(L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here [2010-2019]

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Adarain
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Adarain »

Hang on, so linking to a google drive of pdfs is okay, but to a torrent containing the same files is not? I'll gladly remove them if it's against the rules, but I would like to understand the reasoning behind that. (or, well, I would if I could, but you've commented on it…)
Edit: I remembered that I can of course still edit the post… Silly me. The question still stands though, how is linking to a collection of pdfs hosted online different from linking to a download via torrent?
At kveldi skal dag lęyfa,
Konu es bręnnd es,
Mæki es ręyndr es,
Męy es gefin es,
Ís es yfir kømr,
Ǫl es drukkit es.
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qwed117
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by qwed117 »

If you are linking to the drive, you basically absolve the board of any guilt, but torrents are technically illegal if the copywrite-owning person doesn't permit it. In a GD link, you share something, without making a copy (much like sharing a book), but in a torrent, you "copy" the data (much like "copying a book")
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Minicity has fallen :(
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sumelic »

qwed117 wrote:If you are linking to the drive, you basically absolve the board of any guilt, but torrents are technically illegal if the copywrite-owning person doesn't permit it. In a GD link, you share something, without making a copy (much like sharing a book), but in a torrent, you "copy" the data (much like "copying a book")
That seems a bit of a dubious distinction to me. It seems to me that providing a link to a torrent is like providing a link to a Google Drive: there is no illegal copying going on in either case. It is using or hosting the torrent that would do that. But IANAL. I think Aszev would be the one to decide about these kind of things, right? (By the way, a question I've had that I never got around to asking before: what happened to the Ascevarium stuff aside from the CBB? Whenever I go to http://aveneca.com anymore I just see a blank page.)
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by qwed117 »

Sumelic wrote:
qwed117 wrote:If you are linking to the drive, you basically absolve the board of any guilt, but torrents are technically illegal if the copywrite-owning person doesn't permit it. In a GD link, you share something, without making a copy (much like sharing a book), but in a torrent, you "copy" the data (much like "copying a book")
That seems a bit of a dubious distinction to me. It seems to me that providing a link to a torrent is like providing a link to a Google Drive: there is no illegal copying going on in either case. It is using or hosting the torrent that would do that. But IANAL. I think Aszev would be the one to decide about these kind of things, right? (By the way, a question I've had that I never got around to asking before: what happened to the Ascevarium stuff aside from the CBB? Whenever I go to http://aveneca.com anymore I just see a blank page.)
I know. I was using his romlang page for help, but I couldn't find it. I'm basically limited to using WaybackMachine to use that page. It could be that the size of the CBB is making the other pages starved for space in his server. Less likely, the main page is being retooled. Potentially, it may be that no one is actually going there. I guess the only one that we can really ask this to is Aszev himself...
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Minicity has fallen :(
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

What exactly is the difference between the optative and the desiderative? I've seen optative described as "wishes and hopes" and desiderative described as "wishes and desires". They seem pretty close to me, although the desiderative sometimes seems a bit stronger. Is that it, though? What of languages that have both moods (like Sanskrit? I don't know much about Sanskrit verbs).
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sumelic »

I think it depends on the language, but could be something like optative = "I (the speaker) want [subject] to [verb]" while "desiderative" = "[subject] wants to [verb]".

E.g. desiderative expresses what in some other languages would normally be expressed with an independent verb meaning "to want to [verb]". "God wants to save the Queen."

Optative expresses what might be expressed in some other languages with a subjunctive construction. "God save the queen" or "May God save the queen."
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

Thanks. I didn't think about the optative as necessarily involving the speaker's wishes (even in 2nd and 3rd person). That clears it up a bit.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Omzinesý »

Axiem wrote:For languages that mark evidentiality on the verb (e.g. differentiating between "I heard that..." and "I directly experienced that..."), how do they handle telling stories, in particular, mythical stories? Things like fairy tales, myths, even a fictional novel about something that happened five years ago.

Is there a particular evidentiality they're told in, or does the speaker just drop to the default (i.e. unmarked, if there is one) evidentiality?
It, surprisingly, depends on the language and the culture.
But using some evidential is a very effective genre marker. So it's very usual that only one evidential is repeated in a folk story, which makes life difficult for a linguist that is trying to describe the system of evidentials just listening to folk stories.
Many languages use the hear-say evidential in folk stories, some use the default, some maybe drop it out all together. It depends.

Some languages have double evidentails "I heard that somebody personally saw that...".
My meta-thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5760
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Adarain »

KaiTheHomoSapien wrote:Thanks. I didn't think about the optative as necessarily involving the speaker's wishes (even in 2nd and 3rd person). That clears it up a bit.
One way to explain the Optative is that it acts much like an Imperative, but less command-y and more wish-y, which is why it tends to be applicable to more persons than an imperative. Afaik it's also not too uncommon for a language to have a single mood that acts as imperative in second person and as optative in the others.
At kveldi skal dag lęyfa,
Konu es bręnnd es,
Mæki es ręyndr es,
Męy es gefin es,
Ís es yfir kømr,
Ǫl es drukkit es.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Ephraim »

Sumelic wrote:I think it depends on the language, but could be something like optative = "I (the speaker) want [subject] to [verb]" while "desiderative" = "[subject] wants to [verb]".

E.g. desiderative expresses what in some other languages would normally be expressed with an independent verb meaning "to want to [verb]". "God wants to save the Queen."

Optative expresses what might be expressed in some other languages with a subjunctive construction. "God save the queen" or "May God save the queen."
To add to this, it's possible to distinguish two types of desideratives: structure building desideratives, that add one argument slot ([subject] wants [+argument] to [verb]), and inheritance desideratives, that don't change the argument structure ([subject] wants to [verb]).

Donna B. Gerdts give the following examples from an Eskimo language, that have both types:

Inheritance desiderative:
angutik tiki–guma–vuk
man\ABS arrive–want–3SG(SUBJ)
"The man wants to arrive"

Structure building desiderative:
anguti-up annak tiki–kqu–janga
man–ERG woman\ABS arrive–want–3SG(SUBJ)>3SG(OBJ)
"The man wants the woman to arrive"

http://www.sfu.ca/~gerdts/papers/Gerdts ... atives.pdf
(This paper also makes further distinctions among desideratives)
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Axiem »

Omzinesý wrote:
Axiem wrote:For languages that mark evidentiality on the verb (e.g. differentiating between "I heard that..." and "I directly experienced that..."), how do they handle telling stories, in particular, mythical stories? Things like fairy tales, myths, even a fictional novel about something that happened five years ago.

Is there a particular evidentiality they're told in, or does the speaker just drop to the default (i.e. unmarked, if there is one) evidentiality?
It, surprisingly, depends on the language and the culture.
But using some evidential is a very effective genre marker. So it's very usual that only one evidential is repeated in a folk story, which makes life difficult for a linguist that is trying to describe the system of evidentials just listening to folk stories.
Many languages use the hear-say evidential in folk stories, some use the default, some maybe drop it out all together. It depends.

Some languages have double evidentails "I heard that somebody personally saw that...".
Interesting. Do you have any concrete examples I can sink into?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Omzinesý »

Axiem wrote:
Omzinesý wrote:
Axiem wrote:For languages that mark evidentiality on the verb (e.g. differentiating between "I heard that..." and "I directly experienced that..."), how do they handle telling stories, in particular, mythical stories? Things like fairy tales, myths, even a fictional novel about something that happened five years ago.

Is there a particular evidentiality they're told in, or does the speaker just drop to the default (i.e. unmarked, if there is one) evidentiality?
It, surprisingly, depends on the language and the culture.
But using some evidential is a very effective genre marker. So it's very usual that only one evidential is repeated in a folk story, which makes life difficult for a linguist that is trying to describe the system of evidentials just listening to folk stories.
Many languages use the hear-say evidential in folk stories, some use the default, some maybe drop it out all together. It depends.

Some languages have double evidentails "I heard that somebody personally saw that...".
Interesting. Do you have any concrete examples I can sink into?
I cannot remember. But the study of evidentials is going to the "cultural" direction of researching which evidentials are used in which contexts. If watching TV is direct or indirect evidence etc. Languages seem to vary in that. I guess folk stories are the basic case, and easiest to research.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by mira »

Is there a standard set of questions? Like the following:
is (sub) (adj)?
what is (obj)?
what is (adj)?
why does (sub) (vrb)?
how do I (vrb)?
and so on.
If one can be found, maybe it would make a good resource for the resources thread?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

OTʜᴇB wrote:Is there a standard set of questions? Like the following:
is (sub) (adj)?
what is (obj)?
what is (adj)?
why does (sub) (vrb)?
how do I (vrb)?
and so on.
If one can be found, maybe it would make a good resource for the resources thread?
Any element of a sentence can be questioned, and a sentence may include an infinite array of elements, so there are an infinite number of possible questions. "Which opossum had he last eaten before the incident?" "Five doors along from which photography studio did he eat the biscuit?" [or "which photography studio did h eat the biscuit five doors along from?", if you prefer]

English happens to condense some questions into specialised words. "Why" is just a condensed way of questioning "for what reason?", whereas "how" can stand for one of several different questions, including "by what means?" and "in what manner?". "When" is "at what time?" But which questions merit these special forms and which do not will depend on the language.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Adarain »

Well, any statement can be converted into a quesiton by either:

1) Asking for the truth value of the statement (yes/no questions such as "Are you hungry?" < "You are hungry.")
2) Asking for the value of any NP (wh-questions such as "Who is that?" < "That is my friend Max")

So really, there are as many question types as you want to distinguish in type 2 plus one for type 1. Languages may be quite unspecific about the type of NP asked about or they may have a wide array (potentially even open class) of wh-words.
At kveldi skal dag lęyfa,
Konu es bręnnd es,
Mæki es ręyndr es,
Męy es gefin es,
Ís es yfir kømr,
Ǫl es drukkit es.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by loglorn »

Adarain wrote:Well, any statement can be converted into a quesiton by either:

1) Asking for the truth value of the statement (yes/no questions such as "Are you hungry?" < "You are hungry.")
2) Asking for the value of any NP (wh-questions such as "Who is that?" < "That is my friend Max")

So really, there are as many question types as you want to distinguish in type 2 plus one for type 1. Languages may be quite unspecific about the type of NP asked about or they may have a wide array (potentially even open class) of wh-words.
You can also ask for the truth values of NP's, in like "Was it John that ate the cake?". You can ask for the value of things other than NP's, such as "What did John do?" or "How did she fall?".

Options do seem to be endless.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Adarain »

loglorn wrote:
Adarain wrote:Well, any statement can be converted into a quesiton by either:

1) Asking for the truth value of the statement (yes/no questions such as "Are you hungry?" < "You are hungry.")
2) Asking for the value of any NP (wh-questions such as "Who is that?" < "That is my friend Max")

So really, there are as many question types as you want to distinguish in type 2 plus one for type 1. Languages may be quite unspecific about the type of NP asked about or they may have a wide array (potentially even open class) of wh-words.
You can also ask for the truth values of NP's, in like "Was it John that ate the cake?". You can ask for the value of things other than NP's, such as "What did John do?" or "How did she fall?".

Options do seem to be endless.
I agree that I didn't consider asking for the truth value of things below the sentence level, but the latter thing you describe still falls under 2). It's not asking for core NPs (subject, object…) but asking for peripheral arguments still counts.

I guess ultimately an extremely broad summary could be:

1) Asking for the truth value of anything that can be referred to - including fragments of a sentence such as a single NP
2) Asking for the actual value of any part of an utterance
At kveldi skal dag lęyfa,
Konu es bręnnd es,
Mæki es ręyndr es,
Męy es gefin es,
Ís es yfir kømr,
Ǫl es drukkit es.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

I suppose you could ask more complicated 'truth function' questions. For instance, given two NPs, you could ask "is the conjunction true?" or "which of these two values is true?" (your 1 and 2) - but you could also ask "is the sheffer stroke true?" - that is, given A and B, "is it true that it is not the case that both A and B?"

You could almost certainly reduce such questions to complex questions asking about truth: in this case "is it true that [it is not true that [both A and B]]?" or "is it true that neither A nor B, or A but not B, or B but not A?". However, the details are potentially hostage to your logical system, and in the case of some operators this may become problematic. For instance, the question "is it true that if A then B?" can't straightforwardly and uncontroversially be reduced to plain [solicit truth condition] questions.
(Under classical logic, "is it true that if A then B?" is equivalent to "is it true that it is not the case that A and not B?", but relationalists, intuitionists and so on would disagree. So you have to pick a side).
Alternatively, you could reduce such questions to asking about the truth of a complex claim: in this case, "is it true that [if A then B]?" - even if this weren't subject to logician's quibbling, you could potentially have a language in which it was possible to query conditionals that there was no straightforward way to express in propositional form.

A less 'logically' obvious, but perhaps more pragmatically likely, issue would also arise around non-binary logics. "What is the truth value of A?", "is A true?" and "is A false?" are only identical questions in a logic with binary truth values. For instance, the English question "is the King of France bald?" is likely to confuse people, leading to responses like "err... there isn't a king of france? I don't know how to answer that?" - because it asks for a description of the truth value, which is hard to describe, intuitively. Whereas "is it true that the king of france is bald?" would be answered "no" by most pedants, and probably even more (but not many logic professors) would say "no" to "is it false that the king of france is bald?"

Anyway, different philosophical systems have assumed that possible answers to "what is the truth value of A?" include things like "neither true nor false", "both true and false", and "partly true, partly false" - in which case "is A true?" and "is A false?" (and "is A not true?", etc) may sometimes give different answers.

[/gigantic pedantry tangent]
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by loglorn »

Real quick, what's the name of a mood that means roughly "try to"?

For instance:

eat-CONT
am eating

eat-CONT-XXX
am trying to eat
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

^ I was thinking "conative" (from Latin "cōnor"), but Googling that yields almost nothing.
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