jay_walk: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] jay_walk at 08:20pm on 17/10/2011 under ,
as a third person singular pronoun that is. It's my new favourite candidate.
(I'm just talking about third person pronouns for a person of neutral gender, no gender, both, etc., ruling out the options of going non-neologisms such as by both or by it or by they. For an unspecified person or a person whose gender I do not know yet or a generic person, I use they, while the very traditional thing to use is "he", which is sexist, or "he or she", which is binarist. I don't tend to use a neologistic word for this case, although some people do.)
Thon:
Just because it's phonetically perfect for it. It fits into an English sentence well. Pronouns with more complex and uncommon sounds in them like x or z are going to slur when they're in often used, unemphasized, and small words like pronouns are, and when they do they'll turn to something involving h or s sounds, which makes them hard to keep apart from other third person pronouns.
Another reason I dislike the more common options phonetically is because they're too close to female or male pronouns (zie, hir, for example). Not that people can't call themselves that if they don't see that quality in them or like it to describe them, it just makes them not perfectly neutral in my perception. For example for myself I don't mind "hit", which is middle English for it but declines as "him, his". Phonetically it sounds like it means something between he and it, which is why I'd use it for myself, but why it can't be a good new neutral pronoun.
And the ones that are them without the th I just find phonetically unaesthetic Because they either begin with a glottal stop or slur with the preceding word. Personal taste I guess.
(unrelated note: the quenya word for personal taste in phonetic aesthetics is lamatyalve)
Thon is a demonstrative (?) pronoun in some dialects, apparently, so that's why it fits phonologically as a pronoun in an English sentence.
I have no idea how to decline it. Demonstrative pronouns don't decline. Although I'd guess they did in middle english and certainly in old English. It might be easiest to just let it be the same in all cases. Or to decline analogous to "one": thon-thon-thons
I'd love to enforce bringing back accusative and dative cases for pronouns and getting rid of some prepositions, but anyway.

And yay, I managed to have some thoughts and write something.
jay_walk: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] jay_walk at 09:29pm on 10/07/2011 under , , ,
Everyone I've talked to in real life: You've heard most of this before and probably still aren't passionately interested in grammar.

You only need to figure out where to put them if you're a fan of agglutination in general, that is. If you're isolating morphemes I suppose the only question is the syntax.

Personally I don't care whether the morphemes are going on the words or next to them as long as they're nicely organized and precise.
For example I like the idea of Finnish cases (In theory, have no idea about the details of actual Finnish) better then using the English prepositions, because it's more logical to use, for example, a locative case than not knowing whether the right phrase is "on the yard", "in the yard", etc.. I suppose I think so because I see a lot of people having problems with prepositions not matching up between English, German, French (I never know what the right preposition is in French), and if there were a French locative for it all I wouldn't be having this problem. The Finnish ones seem to cover all the basic concepts quite logically. "Inside", "from inside", "into" ; "outside", "from outside", "out of", etc..
Allthough I suppose it would avoid complications if there were less of them; a latin ablative means quite a lot of things and nobody gets confused about what's being said (except teachers who demand embellishment in the translation).
Information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affix

In European languages, mostly at the end and at the beginning.
In Esperanto, as far as I know only at the end, because it is intended to be simple and easy (to Europeans, that is, one of the reasons I don't like it.)

I want my conlangs to not just be english or latin with a different vocabulary. Which is why I need to learn some different things like an asian language, and all those grammatical concepts.

In Quenya: perfect tense- duplication of the stem's vowel as a prefix, and suffix -ie (lante -> alantie)
(I need to learn a second conlang though, or at least relearn some Quenya)
One of my favorite characteristics of the language, because it's exotic (at least to me) and adds to the language's "flavor" of having a lot of vowels.
Changing or inserting vowels: Certainly it must have some system to it, but its rules are a bit more difficult to understand than just always sticking stuff on the beginning or end. I need more conlanging skills, but it would make a language more natural. (Unless you just change vowels on a very rigid system, in which case it might even be more systematic than adfixes).
Duplication of (parts of) the stem: a very human type of thing in my opinion, not what you'd find in Newspeak or a logical artificial language, because it isn't the most rigid thing to do but rather requires the brain to process each word.

The suprafix, rather subtle thing to do, this would cause (maybe did) interesting writing systems to be invented if a whole lot of meaning relies on it in a language., or create problems with trying to adapt other people's writing system.

Sidenote: Wikipedia on what theories there are about what where we insert the "fucking" tells us about a word: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive_infixation
I love wikipedia sounding serious and scholarly about everything.

Where am I currently putting mine? Well I've only gotten to declension of nouns, and I put the affixes at the end there (and there are a lot of affixes, for about twelve cases, three numbers, and five grammatical genders (by animacy mostly)). And I'm dropping pronouns on favor of (optionally) adding morphemes signifying person, number, gender, and/or case of subject and a few objects at the end of the verb- it's a rather very agglutinative language, in fact I there's one-word sentences.
(This language isn't going anywhere other than grammatical theory at the moment because I need to figure out how to assimilate more systematically, and how to operate a vocabulary generator which I can tell exactly what my phonology is)

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