Re: Sev Trek-translation Rob Zook Tue, 07 Apr 1998 19:44:23 -0500 At 06:09 PM 4/7/98 -0400, MDriest wrote: < >I have to questions: - what are the unresolved questions in (vowel) >phonology? >how did Rob 'discover' all these words? Well, before you subscribed we discussed this a bit. I proposed that we generate the words using a computer program based the whatever statistical information we could derive from the existing words. The program is ready and we did a trial run based on the material in the ZC and the dictionary that Marketa compiled. The program does not generate the words close enough to what Marketa wished them to sound like. Basically, because my conception of the phonology differed from what there conception of it. Mainly from differences in the way the sounds could be pronounced due to our dialect differences. So we talked with Marketa over the phone, and I taped the way she said the words, and Saul and her are working out a phonolgy from that. I'll let them explain it further if they wish, apart from recording the sounds, I have not had much to do with it. >In reaction to Rob's comments: >Words like 'yikes!' and 'gross!' are definitely pre-Reformation. I would >not suppose additional 'emotional' (or even worse) words were added >after the Reformation of Surak. >The structure of these words should reflect that. They are at least two >thousand years older than modern Vulcan. Possibly. They may or may not have followed the normal linguistic drift of the Vulcan international language which I regard the ZC version as. I keep thinking they would have great value in terms of learning how to control emotions, but I need to think on it more, and work out more details before I wish to discuss exactly how. My conceptions of this still seem too nebulous. >Which brings me to another >question: why is it (almost) not possible to derive whether a word >is a verb or a noun or something else? Possibly because Vulcan does not have the same parts of speech has English and other languages. It has Action/States, Entity Words, Diectic words, Qualifiers and Grammatic Particles. None of which exactly correspond to Verbs, Nouns, Adjectives and Adverbs of English. What's not exactly clear from the Lexicon is what the scope of an Entity is compared to an Action/State. Is ahkh "war" an action-state or an entity? Not sure, we need to establish which is which, I agree. But specifying an action/state word in English terms would seem more confusing. >There is not uniform format to words from the same class. Not sure what you mean by "not uniform format"? Vulcan will still probably have much of the irregularity of a natural language reformation or no. They would probably have to re-write the entire language to remove all irregularities. Nor would it necessirly be desirable to do so. The only thing the reformation would need to do to the language would be to enforce a logical consistant grammar, pronunciation, and a way of resolving semantic ambiguity when necessary. Rob Z.