Conlangery SHORTS #05: Classification

Conlangery SHORTS #05: Classification

Published: Mon, 04 Feb 2013 05:00:19 +0000 \

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Transcript

utterance-id1 [noise] [noise] <unk> about constructed languages and the people who create them i'm william and if that means that is another thing are you sure they want to talk about last vacation and category and language um course classification categories pop up all over but there are some interesting <unk> in different parts of grammar i noticed across different languages over the years and i thought that those coming out with these were sort of interesting so imminent uh skaters are across the bunch of different topics um that i think uh related the sort of deep rabbit whole starting place if you're interested in pursuing the <unk> there is george <unk> women fire and dangerous thing um that slightly provocative title uh is due to the german language of australia that has four genders wanted which encompasses women aren't dangerous things and he uses that as a starting points to think about the many different ways that humans categorizing classify things um <unk> you know has rude things to say about aristotle and i'm not going to get into any of that here in michigan talk very generally i leave it up to you to think about alternate human conceptions of the universe or if you want aliens to have some different psychology of classification and category so there are four main places where the categories nation or classification of known can pop up in a language is grammar first there's the gender system and when i say gender system i mean where you have known that have to agree with pronouns birds and additives um with some special marking and not not simply having he or she is the mechanics of agreement [noise] the next one is measure words or uh numerous classify her sometimes called used in counting things uh sometimes they're used was demonstrative and other circumstances another one which is really interesting and i've only ever seen in the austin asian languages were they have something they call indirect possession um if you google astringent possession you will see things about this uh how that works is um some nail mountains which are you <unk> alien and bleed possessed take uh direct possessive morphology on the mound illegally possessed now the possession marker has to go on some <unk> you can't say um my books you have to say my thinking book and that <unk> no changes depending on what the possessed now is uh it's typically very simple and the austin he's in languages where the classification goes by whether or not something is edible or consumable um and then a small number of languages distinguish uh food from drink and then everything else and then last place where classification can occur is in the electrical system and specifically i mean things like verbs of handling um but also verbs of posture um might classify and then when i talk a little bit more about that my favorite example there's there's always the baskin languages so that's always i'll be talking about <unk> in a bit so obviously all of these things er ultimately related to now we need to classify things less than actions necessarily but the marketing can pop up all over the place and that's what i think makes it interesting so how does a noun end up in particular class the easiest starting point is with semantics so going to gender you might have an inanimate versus intimate system where everything that is a moving living animal is adamant and everything else inanimate um you might have a gender system like into european where are you good masculine feminine possibly neuter and you just classify thing according to their semantics that almost never last and there are things that don't quite make sense samantha <unk> we'll get drawn into a category and i call is category fickle contagion literate nicely and what i mean by that is when things that are related to two items at a particular class might get absorbed into new class so for example if you have a class for food things associated with cooking food my also been overtime get drawn into that class but not all items sometimes purely phonetic considerations sometimes purely grammatical considerations will change the class uh an hour or set the classes down for example all diminishes the ancient greek or neutered <unk> um even when you're talking about people so some of the common things declassified by our biological sex intimacy humans and animals or is everything you know uh plants and trees or plain tore trees might end up in their own class as well um food and drink <unk> very widespread preoccupation with what i call sticks and noodles that is slender rigid objects and slender flexible objects like <unk> we see these things in nature and in our day to day tools all the time so um that classification is very popular in every language chinese is pretty occupied with this now that i was <unk> then the other contracts i like to make the distinction of plates and sheets that is salient lead <unk> things or their religion or flexible uh fairly common classification is things in a mass like mud or uh flower um things in a container on my end up in their own class as well and there are other ways that these classes can be made more refined can be expanded can be collapsed i'm not going to go into all of that if you do a little research on on classes you can find all sorts of things [noise] and i have some links to documents with different kinds of classification systems but you might find interesting in any given language you're classification might be very simple like a two way intimate versus <unk> or it might be very very complex there dozens and dozens of classify words in the various chinese languages in general the southern languages have more of them in the northern have fewer and that opens up another way to very or languages um dialect is to have different kinds of classify ours used in different places either utterly different words which happens in the chinese situation or had one language make many more distinctions in some neighbor languages it's kinda fun there is sort of a catchall class a fire in newark less fire in mandarin which is good um but that's in the standard dialect all over the different dialects and different sort of related languages all seem to like to pick their own general classify are such a great big mess that's another great dialect till uh another thing that you can use to distinguish by dialect another thing that you might have an uh here i'm falling on the ah basking language cult duck cash which is smoking in the pacific northwest <unk> it has eight separate system of classification [noise] so you have a five way system for numerals classify or you have a two way system for possession you have <unk> i'm not going to talking about there is a three way category distinction for demonstrative a three way system for uh agent announce drive from from salt lake runner from running or um sleeper from sleep whatever there is a four way distinction for relative visors there's five category system for asking how many of something whereas in chinese you use the same new world class fire system for how many <unk> use for normal numerals demonstrative and then finally you have the normal at the baskin system which i'll talk a little bit more shortly in <unk> in addition to a uh five four five way distinction of these other classes so you can get completely out of control with this if you want you don't have to but there are many opportunities for subtlety and <unk> and more um trucks and your grammar if you go in for that [noise] so the ah asking verb system has these classical story verbs where <unk> uh verbs rather of handling of propelling that is a checking things or of describing objects and free flight by between falling and things like that make and eleven way distinction <unk> um based on the non type so one of the classes for solid round objects like bottles and balls and boxes and so forth uh there's one for burdens or packs like backpack settled stuff like that um one for they called non compact matter so a clip of graft fog they have one oh four slender flexible object and i was talking about this before socks wrote that sort of stuff and then another <unk> object arrows sauce bracelets that sort of stuff not a whole has a flat flexible object classes because a class of a toy river for blankets and coach but it does not have one for things like played specifically there is my favorite class one for mushy matter which in that we can be the article fitness for ice cream mud and slept overcome people [noise] um and that's not um someone being funny with the article they're uh they're not <unk> sometimes can have fun playing joke spy picking different words for these classic authority verbs choice can be uh an opportunity for humor um there are two <unk> objects which i don't understand there is one that's very interesting to me for things and open container so glass of milk a student food food handful flower so and so forth i mean then finally there is the classroom or even a report and an object so people um germs adult interesting they fall into the system the simulate <unk> uh living object auto falls into that so that's a pretty rich system a lot of the other asking languages are typically less complex than up 'cause now who does everything turns that died two lebanon and in the lake i had to the doctor and system way almost near the end they talking about the verbs um to say he will give me something and there's a big long list um so it has the normal and the normal for way distinction fan for the numerals system the demonstrative as well the numerals system um in addition to long rigid objects body contact him an open container that sort of stuff so i think that it i have not talked much about the bad two languages there another uh classic system uh very rich not in class and most of the language is a few of lost them um i have a paper though that give some historical stuff um especially table for uh which is way at the end of the paper after the references talks about what they thought the pro band too um system looked like in the simplest semantic breakdown so that looks like a really interesting starting point if you want to play with this yourself too so there it is classification and language go forth and make a classical story like [noise] thank you for listening to <unk> you could find our our cars ensure knows that <unk> dot com you can send questions comments poor topic or featured language suggestions to con lying or e. i. g. mailbox off [noise] to submit a con langhorn outlying greedy for the top of the show see our contributes page for detail [noise] web space for calm libraries provided by the language creation society and our team music is by no device [noise] [noise] [noise] [noise]

Tags

  1. Conlangery Podcast
  2. Podcast
  3. classification
  4. conlang
  5. gender
  6. language
  7. linguistics
  8. noun class

Conlangery Podcast/Conlangery SHORTS 05 Classification (last edited 2017-09-08 23:10:23 by TranscriBot)