A new version of the Conlanger's Thesaurus is ready. It has a few more maps, a few more grammaticalizations, and some subsections on classifiers, demonstratives and a few useful implicational hierarchies for verbs.
I've been tidying up some parts of Kahtsaai vocabulary as a direct result of working on the thesaurus, which is a nice side effect.
Version 1.3 of the Conlanger's Thesaurus is out. It has a few more polysemy maps, a few more grammaticalizations, and an addition to the final section with some notes on the typology of content question words ("who, what, when," etc.). The semantic map I got from "thread" was suitably and ironically tangled.
Some of the work on the Thesaurus has motivated me to make a few refinements to Kahtsaai. The biggest change is that I made some changes to question words. In English and the rest of the Indo-European family, we're used to content question words being obviously related in some way. In English, they all start with wh-, and in the Romance languages with qu-/c-. But it turns out this pattern is very rare in the world's languages, which may have completely unrelated roots for their core set of question words. So, I irregularized Kahtsaai a bit, with *ye'wei where becoming táá, and *ye'pas why becoming łouh.
Related to the question words, I have started to fill out the range of indefinites a bit. In particular, there's now an affix on the question words to mark a free choice indefinite ("pick any one"),
Ye'énał so'ołípto. ye'é-nał sou-n-líp-to what-FREE.CHOICE 2SG-3INAN-select-IMP Pick anything.
Additionally, it struck me that I didn't yet have a way to indicate intensives, I myself did it. In quite a few languages, those are related to the word for body. I didn't feel like using the full noun for body, tsire. Instead, I took the inspiration from the morpheme used in noun incorporation for body, which is -s(i)-. I expanded that a bit, to -ssi', which must be possessed:
Mo keil aassi' yo'áhlektén yolleile. mo keil ats-ssi' yo-'áh-lekté-n yolleile SUBJ soldier 3SG.AN-self 3SG.AN-3PL-save-EVID children The soldier himself saved the children.
One of the central features of the Conlanger's Thesaurus is the cross-linguistic semantic maps. For the first version of the Thesaurus I used those I could find in public linguistics journal articles. But it occurred to me I could come up with some of these on my own.
First I came up with some straightforward software to manipulate lists of definitions to produce the semantic maps automatically. I wasn't actually expecting this approach to work out so well right away, but my initial assumptions and model turned out to work pretty well.
The biggest problem has been finding good dictionaries to work with. All too many online dictionaries — and not a few printed ones — are simply lists of words with single-word definitions. This is not a great way to get at polysemy. However, over the last few days I have managed to find enough good dictionaries online to make me confident in the cross-linguistic (and cross-cultural) polysemy maps I've been creating.
The code is explained at Generating Cross-Linguistic Semantic Maps. At the bottom of that page is a list of core words around which I have generated maps. Even if you cannot understand the Python programming language, you can see the list of languages and meanings I have used in the links that end in .py. The maps are images of the common polysemies.
There have been two big surprises to me in these maps. First, "face" can refer to the blade of a knife in two utterly unrelated languages (Turkish and Inupiaq). Second, I was surprised how often "sweet" can refer to what English speakers consider other flavors, especially "salty."
In the last year or so I have been thinking about writing a piece of software which would spit up a skeleton dictionary which I could fill in with a new language being created. The point was to help me get out of certain lexical ruts, while still creating a language that would be more or less internally consistent. I gave up on that project, but one side effect was a lot of reading about recent work in lexical typology. I found the semantic maps especially interesting as tools for conlanging. I've collected a bunch of that work in A Conlanger's Thesaurus.
The core of that document is a word list, lightly edited, but mixed in whenever possible are cross-linguistic semantic maps, to prod thinking about new possibilities for words that don't simply reproduce the semantic boundaries of languages I already know. There are still a lot of gaps, but this seems a good start.
The last two pages have some dense but very interesting semantic maps relating to matters most people would consider grammatical rather than lexical. But there's a lot of interesting stuff there, too. Whenever possible I have included links to free, online papers and articles which discuss the maps in much more detail, so people can hunt down details if they are moved to do so.
If you know of cross-linguistic maps I have missed, please let me know. I'm sure I'll be updating this document from time to time as I run across new work.
I just noticed that the document sketch.pdf in my Kahtsaai directory is dated to April 23, 2011, meaning I just missed Kahtsaai's birthday. Taking a quick look at that sketch, it's interesting how much of the basic character of the language was firmly settled in just three not-very-dense pages with a whopping 20-word vocabulary.
For example, the conjugation table of subject and object prefixes is very similar, with the biggest change being the addition of several conditioned variants for the third person inanimate object, and the indefinites (thank you, Nahuatl). The sound system is completely unchanged, which shows serious restraint for me. The inchoative went from being a suffix, -píí to an aspectual prefix, -yé'-. The verb chain got a new slot just for those aspectual and adverbial prefixes.
I somehow derived an entire system of deixis from the single word hó'owa, thus.
Amusingly, the clause-final discourse particle łaai, undefined in the sketch, was briefly turned into the word yes, but now again sits without definition. It was used in the phrase, "s/he will make tea łaai." I suppose I really should find a meaning for it, given it's seniority.
It's at 973 lexical entries, including sublemmata. Perhaps I can spend the weekend getting that up to 1000.
I recently ran across this page about transitivity. Section six, "Problem Cases," mentions two languages in which it appears that the verb transitivity is cross-referenced on other constituents in the clause, in particular, adverbs and noun phrases acting adverbially. The first of the Shipibo-Conibo examples has two other elements in the clause so marked, Jain-xon-ra there-TRNS-EV and xobo-n-xon house-LOC-TRNS.
I don't think I'm going to be using this feature any time soon, but some people might find it alluring.
If you listened to the out-takes from the most recent Conlangery Podcast you heard an out-of-context quote from an experience I had in college. I went to a show of performance art pieces put on by art students. One of the episodes involved a man walking out on stage with a boom box, turning on some industrial music, stripping naked and proceeding to duct-tape sausage to himself.
From time to time, both on the show and off, Bianca and I have amused ourselves by imagining how various schools of art would map to styles of language invention. But now I think we've been going at this backwards. There is nothing intrinsically confusing about an earnest, naked gentleman with kielbasa affixed to his person. The problem is that no one in the audience knew what language he was speaking. If he had passed out a grammar and lexicon first, the audience would have some idea of what he was trying to say.
So, my current idea is that conceptual art is actually a form of conlanging. People just don't realize it yet.
Maybe I can get a paper in Social Text about this...
