Re: Whatever happened to vulcan-linguistics + question Rob Zook Mon, 25 Jan 1999 19:09:10 -0600 Martina Luise Pachali wrote: > I was explaining about Vulcan spirituality to an outsider, giving him the > full lecture about katras and the Hall of Ancient Thought and the > knowledge of The Other, and during this discussion there cropped up the > question whether there is a verb in any of the Vulcan languages (ancient > or otherwise) to describe a perception during mind meld or deep > meditation. My idea was that there would be a simple verb, analogous to > "hear", "see", "taste", "smell" or "feel", which would denote a such a > perception. In a way, Vulcans do have one more sense than humans do, and > as there are verbs for all the other senses, there would also be one to > denote sensory input from the world outside through that particular gate > of perception. Is there, and if so, what is it? Currently no such word exists in the Modern Vulcan Lexicon. Of course, right now we only have a "virtual" Lexicon, part of which exists as Marketa's Vulcan Dictionary on her web page, and the rest of which exists as potential words which haven't had their eigenstates collapsed yet :) We have discussed something simiilar to this. First, keep in mind that words in MV don't have the same word classes as English. It doesn't have any grammatical features that directly correlate to verbs or nouns. A verb and some nouns correspond to words called "action-state" words in MV. While most nouns correspond to words called "entity" words in MV. We're still hashing this part out, but my take is that MV words represent pretty abstract concepts for the most part, and you have to realize the meaning of the word with additional particles and the context of the utterance. Even words like le'matya (which in English would get classed as simple nouns), concern a class of phenomina rather than one specific feline preditor. So I proposed a set of particles on could add to entity and action-state words in order to make them more concrete and applicable to a specific situation when one wants to use them that way. I called these sets words abstractors and instatiators. Abstractors would define what kind of abstraction you where dealing with and consists of the sub-classes of Evidentials, Sensations, and Mentations. Some examples of some Sensation abstractors: -gi = visual -ye = olefactory -to = auditory -qu = tactile -za = gustitory cho- = indirect sensation Some examples of Evidential abstractors: -ku = experienced -fa = remembered -lo = operational -wi = heresay (direct) -ve = heresay (indirect) I'm still working on the Mentation particles. All the Vulcans we've seen (except for Sybok) generally speak in a precise and scientific manner. So in line with that conception of Vulcan speech, rather than say, "I saw a le'matya" which has all sorts of unfortunate epistemological baggage, I think a Vulcan would say , and probably just if speaking in an immediate sense. Literally it would mean "I report my visually remembered le'matya-like phenomina" or the simpler utterance just "my visually remembered le'matya-like phenomina". So, if a vulcan did a mind-meld with someone who had seen a le'matya and he was describing his perceptions during the meld he could say , "I report my indirectly, visually experienced le'matya-like phenomina". I don't think that Vulcans consider telepathy a "sixth sense", but that sensory information recieved telepathically would seem like sense memories but one's you know your senses did not report. An instatiator one uses as a linguistic extensional device. The simplest one is just "this, that" as in , "I report that (not-visable) auditory experienced le'matya-like phenomina". I'm trying to work on a system of mathematical indexing that Vulcan's might use in places humans might consider inappropriate ("child-1 has progressed satisfactorily, while child-2 did not"). Mophological breakdown of above utterances: th'-kircha th-le'matya-gi -fa I -report I -le'matya-[visual]-[remembered] th'-kircha th'-cho -le'matya-gi -ku I -report I -[indirect]-le'matya-[visual]-[experience] th'-kircha u -le'matya-to -ku I -report that[not-visable]-le'matya-[auditory]-[experience] Rob Z.