#animacies

[dedalvs]

How does gender(animate and inanimate) evolve typically, And I saw your video on vowel quality changes but I didn't quite see how certain diphthongs could change overtime, specifically:ai,ei,oi,əi,au,eu, and əu. Thank you so much if you can help me with these!

Usually animate vs. inanimate isn't marked in the way, say, masculine and feminine is (most of the time) in Spanish. Rather, animate and inanimate nouns are treated differently, and those differences end up getting codified.

As a sidetrack, consider mass and count nouns in English. These are definite noun classes of English that you have to understand to use the language well, but they're not marked, and generally not taught. The differences, though, are pronounced:

I'll have a hot dog. 🙂

I'll have hot dog. 😬

I'll have a rice. 😬

I'll have rice. 🙂

You can certainly invent contexts where the 😬 ones work, but they usually involve either (a) jokes, or (b) turning the noun into an opposite type via zero derivation. For example, imagine you're being served at a counter of improbable ice cream flavors, and after surveying them all (typewriter, Nintendo Wii Nunchuck buttons, forgetfulness, fig) you decide you want hot dog flavored ice cream, and so you ask for hot dog [flavored ice cream]. Now imagine a series of keychains with pictures of foods on them, and after looking at them all, you decide you want a rice [keychain]. In other words, the way to make the 😬 ones work is to take a naturally count noun and treat it like a mass noun and vice-versa.

The same logic that applies here applies to the development of animacy, but usually with different parameters. For example, inanimate nouns are more likely to be objects and less likely to be subjects. One very common phenomenon you'll see in language is the following (btw, @staff, if we could add tables to Tumblr, I would be so, so, so very happy):

Animate Subject: Noun

Animate Object: Modified Noun

Inanimate Subject: Noun

Inanimate Object Noun

The reason is the animate noun occurring as an object is a bit of a surprise, but is also common enough that it needs to be demarcated or set apart in some way. An inanimate noun is much less likely to be a subject so language users don't care enough to make an event of it.

But look at that! Suddenly there's an animacy distinction in the language. It's pretty minor, but it can keep going. For example, as in Dothraki, sometimes only animate nouns are allowed an explicit plural. Inanimate nouns aren't conisdered important enough to distinguish. That is, it doesn't matter how much rice, how many rocks, how many shirts there are (if it is, there's numbers), but it is important to know how many sisters, how many cats, how many grandparents, etc. there are without having to ask.

Now imagine that being applied to the above system with subjects and objects treated differently depending on animacy. Suddenly animate and inanimate nouns look very different.

And you can keep going in this fashion. Eventually you'll have some full on noun classes that need to be taught explicitly.

[quotelr]

We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

[hana-loves-bumblebees]

Lidé drazí,

[velaraffricate]

thw world when im working on a conlang again

[happyk44]

Not me thinking "I wonder what the opposite of necromancy is called" and immediately answering myself with "murder" because the opposite of reviving the dead is killing the living

[carriecarriecatgirl]

listen. you gotta stop viewing this dude as a person who does not believe they are human, and instead as a nonhuman entity

[puddox]

thank you internet archive for having a paper avaliable to download that was restricted on the university website i will love you forever

[swordatsunset]

Guyses… I’m beginning to think thsi academia thing is not so fun

[afternoonaetheling]

My understanding of English is that it’s such a fun and weird language because it’s been repeatedly smashed into other languages such as French and Norse due to the Norman Conquest and the Danelaw, and it’s at a point where most of its vocab is from loanwords and it barely has grammatical gender (for the better).

Anyways, the point is that I need a civilization of native Ithkuil speakers to invade England. It would be very cool and fun; I promise.

@bolt76 agrees with me.

[korrasamibottles]

Braiding Sweetgrass is making me insane

[cthulu-in-a-ballgown]

Verb-based languages are played out. Navajo, Lojban, give me a break! Instead, have a noun-based language, where the verb is suffixed to all nouns it acts on.

Wait, I hear you saying. How do you tell the subject from the object? Simple: animacy. The more animate thing always acts on the less animate thing.

But how is animacy decided? Well, ascribing your own motivations to something, anthropomorphizing it, turning it into a puppet to tell your stories. . . that's a pretty good way to get rid of something's inherent animacy. So the most animate things are the least frequently anthropomorphized, and vice versa.

LV1: non-moving non-conscious things

LV2: moving non-conscious things

LV3: moving conscious things.

So it's actually impossible to say something like "I watch TV." Instead, the TV watches you. 1.SG.LV3-watch tv-LV1-watch.

Welcome to Soviet Russia.

[kittoforos]

casual poll, throw your answers in the replies: what is your native language, and are you comfortable using ‘it’ to refer to a dog or cat? what about a specific dog, like idk your friend’s dog, Sparky? what about a child? what about a baby?

[overdramatics]

people really do underestimate plants & nonhuman animals. Where else do you think the ability to see, thing, feel, and communicate. How else could a being survive in a very complex world full of dangers except for being conscious

[velaraffricate]

i had this idea of verbs having multiple meanings depending on how they're conjugated - kind of an active/stative thing, but not in the morphosyntactic alignment way, more in the sense that the active verb would be a sort of intensified or more intentional version of the base stative verb. so one word could mean eat or devour, hear or listen, see or watch, etc. i think that could work, but i don't think i'll implement it into pyanli, i think it's already got enough other verb stuff going on

[xarliclub]

Pixar lo hace de nuevo

Elio es la mejor película original del estudio desde #Coco.

Tiene escenas postcréditos y bloopers como en la época dorada.

xarliclub #movie #movies #cine #cinema #tv #cinemastodon #filmsky🎬 #SuperFriends

[snissel7]

Shoutout to my very straight friend who said that he feels better about using animate it than singular they as a gender neutral pronoun (not in those words)