Kintsugi Conlang Creation

good god, yes. no gender pronoun bullshit. get that the hell away from us.

 

I think that "give up" is different verb than "give". The second one, "I regret that I have but one life to give" sounds incomplete to me,but I suppose is a valid sentence so that would be an example of give taking only a subject and an object.

In terms of the strings of genitives, that sounds more like an issue with French than an issue with prepositions. "I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate" doesn't occur in English except on purpose.

Also yes, we are decoupling pronouns from (nonlinguistic) gender. Save all of us a lot of headaches.

 

Speaking of pronouns, most important question: should first person plural include the listener? Who is "we"?

 

Oooooh. Could we have a few different first person plurals?
"We" as in "me and mine," a plural that does not include the listener...
"We" as in "you and I," referring only to the speaker and the listener(s), and
"We" as in "you, me, and the rest of us" referring to a group of the speaker, the listener, and an unspecified number of others?

 

@Re Allyssa I'm not familiar with that term, but I admittedly spent more time in syntax class drawing tree diagrams than paying attention to terminology. Since I've never heard "give a fuck/a rat's ass/a damn" unless it was preceded by "[pronoun] don't", would you consider "don't give" to be a phrasal verb as well?

@Exohedron I suppose it is French-specific (and emphasized by the fact that there are a lot of nouns that contain "de", like fruit de mer or pomme de terre). Even without the long strings, though, I just like the flow of "My mom's cat" better than "The cat of my mother." ETA: Upon reflection, this might be because when I read "The cat of my mother caught several mice", the "of my mother" bit sort of separates the subject and verb. It's less of an interruption to me if it comes at the end of the sentence, as in "I pet the cat of my mother."

 

Yeah, perhaps the idea of a "first person plural" is the wrong way to think about it.
So just braindumping here:
One issue is that there could be a distinction between a plural speaker and a speaker+third parties. In particular, we have
[1s], [2s], [3s], [1p], [2p], [3p] where [1p] and [2p] are respectively multiple speakers and multiple listeners, but no third parties involved.
Then we have [1 + 2], which might make distinctions based on how many speakers and listeners. Similarly there's [1 + 3], [2 + 3] and [1 + 2 + 3].
This is of course a lot of possibilities: 26 of them, which is too many, one might argue, unless there's a strong system in place and the ability to not distinguish when it's not important (or the speaker is feeling lazy).
So maybe not automatically distinguishing between singular and plural, and just by person? Then we just have seven, which is much more manageable. Then singular and plural could be an optional marker.

 

@budgie "the cat of the mother of me". Anyway, is it a word-order issue or a preposition issue? Since we're building an agglutinating language we could just have the possessive preposition tack on to the end of the word the way that 's is, only have it actually treated as a preposition and not as a distinct case.

 

Could you elaborate a little more what distinguishing by person would look like?

 

Heh, I was stuck thinking in French, where pronouns can indicate possession but nouns don't. But yeah, it's really a word-order thing to me, upon reflection.

 

[1] I am going to the bank
[2] You are going to the bank
[3] He is going to the bank
[1 + 2] You and I are going to the bank
[1 + 3] He and I are going to the bank
[2 + 3] You and he are going to the bank
[1 + 2 + 3] You and he and I are going to the bank
In English, [1 + 2], [1 + 3] and [1 + 2 + 3] would all be "we" because English is awful, while [2] and [2 + 3] are both pronounced "you" because modern English is awful. We say that [1 + 2], [1 + 3], [2 + 3] and [1 + 2 + 3] are "plural" because there's more than one entity involved, but we don't say how many of each type.
[1s + 3s] He and I are going to the bank
[1s + 3p] They and I are going to the bank
[1p+ 3s] He and we are going to the bank
[1p + 3p] They and we are going to the bank
Note: [1s + 3s] sounds okay to me, [1s + 3p] and [1p + 3p] sound wrong, and [1p + 3s] sounds like a Dr. Seuss book.

I am suggesting that we use the first list of possibilities as the base, where I refers to the speakers (regardless of number), you to the listeners (regardless of number), and he to anyone else who might be relevant (regardless of number).

 

(Are we doing a t/v distinction here?)

I would personally be inclined to condense it down like this:

[1 + 2s] "Listener and speaker are going to the bank."
[1 + 2p] "Listeners and speaker are going to the bank."
[1 + 3(s/p)] "Speaker and at least one other person are going to the bank, but listener(s) is/are not."
[1 + 2s + 3(p/s)] "Speaker, listener, and at least one other person are going to the bank."
[1 + 2p + 3(p/s)] "Speaker, listeners, and at least one other person are going to the bank."
[2 + 3(p/s)] "Listener and at least one other person are going to the bank."

I wouldn't differentiate between "one other person" and "more than one other person", unless this conlang is going to have a dual, in which case it'd make sense (especially if verbs are going to agree with number in terms of single/dual/plural).

 

Is there a reason for distinguishing number of listeners when 1 is present and not for the last case? Also does the model allow for multiple speakers?

 

I just forgot to add the number of listeners for the listener/1 other one.

As to whether or not multiple speakers are allowed, you could definitely make it so. Generally aside from formal things I haven't seen many occasions where multiple people are saying the same thing at once; it's usually a matter of one person speaking on behalf of a group, which is why I'd consider it [1+3] or [1+2+3], but that's just my inclination.

 

So I guess my next question is why the number of listeners seems to yield distinct situations but number of other persons does not.

I ask about multiple speakers not because I would use it ever but that I prefer systems where it's clear what to do even in the situations that you'll never use, which is why I separated out number from person, so that formation of the less popular scenarios is possible without extra computation. Of course, this is from someone who never manages to worry about Huffman coding, so grains of salt to be taken.

 

I was thinking in terms of number agreement for conjugation (are we doing that?); didn't think it all the way through, though, since the only situation in which it would matter is 2s vs 2p, or, if we're doing duals, [1+2s] vs [1+2p].

 

Our system is *both* agglutinative and pictoral. I'm tempted to say that you link subject-verb-object with arrows and have done with it.

I'd be tempted to use Circular Gallifreyan as a design inspiration, but the problem is that CG totally changes meaning when you see it in a mirror. Ideally, it should be obvious if you're reading something written mirrorways, especially since Kintsugi In Space apparently has a mirror-based communication network.

I was almost going to suggest a language that's totally mirror-symmetrical, but that seems like it'd be way too much work - half of every glyph would be redundant, so eventually people would probably just write the first half, and then we've degenerated to the non-symmetrical case again.

 

Yeah, let's take advantage of as much of the graphical space as we can.
Query regarding the pictorial nature of the language: is this meant to be spoken at all? Or is it all just written? Is there/should there be a transliteration possible?