Kintsugi Conlang Creation

Being a fantasy fiction nerd, I have to wonder if using both [1] and [5] would make sense for describing prophetic dreams.

And I would probably use [7] for my shitposting. To say don't bother arguing, this is so true man you don't even know.

 

That sounds like a reasonable list to hardcode in. Particular sources/types of sources would have their own markers anyway.
I feel like the most neutral is 4, but that doesn't sound like it would be conducive to conversation. Maybe a variation on 3 is a decent default? Not so much the "I heard this" but "I'm going to say this but maybe don't quote me on it." So no source given at all, and level of confidence is not 100%.

 

@Exohedron That makes sense. Unmarked means "don't quote me on this", specifying 3 is heard-it-from-someone-else?

 

Yeah. I think the evidence markers are explicitly marking sources for those who care to make it clear, and so the lack of one should be taken as not specifying the source/allowing the listener to make assumptions about the source. In contrast 3 is specifically things like gossip or hearsay, from external, unnamed sources that aren't necessarily Authorities.
Perhaps unmarked doesn't even necessarily need to denote "don't quote me on this", but that should probably be its general understanding, that the speaker doesn't necessarily want to be cross-examined, they just want to say a thing.

 

@Re Allyssa Yeah I am pretty confused about that too, but they seem to make it work.

 

Hmm. Where would you put "the brainweasels keep telling me this, pls help"?

 

My first thought is.. [7] (article of faith, dispute likely to be pointless) with some kind of negative modifier. So it turns into "I keep thinking this whether I want to or not."

eta. Hmm. Am I leaning to 7 too quickly for things? It just seems like a useful, versatile sort of meaning. "I think this regardless of the ability to explain it or justify it, attempts to use reason or contradictions on this claim will not succeed."

 

That sound about right. Perhaps article of faith isn't the right term, but that's where brainweasels should go, what with the "rational dispute won't make them go away" thing.

 

That's definitely one way to do it, but I find automatically filing them into "faith" a bit odd - if I have enough directly-contradicting evidence on my end, I can actually get mine to shut up for a little while. Mind you, this took me years of work - and I've needed meds to make it stick - but I'd hesitate to call it impossible.

 

This splits into two issues for me.
The first is that none of the categories are absolutes, so there should always be some wiggle room; that's why all of my descriptions of the various categories are littered with qualifiers. Only the Sith deal in absolutes. And anyway faith is generally far from solid, at least according to the faithful whom I've talked to; it may not be susceptible to r/atheism, but it can waver and adapt and fail.
The second is that brainweird I think is a slightly different issue from evidentiality, in that you don't necessarily take the brainweird as Truth. It's just some asshole backseat driver saying things that sometimes end up coming out of your mouth, but on the conscious level you don't always believe what the brainweird is saying. I guess in that sense you could treat it as a case of [2], a reliable source, that you know isn't actually that reliable. Perhaps not "reliable source" but more "trusted source", who may not be trustworthy.
Anyway, I think with some rewording it would still fall mainly into [7]: [I have no evidence but convincing me otherwise would be difficult]. Not as an absolute, but as a context for the listener to decide whether it's worth arguing about.

 

^This.

Also, bear in mind contextual cues. We don't want to rely too heavily on them since clarity is important, but I think the statement being something on the lines of the nature of God, the Universe, or basic principles of ethics would be a pretty good cue that this is faith 7, while it being something like "I'm an unemployable fuckup" or being accompanied by a request to be talked out of or distracted from it would be obvious brainweasel 7.

It still leaves potential for ambiguity in some cases, true, but there's always the tried and true "further explaining what you actually meant." Also there's sometimes ambiguity in whether it is in fact just the brainweasels talking.

 

Basically we're getting "the voice that only I can hear is telling me to burn things" and you have to clarify if that's the voice of God or the voice of chemical imbalance. Or both!

 

Is [3] the setting for "this is what I'm getting from what you just said but it seems ridiculous and/or pisses me off, so please clarify if that's not actually what you meant"?

 

Yeah, that sounds right to me. A sense of "well, this is what you say, but I can't claim to agree with it, let alone give evidence for it."

 

This brings up the issue that in addition to the evidential, how-you-know-things markers, we should probably also have markers for how much you believe them. Fully, mostly, doubtfully, and pants-on-fire, or some similar spectrum. [hearsay][doubt] would be what @OnnaStik is asking about, whereas [hearsay][firm-belief] would be tumblr's usual state. [unsupported-but-immovable][doubt] would be known, combatable brainweasels, I think, in the sense of no external evidence, no real ability for the listener to make a difference, but the speaker doesn't really believe what the brainweasels are saying.
Perhaps [7] shouldn't be "faith" per se but rather "not easily subject to evidence".

Also to keep in mind: as with all speech acts, these markers are utilized based on what the speaker wants to present to the listener, not the speaker's actual position on anything. So tumblr's usual presentation is [trusted authority][firm belief] even though the actual situation is [hearsay][firm belief], or [][pants-on-fire] in the case of instigating trolls. Or, if you're more generous than I am, [hearsay][pants-on-fire][repeat-anyway-for-fear-of-retribution].

 

Diverting from the topic of knowing stuff, let's talk about declension. Or, as non-Latin classes sometimes call it, case. Are we going to mark subject, object, etc? We've got an agglutinating language, we could easily toss in some markers for stuff.
My experience with declension comes mostly from Latin class, so the model preloaded for me is nominative (subject), genitive (possessive), dative (to/for), accusative (object) and ablative (misc). We probably want a different categorization.
Also I'm assuming that we're not going with ergative/absolutive, unless we're going with ergative/absolutive. Are we going with ergative/absolutive? Because I would totally fuck that up on a regular basis.
Anyway, subject is probably useful, as is object. Most verbs take between one and three nouns as arguments, with the exact usage depending on the verb in question, so I'd suggest at least a case that indicates "this goes in the third slot". Example: "X gives Y to Z", or somewhat less clearly, "X gives Z Y". "I give you a hamburger." "I[nominative] give you[dative] a hamburger[accusative]", in the model where the thing being acted on is the hamburger.*

I wouldn't mind the genitive/possessive being a prepositional phrase, as I am against the proliferation of cases. "Of" is a perfectly sensible preposition and would avoid a lot of the prounoun spelling issues that English has. The ablative as a dumping ground for preposition use also doesn't strike me as the best design possible. I wouldn't mind there being a case just for preposition usage, though, if it were the only case for preposition usage; let the accusative/object case just act as the object.
I do like the existence of the vocative, though. "It's time to eat, grandpa" and all that.

*Note that other people might disagree about the valence of give, but at least as far as I can tell it requires three nouns to form a sensible statement with the exception of when the accusative is "fucks" or occasionally "a rat's ass", in which case no dative seems to be necessary. Lojban has a system for assigning nouns to verb arguments, but it appears rather messy and irregular, seemingly unaware that look-up tables are no substitute for rules.

 

I apparently have some Thoughts about language creation, most of which are irrelevant to the conlang I'm working on because it uses a rather awful recursive clause system instead of anything sensible like prepositions or adjectives and half the time the speaker is just setting up pointers and parentheses.

Anyway, singular and plural. No real opinion on my end, except that I would like that if there are plurals there are distinctions between [plural-lots] and [plural-a-few]. Also if we do have plurals then we get to talk about the issue of mass-nouns versus count-nouns, which can either be serious or insipid and if it occurs I will be firmly dragging the conversation toward the latter.

Another feature that some languages have and that I wish English had: more gradations on the proximal-distal spectrum, this versus that. There's yonder but you sound like a Western movie when you use it, at least in the part of the US that I'm from. Many languages have more possibilities and I think it would be a useful feature to have more semantic value in the demonstrative pronouns.

 

Ergative/absolutive is a cruel multigenerational joke as far as I am concerned.

Personally I'd skip the dative before the genitive, if only because I find the lengthy chains of "de's"that you sometimes wind up with in French to be inelegant. (Effectively, things like "the brother of the owner of the friend of the dog.") I've never seen a chain of "pour's".

I also find declension is more necessary in languages without a fixed word order, which also brings up the question of how rigid sentence structure would be. German uses case markers in many cases (ha), so you can write "the(Subject) man bit the(object) dog" or "the(object) dog bit the(subject) man" and still know who was bitten. English, on the other hand, either structures declaratives in an SVO order or uses the passive, so case is largely superfluous.

On the subject of word order, French is a little odd in that you can say "I gave Paul a hamburger", but if you were to use him instead of Paul, you say "I him gave a hamburger". I think it would be more sensible to have pronouns behave the same way as nouns, but sensible and fun are not always the same thing.

(I can think of some other exceptions to the valence of give, such as "I give up" and "I regret that I have but one life to give", but they are admittedly exceptions.)

 

We're decoupling pronouns from gender, right?