 12 Jun 2018 19:05 Who considers proto-IE a split-S language? I don't think I've heard that before, please tell.
E.g.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... o-European
for an article that marshals evidence against that hypothesis. But it has references to works that support it.

Wikipedia says something about Pre-PIE: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active– ... _languages

I Googled what was early proto-IE's alignment? and got several hits mentioning the idea.
Thanks, I searched "was proto-IE a split-S language" and got nothing.
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Omzinesý
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Re: Random ideas: semantics

Post by Omzinesý »

Hyolobrika wrote: 13 Jun 2018 12:27
eldin raigmore wrote: 12 Jun 2018 21:39
Hyolobrika wrote: 12 Jun 2018 19:05 Who considers proto-IE a split-S language? I don't think I've heard that before, please tell.
E.g.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... o-European
for an article that marshals evidence against that hypothesis. But it has references to works that support it.

Wikipedia says something about Pre-PIE: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active– ... _languages

I Googled what was early proto-IE's alignment? and got several hits mentioning the idea.
Thanks, I searched "was proto-IE a split-S language" and got nothing.
The issue has also been discussed on this board before. Search "PIE ergative".

Syntax cannot be reconstructed but averaging the existing languages. And alignments are not very stable, altogether.

The orthodox PIE reconstruction does not have an unmarked case. So one can speculate if it did have one, and -s (which by the way resembles Genitive) is actually a peripheral ergative and -m (which by the way resembles Instrumental) is actually a peripheral oblique-accusative. But if there was an unmarked syntactic case, there are very few traces of it. (Could Germanic Zero-Accusative derive from it instead of -m-Accusative (?) )
Hittite also has an ergative for inanimate nouns in the agent function but it seems to be quite well verified that it's a later innovation from Ablative.
My meta-thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5760
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Random ideas: semantics

Post by eldin raigmore »

Anyway: someone has proposed that “aqua” and “hydro” (IIANM) come from suppletively different cases for “water as an agent” and “water as a patient”. I suppose I could be wrong, especially about details.
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