Kintsugi Conlang Creation

Although, to be serious, let's solve the "are plants animate" question right now. Most plants should not be considered animate. This means that kudzu and Venus flytraps, when tagged animate, will be properly exceptional to a Kintsugispeaker.

A statement like "Be careful of the [vine][animate]" should cause serious concern.

 

One thing that I've always wished English had in a better form is evidential modalities: when making declarations, saying what evidence you have for those declarations. Similar to the use of [abstract] as denoting something as not personally experienced, but a little more fine-grained.
So we'd have things like [hearsay], [from-a-trusted-authority], [personally-witnessed], [making-shit-up], etc.
Although I can imagine all sorts of passive-aggressive shenanigans involving word-for-word repeating whatever claim someone has just said to you but changing the marker to [making-shit-up].
Also this tag would have to attach to the sentence or the verb, probably, as opposed to [abstract] which looks like a noun tag.

Another thing that would be nice would be a better way of distinguishing average properties of collections from properties of average members of the collections. Spiders Georg and all that.

 

oh my fucking god yes.

eta things like mean, median, mode, and [fascinating outlier]

 

I am highly amused that we are deliberately creating a language that is at least partially influenced by memes

 

Huh! Evidential modalities, like Láadan has?

edit: we should really invent our own, mind you, but here's someplace to start at least

 

One way to do this could be just not having a word for "average". This will require people to specify if they're talking about a mean, a median, or a mode.

 

To be honest I was thinking more of the bad reporting on sociology studies that say things like "boys found to be more X than girls" when they really mean "average value of X over the set of boys higher than average value of X over the set of girls" and the distributions are shaped so that a uniformly picked girl has higher X than uniformly picked boy with probability > 1/2, or vice-versa.
Another example would be things like nontransitive dice where the distributions of numbers on the dice make it so that the die with the higher average face value isn't actually more likely to win.

 

I feel like that "wóo" (or its equivalent ofc) could potentially have saved us a lot of trouble in recent arguments.

 

I'm just sitting here snickering about the fact that the thing for "I pulled it out of my ass and I have no idea what I'm talking about" looks like "Woo".

 

yes. yes it would have.

 

I can hardly imagine the honesty required to use the one that basically means "idk lol."

We should have one for "assumed true but the speaker is unable to remember or articulate their source, a request for suspended disbelief."

Eta basically "work with me here" or "just wait til I'm done to ask questions"

 

Hey, the "idk lol" one could also be used as a sarcasm/irony marker!

 

here's the ones that come to my mind:

- known because they can currently perceive it (fair witness approved)
- known because they have previously perceived it (fair witness does not approve)
- known because duh (self-evident sounds like "because it's obvious duh", and i would hesitate to ever use it, but i'm sure it would have use)

- assumed true because speaker trusts source
- assumed true because speaker can't think of an alternative

- assumed false by speaker because speaker distrusts source (howdy, logical fallacy, how are you doing there?)
- assumed false by speaker because speaker doesn't understand it ("no, that can't be right")

- imagined or invented by speaker, hypothetical

- hesitantly raised as possibility despite speaker's lack of certainty, possibly used for social posturing to indicate humility

- confidently raised as certainty despite speaker's total lack of knowledge as to the validity of the matter ("lol, idk", can be used for sarcasm/irony marker, the shitposter's marker)

 

-Stipulated as true for the purposes of discussion?

 

To be honest most of the things I say should come with a [making-shit-up] marker, not because I'm being sarcastic or ironic, but because I'm straight up just making shit up for the sake of making shit up.[speaking-from-experience]

 

I am taking a class on the structure of Kabardian (don't play with ergative-absolutive languages, kiddos, they'll melt your brains) and one feature is an benefactive/adversative marker. In a nutshell, you could leave off the affix /-xwa-/ to say "I spoke of you", while adding it could mean "I praised you [to others]" or "I slandered you" (Why is the morpheme the same in both cases? )

Anyway I think it could be a handy feature, especially when trying to convey intent.

 

Another evidence modality that I would suggest would be something along the lines of "I don't have evidence for you but you probably won't be able to change my mind". Faith falls under this, but so do a lot of other things. "I know it in my heart to be true" and all that jazz.

 

Okay, in an attempt to avoid endlessly proliferating these- can anyone think of something that could not be grammatically shoehorned into one of the following categories? Or, alternatively, any that could reasonably be merged?

1. I have the evidence of my own senses/experiences.
2. I heard it from a reliable source. (Scientific consensus or near-consensus is encompassed by this, but may be important enough to further emphasize. Maybe this plus an extra [science] marker?)
3. Hearsay- I heard it but wouldn't go to bat for its veracity.
4. I thought of this myself and it makes sense to me, so I'm presenting it as a possibility.
5. Arguendo; whether it's actually true or not isn't relevant to the discussion at hand.
6. It happened in a dream or work of fiction, so it's true according to that secondary reality. (Also potentially applied mockingly to someone else's statement, but only if you're okay with being very rude.)
7. This is an article of faith for me, dispute is likely to be pointless.

(Fun though it would be having a "shitpost" affix, I feel like a shitpost-y statement would more likely just go with one of the "firmer" markers, the first or second, despite being clearly not true. As I understand shitposting, anyway. [presented-as-possibility])

Also, what evidence status would be the unmarked default that needs no affix?