Lojban Attiudinals

Dipping once more into “Mindhacker” by Ron Hale Evens revealed an interesting section on Lojban “attitudinals”, effectively spoken or written emoticons. Probably a system as used in Lojban will not be in Diinlang. Simple words for concepts such as permission and obligation will obviously prove useful for constructing the modal verbs for Diinlang. The Lojban words resemble paired letters, although the dot and apostrophe represent a glottal stop and a “h” sound. By employing a few simple rules the attitidinals are easily converted into Diinlang words, many of them proving to be very onomatopoeic!

“yah” for “belief” clashes as a homophone of “ya” for “yes” and I do not like “yu” for “love”. “Togetherness” will more likely be the abstract noun derivation of “kom” (with) and hence “komeso”.

Note that not shown below are the neutral and negative variants of the attitudinals which may prove productive for Diinlang words once how to handle opposites and related issues is settled.
 

.ai “eye” Intent iy

.au “ow” Desire oh
 

.a’a “AH-ha” Attentive aha

.a’e “AH-heh” Alertness ahey

.a’i “AH-hee” Effort ahii

.a’o “AH-ho” Hope aho(h)

.a’u “AH-hoo” Interest ahu

.ei “ey” Obligation ey

.e’a “EH-ha” Granting/ Permission eha

.e’e “EH-heh” Competence ehey

.e’i “EH-hee” Constraint ehii

.e’o “EH-ho” Request eho(h)

.e’u “EH-hoo” Suggestion ehu

.ia “ya” Belief yah!!!??

.ie “yeh” Agreement yey

.ii “yee” Fear yii/ ii

.io “yo” Respect yo(h)

.iu “yoo” Love yu ???

.i’a “EE-ha” Acceptance iiha

.i’e “EE-heh” Approval iihey

.i’i “EE-hee” Togetherness iihii (komeso)

.i’o “EE-ho” Appreciation iiho(h)

.i’u “EE-hoo” Familiarity iihu

.oi “oy” Complaint oy

.o’a “OH-ha” Pride ohha

.o’i “OH-hee” Caution ohhii

.o’e “OH-heh” Closeness ohhey

.o’o “OH-ho” Patience ohho(h)

.o’u “OH-hoo” Relaxation ohhu

.ua “wa” Discovery wa

.ue “weh” Surprise wey

.ui “wee” Happiness wii

.uo “wo” Completion wo(h)

.uu “woo” Pity/ sympathy wu

.u’a “OO-ha” Gain uuha

.u’e “OO-heh” Wonder uuhey

.u’i “OO-hee” Amusement uuhii

.u’o “OO-ho” Courage uuho(h)

.u’u “OO-hoo” Repentance uuhu

Speedword Inspired Correlatives

My first ever post on this blog was inspired by Dutton Speedwords. Today’s post draws on a evolution of the system taken from this page. This, in turn, is from the book Mindhacker, which acknowledges that this table is inspired by a system used in Esperanto. Other IALs use a similar system, including Glosa. The Glosa table has a number of additional categories that are worth looking at.

Below is the system given on the technical geekery page, to which I have added some suggested Diinlang words. Some of these are words used in previous posts, some are just “placeholders”. Nothing about Diinlang is yet set in stone!

First parts:

• q- what/which; ke
• c- this; si/ vang
• u- some; je
• j- every; pan
• n- no; no/ non
• jj- any; enje/ eje
• k- that;   su/ ving

Second parts:

• -p place; pa/ loh
• -m thing; mu
• -d way; du/ li
• -k kind; ka/ kin
• -y reason; ju
• -z time; zu/ tem
• -r one (person); ze/ jhen/ ore
• -t amount; morl/ metri

I have seen it suggested that “any” is an more indefinite version of “some”. Following this logic and the system proposed here, “any” becomes “eje” rather than “enje”.

There is more than one candidate for the word “way” in Diinlang. “-li” is used to make adverbs meaining “in the manner of” and has been used for constuctions such as “ke li” for “what way? (how?)” and “per li” for “ because”. “du” from “do” does seem logical, however.

Diinlang offers a number of valid alternatives for the English use of “one” including the pronoun “ze” or the word for person, “jhen”. “ore” is derived from the agent noun suffix so could possibly be applied to something that is not a person, as can the inanimate pronoun “it”. Some of these words can be gendered with “-o” or “-a” endings.

Turkish Verb Structure.

Turkish provides some interesting inspiration as to how the verb system of Diinlang might be developed. Turkish is an agglutinative language so what would be a verb phrase in many languages is represented by a single Turkish word composed of multiple suffixes. These suffixes occur in a specific order so a word can easily be deconstructed by someone familiar with the system. For a natlang, Turkish is relatively regular and consistent system. In “The Logic of Turkish” the author categorizes verbs as being as stem followed by vocal, dialectical, temporal (or temporal-modal) and personal suffixes. Note that a Turkish verb seems to be constructed backwards compared to English, the pronoun coming at the end.

The vocal suffixes allow a Turkish verb to produce a family of related verbs. The four classes of vocal endings are reflexive, reciprocal, causative and passive. When more than one vocal ending is applied to a verb stem they will be applied in that order. For example, a reflexive suffix is placed before the passive. Diinlang already uses the prefix “ge-”, effectively creating a related passive form of another verb. The pronoun “se” is used for “self” and I have considered a system where this can be placed between the subject pronoun and verb rather than after the verb. This is just a small step from using “se” as a prefix to create reflexive verbs. The suffixes discussed here produce several classes of verb from a common root.

https://cromwell-intl.com/turkish/turkish-verbs.pdf

https://cromwell-intl.com/turkish/verbs.html

The dialectical suffixes negate a verb or show potential or impotential. The latter is equivalent of the English verbs “can/ be able”. In Diinlang this is the verb/ auxiliary verb “zhan”.

After the dialectical suffixes we have what in English would be tense, mood and aspect. Tense and aspect in Diinlang are already well developed. Progressive and perfect aspect uses the prefixes “is-” and “ha-” which can be combined as “isha-” as needed. Tense is indicated by the adverbs “gon” and “wen” or the past suffix “-(i)d”. A habitual aspect may also be added.

Verbal moods are something that has not yet had much work in Diinlang. Currently we have the word “zou” which may be used for subjunctive and/or conditional statements. The categories that Turkish uses do prove helpful. As well as simple, we also see subjunctive, conditional, optative and necessitative moods used. Some of these moods can be used in more than one tense. It is likely in Diinlang words that give a grammatical mood will be placed after tense adverbs but before dialectical words. For example “zou zhan VERB” rather than “zhan zou VERB”.

Like Turkish, modifiers for verbs should have a set order. This may be tense, mood, dialectical and aspect (TMDA), which is reverse alphabetical order in English.

Past and Perfect.

Currently in Diinlang the tense of a verb is marked by proceeding it with the words “gon” for future and “wen” for past. Perfect aspect is marked by preceding the verb with “dun”, which is placed after a tense marker if present. Continuous/ Progressive aspect is indicated by the prefix “is-” being added to the verb itself. A similar system is used by a number of other conlangs and in many creole languages.

In many conlangs such markers are called “particles” but it may be more accurate to consider them as adverbs.

My recent attempt at novella writing made me look deeper into the subject of tense. Some novels are written in present tense but the majority are written in past tense, usually simple past, past perfect and past progressive.

Some creoles, such as Hawaiian, have a considerable body of printed material but constantly having to write “wen” (or some other tense marker or auxiliary verb) in each sentence seems inefficient. A good case can be made for having a more compact indicator of a past tense.

Jespersen reached a similar conclusion and selected the suffix “-d” for this purpose. I cannot fault his logic in this choice so propose that past tense in Diinlang can be marked with the suffix “-d”. Most verbs in Diinlang end in “-m”, “-n”, “-ng” or a vowel, so this is phonically compatible. In the rare cases where a word already ends in “d” then “-id” will be used. A word ending in “t” may take either the “-d” or “-id” suffix, as the writer prefers. Pronounciation will be much the same. This system is used in parallel with the use of “wen” as an adverb. In Diinlang one can write the past tense as:

“wen VERB”, “VERBd” or “wen VERBd”, although the last is, of course, somewhat redundant.

The “duoverbs” discussed elsewhere use “-t” for their past form. For the moment I will keep this variation, it being more desirable for the past of “riy” (write) to be “riyt” rather than “riyd”. Logically it might be better to use “-t” for all past tense marking.

The progressive aspect of a verb is created using “is-” as a prefix. A past progressive verb may therefore be written as “wen isVERB” or “isVERBd”. It seems logical to drop “dun” as an adverb and revert to the earlier system of having perfect aspect marked with a prefix. Rather than “dun-” I propose to emulate Jespersen by using “ha”, but as the prefix “ha-” rather than as an auxiliary. The perfect progressive can therefore be formed as “isha-”, the perfect passive as “hage-” and the perfect progressive passive as “ishage-”.

Present perfect is “haVERB”.

Past perfect is “wen haVERB” or “haVERBd”

This system also gives us a single word form that can be used as an active past particple.