Re: Extra-planetary translation project Saul Epstein Mon, 11 May 1998 21:35:51 -0500 Quotes from: MDriest Date: Monday, May 11, 1998 5:09 PM >Excerpt from another posting: [originally Rob's] > >>> Also, since we have the form, +<-a> "not-A yes-B", and >>> -a as a vocative suffix, should we not figure out some way >>> of differentiating the two? >> >>That's been nagging me since the collapse of the "long-short" >>vowel distinctions... > >Did they? When and why exactly did Vulcan loose the long-short >vowel distinction? Because no one used them anyway? In a sense, yes. Having actually heard Marketa's pronunciation, my tentative analysis removes the "short" (or "long," depending on your perspective) vowels as separate phonemes from the "long" (or "short") ones. I never have gotten around to sifting through all the data, that's something I should get back to... >Regarding the affirmative suffix, why not use a:? It means 'yes' >already. Ah, yes. Well, if there is an /a:/, it can be used; whereas the reverse is also true. One of the things I had difficulty with, back when I was working on this, was sorting out occurances of [^] from [a]. (In the pronunciations, not the spelling.) If those are separate phonemes, one could be a logical affirmative and the other a syntactic vocative. (Something else I noticed was that <'> literally lengthened the preceding vowel -- if any -- rather than changing its position as <:> was supposed to. Which is why I suggested using -a' as a suffix distinct from -a...) >I would like to stress the need for a symmetrical system. >We should be able to make male nouns from female nouns and >the other way around. Before I can agree with that, I need to know what a female noun is, as opposed to a male noun. If you mean a noun which in a given instance names an entity which also happens to be female, then I don't see that any distinction need be made. If you mean a noun which has a purely grammatical gender, I don't think Vulcan grammar allows for that. (This is only my opinion, though.) That only leaves a very few words for which the actual gender of the entity makes gender-specific terms necessary. >Do we have a male-female distinction yet? I've never seen it >but we clearly need it. > >The simplest way to do it [derive male for ] is to >loose the T'. Somehow that doesn't feel right. Anyone? In Rob's last trial of his word-generator, a form was assigned to a slot in his gloss-list that read "aunt/uncle." This engendered a brief discussion as to whether Vulcans would have separate words for aunt and uncle; if so, whether meant "aunt" or "uncle;" if so, what the word for the other relative might be, in terms of a relationship to the first. The only pattern we have to go on is one neither Rob, Marketa, nor I like. In our base dictionary, is "male life-partner" and is "female life-partner." On the subject, I said: I have two problems with the pattern (X is masculine, X-a is feminine) though. One, it's an extremely typical Indo-Euro-Semitic pattern. (I guess you could call it "Western," although that's misleading.) Two, it mirrors that cultural zone's larger tendency for titles to be masculine with feminine derivatives available, something I'd like to avoid as well. My second concern is the more important, as I don't think we're in any danger of adopting the pattern X-a is feminine where X is masculine. After I waxed complicated with kinship terms, Rob suggested we stick to genderless terms, so actually would end up meaning "parent's sibling" -- aunt *or* uncle. I don't think that addresses your question adequately, but now you have some acquaintance with a related discussion. And I guess the short form of my own position is that we really don't need a generally-applied, morphological, masculine-feminine distinction. I think it makes a lot of sense to have distinct words for mother and father because the role each plays in the reproductive process is of necessity different. I think it makes sense to have distinct words for relatives on one side of one's family compared to those on the other IF the Vulcans who speak this language are more strongly matrilineal than patrilineal or vice versa. It think it is absolutely inevitable that there will be gender distinctions in the terms for those participating in Pon Far and associated rituals. But otherwise..,hmm. That wasn't as short as I expected. >>"Surak ow'phaaper thes'hi thes'tca'; thes'phaadjar thes'hi >> suraketca'." > >I never commented on this in public but it is a wonderful >quote. I of course still do not agree with you on the >spelling but in other aspects, you're absolutely right. Thanks. (And as for the spelling, I think the morphology's out of sync with us too. I'll wait till that's a bit more settled to retranslate it, though.) After re-reading _The_Lost_Years_ yesterday, I have some more thoughts on the role which the woman I'm quoting played in Vulcan history. But if those thoughts ever coalesce and become better related to our community's musings, I'll share them on the general list rather than here. -- from Saul Epstein locus*planetkc,com www,jccc,net/~sepstein "Surak saved us from ourselves; we must save ourselves from the suraks." -- K'dvarin of Urswhl