My post Conlanging III is long enough now that Blogger's editor freezes up when I ty to add to it, so I guess it's time for a new post. First up, there are a few hundred nominal concepts that I want the Xenants to have words for, and since Xenant nouns have ontological phonesthemes in the initial syllables, that means I have to do some ontological categorization work that I've been putting off for too long.
First a random thought that I need to get out: I've been growing increasingly favorable to the idea of having a comparative verbal suffix, so that you can say X exists as a Y (more than Z does). That would be the only verbal suffix that doesn't have a short prepositional gloss, which is less than ideal, but I don't think it's semantically irregular; the (as a Y) suffix is already doing equative work, and a comparative is hardly different.
Okay, now to shore up the nominal classes.
I want the Xenants to have words for psychological concepts. I don't have strong opinions on how their psychology should differ from ours architecturally, so let's just start by translating human psychological concepts directly into their language. First, I want a class for countable psychological endurants. If you can talk about an X rather than some quantity of X, then X is countable, rather than massed. If you can talk about things happening during an X, then X is a perdurant, rather than an endurant. This is a little tricky, because systematic polysemy often means, in English and other languages, that concepts labelled X might be described with more than one of those seemingly binary distinction, e.g. the universal-grinder in English let's us say both "two potatoes" and "some potatoes". The Xenants don't have systematic polysemy though.
:: Cognitive Endurants
In the last post, I said that the ontological phonestheme for counted cognitive endurants would be "Ik-". The first word-sense I think of for each of the words (concept, belief, memory, desire, preference, goal, reason) is a countable endurant, so let's give each of those short "Ik-" words. A bunch of other psychological words (sensation, thought, judgement, interpretation, deduction, inference, selection, decision) are also countable and I think they have both endurant and perdurant senses, but I think in such cases, I should first give the Xenants words for the perdurants, and then only make endurant words when I find those expressively insufficient, or perhaps instead of making a new endurant root word, just apply a derivational suffix to those perdurant words to make them into endurants. Alternatively, all the perdurant words I made in the last post were for binary / polar / antonymic endurants, not categorical ones. I never really even came up with ontological phonesthemes for categorical perdurants. Maybe I should just keep all of the perdurants polar, skip the categorical ones ("manner perdurants"), and instead use endurant word senses for things like (sensation, thought, judgement). That's kind of good, I think. It would make the perdurants a very tight class, if not a closed class. I'll decide shortly. In the meantime, here are some new Xenant words:
IkIx: belief
Iktk: memory
IkXt: desire
IkTK: preference
Iktz: goal
IkXi: reason
, but I didn't give any examples. The directed parts should at least include: (top | bottom), (front | back), (surface | interior). The shapes should at least include: (mass| void), (rod | pipe), (sheet | fault), (bump | dent), (ridge | furrow). I wouldn't mind having (left <| center |> right) as directed parts, and then for parallelism we should have something like (top <| middle |> bottom), (front <| midway |> back). And maybe like (surface <| mantle |> core) instead of (surface | interior). The Xenants live inside their planet, so here their psychological preferences for parallelism has also resulted into something appropriate for their environment. Oh, but, shoot, the language already has locative and directive frames as adverbial suffixes. Do these directed parts match up with those? ...
I don't know. I really want to get this language done, so I'm going to push forward.
Here are some clustered words for shape vocabulary:
* 2d polygons: polygon, triangle quadrilateral (rectangle square diamond trapezoid kite parallelogram rhombus) pentagon hexagon heptagon octagon decagon
* 2d stars: star, pentagram, hexagram, heptagram, higher n-grams
* 2d closed curves: circle ellipse oval lune crescent
* 2d knots: lemniscate trefoil
* 2d open curves: line spiral semicircle arch helix zigzag chevron cross angle
* 3d closed curves: loop torus ring hoop
(mass | void) bulb sphere prism pyramid cube cylinder figure blob ball wedge spike expanse frustum gap slot hole rift aperture body cavity solid
(rod | conduit) string thread fibre filament bolt beam coil bar pole belt duct pipe wand post tube adit vent shaft billet rail vein
(sheet | fault) plane wall saddle incline slab wafer membrane plate disc diaphragm interface
(ridge | groove) crack elbow crotch edge rim arc fold fork kink bend furl part-line fissure cleft flap crest gyrus crevice sulcus
(bump | dent) horn pillar column obelisk spire point dot peak barb burr plateau corner vertex tab dendrite cup basin mound bowl chasm hook tip peak dimple divot
bend crimp wrinkle
? incline gradient bevel
? level tier ledge shelf layer slice
bell dome mesh coif cusp zenith apogee cone curl split
? grid weave lattice braid bow knot web network roll
Not shapes or directed parts: joint union juncture quadrant sector hemisphere twist
roles for mass: sliver shred shard strand tendril fiber cord strip
? axis center side edge
? line 2d-form 3d-form
.
I'll have to clean that up eventually. I'd also like to note that Xenant shapes are considered to be counted concrete endurants. Moving on.
:: Artefacts
How about artefact categories? The Xenants are blind to EM radiation, so they don't have much in the way of vehicles. They do have a sense of particle radiation, but it's non high-dimensional enough for rapid localization and mapping.
I think they sometimes wear personal coverings, but "equipment" is probably a more apt word than "clothing". What's the unit of equipment? What do you call one piece of kit? Or armor, for that matter? I don't know a short word. But they have protective gear for use in hazardous situations. And they weapons for when they want to get into hazardous situations. I don't know what specific weapons they have, but they also have the general word "weapon", and other general artefact roles besides that like "container", "covering", "support", "tool", "machine", "sensor", "actuator".
They live in magma, so they don't have much use for fire and don't cook their food. They have buildings, and normal architectural-parts to go with, including the door, window, wall, and floor. I'm not sure how they move from room to room vertically. Maybe a staircase, ladder, climbing-rope? Or they just swim up/down. They live spartan lives, but they might still have some furniture or furnishings, such as a bed, table, shelf, and maybe even a rug. Boxes, buckets, food pots, locked safes; all fine.
I think they have similar hand tool as humans do, including perhaps the hook, needle, chisel, trowel, fork, saw, hoe, crowbar, wrench, hammer, axe, broom, screwdriver, scythe, and shovel. They have fasteners of various kinds, like screws and nails and staples and wire. They might have passive measuring devices like plumb bobs, tape measure, and calipers.
Aside from hand tools, they have simple mechanical machines like pulleys, lifts, cranes, pliers, scissors, screwjacks, augurs, hydraulic motors/fans/turbines, hydraulic cylinders, and valves, along with complex machines like locks and clockwork timepieces. They also have electromechanical devices, including the microphone/loudspeaker, motor/generator, capacitive sensor, and limit switch.
They're not a warm, loving species, but they do have medical technology and use it on the people who are important to them. Simple medical equipment they might have includes syringes, catheters, bandages, and stretchers. For more complex equipment, they might have pacemakers and artificial organs, prosthetic actuated limbs, hearing aids, and patient-monitors.
They have documents, but it's a little bit different from our concept. To them, our stop signs would also be called documents. Physical keys are documents to them. Even coins are documents, in so far as they are treated as created artefacts in a legal system and not simply valuable chunks of metal.
Somewhat related, but with a different ontological prefix, Xenants have words for functional substance roles, like (medicine, ammunition, fuel, food, poison, fertilizer). And maybe biological words like pheromone and excrement they specify (function and relational roles to biological processes) more than (material composition) go with those too? Maybe.
:: Evaluative Roles
I was having a hard time making ontological categorizations for a bunch of words are very evaluative, like (defect error waste progress benefit). I like to start my ontological categorizations of nouns by asking three questions: 1) is it (an endurant | a perdurant | a rare other thing)? Is it massed or counted? Is it concrete or abstract? And for most of the evaluative words like "defect", I was having trouble answering at least one of the three preliminary questions. Like a defect seems to be usually concrete, an error seems to usually be abstract, and a mess can be either, maybe? But I don't feel super confident about any of those judgements. But here's a solution perhaps: just add an evaluative suffix to other nouns that are already well categorized, either as a bare adjectival suffix or as a genitive suffix that takes a dimension as an argument, like (valuable | worthless). The Xenants don't have a root word for a mess, they have a compound noun like (collection(-with-(disorder)). They don't have a root noun for a defect, they say (surface-feature(-with-(non-functionality)) or similar. You know how in English we can say "it was such a waste" and "there was a lot of waste on the ground"? It's a mass noun and a count noun. I was struggling to well-characterize both word senses, and now I don't have to: the Xenants don't use root nouns for those either word sense.
I like this a lot. It's very Xenantish. No evaluative root nouns. Before I came to this decision, I was trying to make a tidy set of antonymic evaluative roles for situations:
(opportunity | threat)
(benefit/windfall | setback/mishap)
(impediment/restriction | freedom)
(scarcity | abundance)
.
Not perfect yet, but it was going somewhere. I still kind of like it. Might come back to it.
:: Speech Acts and Message Roles
In my post Conlanging III, I came up with these words for "compositions":
Name : IXXo
Sentence : IXXt
Message : IXKi
Record : IXZk
Aphorism : IXoi
Rule : IXXK
Contract : IXOz
Design : IXIx
Language : IXOT
Algorithm : IXIT
Program : IXtx
Game : IXZt
Explanation : IXot
Prediction : IXIk
.
In retrospect, I think the last two don't belong with the others. A message can function as an explanation or a prediction or other things. Those are roles for a message, not separate types of symbolic compositions. Here are some common roles for messages among human speakers, based on the content of the message: (greeting, well-wish, statement/claim, prediction, explanation, justification, insult, compliment, criticism, blame, praise, offer/proposal, denial, rejection, acceptance, request, inquiry, command, pronouncement, apology, promise, warning, invitation, suggestion/recommendation). And maybe (prompt, response, retort), but those seem to have less to do with the message content than the other words. I've said in previous posts that I'd like the Xenants to mostly not have speech acts: they don't think that reality is altered by verbally agreeing to terms of a contract, or by pronouncing two people to now be spouses, or by calling a meeting to order, et cetera. And they're not friendly, so they won't have greetings and well-wishes. And their emotions are kind of blunted relative to ours, so they might night even have (emotionally charges) insults and compliments, although they'll still have a capacity for causal attributions allowing them to make criticisms and praise, blame and... exonerations. And they are intelligent, with a capacity to weigh probabilities, so they need to have a way to talk about prediction and explanation, at the least.
Here's where I'm leaning: For messages that are claims, the Xenants recognize and use the following roles, which distinguish claims functionally by their contents:
(blame | exoneration)
(praise | criticism)
(warning/threat | good-tiding/proposal)
I want names for Xenant social roles. I think it would be cute if they had a very small set of root-words for roles which are then distinguished by the subject that they deal with. Something like:
* administrator of (army, business, earth-mound, ecosystem)
* caretaker of (animals, corpses, earth-mounds, elders, infants, patients, plants, ...)
* creator of (earth-mounds, infants, prophecy, soldiers, ...)
* hunter of (animals, criminals, enemies, gems, plants, profits, spies, stratagems, wisdom, ....)
The presence of a half consonant in the second position indicates a role, and specifically a role for the sortal ontological type associated with the phonestheme. I already did this with
as roles for the sortal concept "organism" which has the phonestheme IZ. I think now I'm going to add a rule that the role-word which has "Zk" after the half-syllable will name the family of roles, e.g.
Relative: IZx_Zk
.
It's not ideal to have "relative" at the same level of lexical complexity as "parent", since "relative" is more abstract, but Xenants wouldn't recognize the phonestheme + half-syllable, "IZx_", as a well-formed noun. It would mess up their rigid parsing rules for identifying parts of speech and affix boundaries.
This potentially allows me to make roles for roles. Like if an agent is a role for a concrete endurant, maybe social roles for people, like "administrator of business", are roles for roles, with a form like
(phonestheme)(half syllable)(speciating boundary syllables)(half syllable)(speciating boundary syllables)
. I think that has the potential to make common important words unwieldy, so it won't be rigidly adhered to in the language: half-syllables in nouns will indicate roles, but not all roles with have half-syllables. For example, "agent" is a concept of such commonness and import that it will have a short word in the language, even if it's a role, and so social roles won't be so long as a consequence.
I had been struggling to find a place for the word "member" as a noun in the language. Endurants and perdurants can both be members of sets, so "member" has to be at a higher level of abstraction than either of those in the language, i.e. the level of Entities. For a moment, I had the idea that I could just not have "member" as a root noun: we have already introduced a genitive nominal suffixes that marks a noun as a member, "xkk_", so to speak of the concept "member" generally, I could say something like entity-(member-of(entity)), where "entity" here is not meant as a free variable, but rather the most general noun in the language, the word "entity", which they write as "ot". Written out it would be more like:
ot ot #1xkk_#2
That works to express the concept "member", but I'm not sure it works generally: I wanted a small closed class of genitive nominal suffixes, and it's not clear to me that nominal roles are a small closed class that can fit into the fixed lexical/morphosyntactcial space of genitive suffixes. Provisionally, I'm going to say that the Xenants have a word for "member" that is a role for entities,
Member: otx_Ko
and other concepts related to "member" can also be in the "otx_" class, but I'm not sure what the general name of the class is, i.e. what the word "otx_Zk" means. Maybe "member" is the most general word and later I'll replace it with "otx_Zk". We'll see.
Since there are only 12 half syllables in the language, this choice of word-form for "member" is committing me to sorting entity-roles into at most 12 categories, which is... exciting maybe? We'll see how that goes. Members are countable, so maybe "otx_" entity roles are all countable, in addition to having other properties in common. I like that.
: Modal Roles
I tried to keep the Xenants from having adjectival nouns (property/quality words) with a modal character, like "flammability" and "legibility". Xenants don't remark on someone being "able" to do something, they say that [the person is (powerful, stable, intelligent, knowledgeable, ...) and therefore the speaker expects the person to do the thing]. In light of this, I'm struggling to figure out where if anywhere in the language to place the word "skill". Is it an info object like "knowledge"? Is it just a synonym for "ability", which I've tabooed? I'd feel better categorizing it as an info object if there were a numerical measure of skill so that an ascription of skill was a statement about the present and not about possible futures. Maybe instead of saying "skill", the Xenants will say "a history of success". How would they express that phrase in their language?
...
I'm forgetting which features this language has. I need to reread everything from the start. Please hold.
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