As ideas pile up in margins of notebooks, on scraps of paper, in random files on a variety of computers, etc, one interesting problem arises. They do not necessarily conform to the other ideas that have gone before them, and therefore either require 1) new projects, 2) reform of old projects, 3) changes in the idea or 4) discarding. Now that I took the time to finally organize the ideas of the last few years - ideas that have been amassing since before I made the current version of Bryatesle, I realize I haven't actually done much of the actual organizatory work needed for my kind of conlanging. Part of the creative work is done, but since the organization of this material also is a creative act, much remains before any of this could be called a conlang. Some of the ideas offer possible glimpses into fascinating structures, though.
These ideas have occured at any time, and been recorded quickly (alas, as you'll soon see, also somewhat unorganizedly) on whatever surface it could be recorded on.

Now, part of a problem I am discovering (again) is that Past Miekko doesn't communicate very well. In part, this is because I write unclearly and fragmentarily, in the illusion that what I mean is obvious.
The italic text is the note itself, the text afterwards the further creative process when pairing it with a language and wondering whether there's conflicts with earlier ideas etc. I am trying to catch the thinking I would do as closely as possible.
Anyways, here's some nuggets of what I've come up with.

coordination - no coordinating particle needed for simple 'and'. constraints: same case (but also abl + dat permitted)
relatively easy to understand, but i left out which conlang this was meant for. My guess is bryatesle, since its case system would permit rather nifty ways of distinguishing noncoordinated from coordinated nouns, but Tatediem and Dairwueh are just as likely.

rcp + weak agentivity -> subj[1](high anim)
obj/subj[2](low anim).sec subj
rcp + strong agenitivity
-> subj.rcp.obj subj.rcp.obj
clearly something to do with reciprocality. the case system used in the glossish things imply bryatesle. I guess this simply means that reciprocal stuff is done in Bryatelse as if it were normal transitivity but with additional markers on the subject and object. What exactly strong and weak agentivity mean in this context was left unspecified, so I guess I have to figure that out?

"between" as in N[1].dat.rcp.obj+N[2].dat.rp.obj
pretty ok way of rendering 'between'
obviously bryatesle, not much more work needed except coming up with the word 'in' in the first place.

only the 3sgII-form of a verb can be fronted; 3sgII can be used with 0-subjects, 3sgI otoh permits subject omission (because it is more clearly bound to a real 3sg subject)
these are likely dairwueh-thingies, since it has two verb forms that I call 3sgI/3sgII, altho' in fact the 3sgII is not purely a third person verb - it's less strictly bound to person, but still most likely to pop up in 3/impersonal situations.

'in +dative (or whichever) being the normal way of that adposition, with the exception of x.nom AUX (presumably along the lines of 'to have', but possibly exceptionally marked) obj.instr in + y.accusative for 'x put/poked/threw/placed/whatever obj in y (with implication of this having been done somewhat violently)'
probably dairwueh, due to the nom-acc alignment, altho' it could also be bryatesle.
also, in +dat is what the previous bryatesle idea says is the normal way, so I guess that helps qualifying this as a more or less set idea!

These were examples of the oldest notes I've been finding - I've since then taken to organizing them somewhat better in a notebook specifically for ideas (altho' not limited to conlanging ideas - ideas for algorithms, stories, compositions, experiments in music theory, outlines for posts in religious debates, rather imprecise calculations of the n:th power of the o:th root of p, etc etc also occur), they've taken to being a bit more organized - I (very) recently took to tagging every conlangy idea with a set of marks, and numbering them.

have a large number of different participles, e.g. 'active participle of future obligation', 'active participle of fulfilled obligation', 'passive participle of likelihood', etc etc. few verbs have a full paradigm, and different verbs tend to have different sets of these participles. [try at some point making an elaboration of this with example systems].
This seems to be an idea that would require a language of its own, or could maybe work in dairwueh (less likely in tatediem, but I'll have a look). Coming up with a rich morphology isn't something I like doing a lot, but I guess this is a good enough idea to warrant it.

related: transitive and causative verbs for intransitives are formed by aux + trns/caus participle (cf how English forms passives)
This idea actually predates the prior idea, but it's just popped up every now and then and I never wrote it down until rather recently.

auxiliary for future tense comes in two flavours - transitive AND volitional intransitive subjects versus nonvolitional intransitive subjects.
pretty basic, really. prolly put it in dairwueh, might put it in tatediem? Tatediem being ergative, this could be kinda cool, but on the other hand why not put it in a nom-acc language?

nominal classes otherwise not marked except by auxes showing agreement through suppletion - often with partially incomplete paradigms, to a lesser degree similar agreement through adpositions and even less so - again mostly through suppletion and lexically determined thingies - for adjectives.
doesn't work for B, T or D, but I have plans for a future, more isolating language. This fits in with that, but on the other hand, it'd be interesting to build a more complex system of classifiers and stuff, but wth, this could be rather neat.

removed because a re-worked version is in the works

Lots of hobby-linguists, especially among fans of auxiliary and logical languages, and also among fans of natural languages seem to think that double negatives are an illogical and ugly thing. Fans of logic seem to think it violates some need for clarity of thought, and that this is because it's fundamentally illogical somehow. On the other hand, people interested in naturalism seem to think it is a proof that language is something completely divorced from logic.

Both of these notions are wrong. Of course, they both stem from the thought that not(not(x)) must equal x, and that if it equals x the system no longer is logical.

Granted, language is not fully logical - often, phrases get meanings that are somewhat divorced from the meaning of the subcomponents; but this is mostly because of how we think - we don't think fully logically all the time, but rather in a fuzzy cloud of ideas and associations and connections, and we want to convey a likeness of this cloud, rather than an exact copy of a chain of very clearly delineated ideas. Most of the quirks of language probably come from how our brains work, and how it matches patterns, and will, for instance, associate a phrase more with a situation than with the meaning of the phrase, or somesuch, after some time. Given some thought, it's obvious that the communication between systems that works on such premises, where the protocols for communication are somewhat fluid, where the information often isn't even completely formalizeable, etc, will be somewhat illogical; yet, it often is surprisingly logical, and without some level of logic in it, it would get very difficult to use at all.

But anyways, back to double negation. It's assumed to be illogical, because in usual e.g. boolean algebra, !!x = x; analogously, in arithmetics, -(-(x)) = x; however, why should we assume that the negating function in a given language is -() or !()? Why not assume it is f(x) = 0x? What will be the value of f(f(f(f(x))))? yes, it's gonna be 0000x, which == 0x == 0. (Let's, for readability and parseability and clarity retain the x there.) Is multiplication by zero illogical because it doesn't alternate between x and 0, the way multiplication by -1 alternates between -x and x? Is this proof that maths is illogical?
No, it's not, but by extension, it's also disproof of one common proof that language is illogical, and I hope everyone would stop claiming that double negatives are illogical and therefore bad, or that they are illogical and therefore proof that language is illogical.

There are benefits to such a negating function as well - no need to keep track of how many negations there are stacked, since as long as there's at least one, the result will be negative; whereas for a system where negations cancel out, you need to keep track of whether you're negative or not at any given point. That is rather taxing.

However, I generally think the search for a totally logical language is misguided and fails to appreciate how our neural network handles information and thoughts.

I came across a post by Radius Solis on the ZBB which touched a topic I've generally not cared to think about, but being in need of some procrastination, I decided to think about it.

Here is the post:
"Hmm... I wonder. Various languages categorize nouns in various ways - by shape, by gender or animacy, by their utility to humans, by whether they are considered to be inherently possessed, and all sorts of other odds and ends. What languages, if any, categorize their verbs in a similar manner? And on what semantic basis? And where is the categorization marked?"

I would consider the Slavic motion verbs vs. other verbs such a distinction; these use the various prefixes (generally derived from prepositions) in a much more consistent way than do other verbs, and they have an added dimension in their aspectual system (altho' many grammars will state that this added distinction is not an aspect, I think it is close enough for this post to say that they have two axes of aspect whereas other verbs just have one).

I wouldn't be surprised, however, if for nouns, the categorization generally is fixed, and for verbs it's more generally derivative? So that, say, the closest analogy to 'by utility for humans', which I'd for no particular reason say is 'beneficialness for humans', the classification gets more tricky for verbs. Right, knives per se are very utilizeable by humans, but cutting ... can go both ways? Of course, a knife can be a bad thing as well in the wrong hand, ... do languages that classify nouns along utility have these classes as statical classes or do they permit changing stuff around?

As for classification along possession, shape, etc. The Slavic verbs of movement sort of go into the 'shape' slot, on some semantic grounds; verbs of movement have a specific sort of shape that other verbs might lack (altho' some verbs that indicate movement, iirc, don't qualify in some Slavlangs, so it's a rather exclusive club of verbs). Possession would make sense for verbs that mark actions that are culturally limited to various classes of people; maybe a verb that can only be performed by one gender would completely lack gender marking? Or have a different morpheme instead of the usual gender marking? Or whatever, but there's possibilities.
(C.f. the Russian verbs for marrying, where the verb for females actually is a prepositional phrase, za muzh / za muzhem, literally 'to behind the man' / 'behind the man', and for males, zhenitsya, 'to wife oneself [someone]' or whatever we'll literally translate it as - that is, to take oneself someone for wife' or such. That's an interesting classificational detail, altho' again, it's not really an entire classificational system, but nevertheless...)

This ties neatly in with one design idea I have for dairwueh, viz. the idea that the case of the object (accusative or some oblique case or partitive, not sure yet) marks whether the action is considered beneficial for the speaker (and listener, depending on in what standing they are) or not. Of course, this is neither derivational, nor a classification. It is rather just extra information added on.

Not a very coherent post, just some stuff that doesn't really add up to anything yet.

Choices choices choices.

Slackware or FreeBSD? Since I got my old HD back I am sitting here with Windows with settings and files that date back 30 months... and dying to get back to Unixdom, but thingy is: I don't want to install (k)Ubuntu, and altho' I *love* Gentoo, this machine isn't exactly that optimal for it - long compilations aren't really fun when the machine can suddenly shut down on you with no warning whatsoever.

FreeBSD might actually be what I try. The lack of a floppy drive on this machine requires some extra magic in order to install Slackware.

Also, I am rereading the beginning of Berakhot in order to find the folios I had in mind for my little Talmud feature.

EDIT: I decided to go with Slackware.

I am not a Talmudic scholar.

I have not read very much of the Talmud, and what I have read has been snippets from translations. Well, some of the snippets correspond to 20-ish folios, so it's not like I have only seen a couple of disjunct quotes - the kind that various antisemites, various shady versions of missionaries and some antireligious people like to quote.

Anyways, the Talmud has a rather strange structure, at least to the reader acquainted with modern scholarly writing, modern prose and generally also western literature.
I have no idea, however, how it compares to moslem philosophical, theological and jurisprudential writings. They may provide a match.

To demonstrate this, one will need to devote some time, and the needed sample text would span several folios of Talmud. I have a few specific parts in mind, one of which also often is used as a so-called proof text that the Talmud is racist (if it is, at least this specific text is not, which raises the question why so many alleged racist proof texts either are not racist or do not even exist in the first place ...)

However.
My harddrive died some weeks ago, and this is a sort of impediment to my progress. Even tho' I like textmode unix (and my livecds with X on them haven't started, whereas my gentoo install cd from the fall of 2004 starts, giving me access to text-only elinks, irssi and ssh, oh, and text-based adventure games.

I just got my hands on a spare HD, so after I have installed it, done some homework assignments (pthreads and hash tables) I will get right to locating those folios of talmud, trying to provide a sensible interpretation, and showing how the logics are consistent and hang together, over a surprising span of topics.

This is a small essay I wrote about a year ago (don't remember exactly) for a certain forum. I've been thinking of having it sent to some christian magazines in Finland, possibly. It needs some editing though, since the metaphorical language I use at some places is a tad too obscure, and some of the events I refer to might need some specifications. Enjoy, and comment.

Confrontations and dialogues between judaism and christianity have almost always been on christian conditions. The medieval disputes were rigged by christian clergy, mere plays were the rabbi had to say his lines which of course ended him up losing. The notable exception, of course, got the victorious rabbi exiled.
Later, the reformation didn't change the basic idea, though some of the implementations were altered. It still was designed so the christians were in a win-win situation. Now, the idea was that jews should be shown compassion and friendship so they would embrace christianity. When they didn't, this was retracted. We see another example in the laws that forbade conversion to Judaism in most of Europe, up to the 19th century - christianity had a monopoly on conversions. The same goes for the 19th and early 20th century ministries to the jews in Europe, especially Germany, whose members - many of whom still lived during the mid of the 20th century - by and large looked the other way while the jews were exterminated, in case they weren't even directly supportive of the final solution. We see it in Sweden, where jews could not hold higher office until the 50's. The idea seems to be that the jew can be afforded human rights as long as he has not yet proven to be beyond grace, stubborn and faithful to his own religion; as long as there is a chance that he might become christian he is a human being. But the lesser the chance shrinks, the less human he is, an enemy of all men, having the Devil as his father, progenity of vipers.

When the jew doesn't accept christ, it is suddenly the christians' obligation to get angered, and somehow punish him. This is the christians setting the rules at its worst: the premise is that since they're right, they've got not only the divine approval of doing so, no, they are even divinely obliged to do so. A quote from one of the christians who frequented this forum might illustrate this opinion: "Is it anger or frustration? Let's say you have a stubborn mule, all the sweet talking you can do will just make him sleepy, and he lies down for a nap! Luther should have refreshed his mind about what scripture says about some hearts. But still, the frustration!". With this in mind, what will happen when the so called "evangelical embrace" wears off? Considering the acrobatics they involve themselves in redefining 'antisemitism' so that Luther is freed of that accusation, the leeway for hating jews and judaism without being antisemitic by christian measures is considerable. Disconcertingly.

Christianity can't stand it when it suddenly loses the initiative, the right to set the rules. Israel ruled in its law that no more evangelizers may enter than there were at the foundation of the state. This is a highly offensive fact to christians, and there are lots of them that travel there without permission to evangelize, but still do so. They get the visas for students, guest workers or journalists; they deceive the jewish state and the jewish people to plant their foreign dogmas on Israeli soil. They are offended when Israel creates odd conditions for evangelism on radio (limiting broadcasts either to the English language only, or Hebrew on a frequency that is only used by the Israeli Arabs otherwise...), but they don't understand it when jews are offended by the masses of misinformation about the jewish religion in christian schools, literature, media and sermons. Only the christians have the right to set the conditions, they won't play a game they haven't designed.

Whenever the christians have been playing by rules set by others, they've either cheated or used the military power of the christian nations so that the rules'd be changed - the Opium War, although not per se a crusade, got a few elements of it, when one of the demands during the negotiations for peace was that China accept way more missionaries. True Christians, of course, did not start that war, so they came away with their hands clean, but like a buzzard, they descended on the corpse and had a feast.

The fact that the rule is, "jews are entitled to human rights as long as they are potential christians", is the true reason why many jews, and rightly so, fear there is antisemitism in nearly all christian kindness.
I fear that the same treatment will be given the moslem communities in strongly christian areas, as well as gipsies and other non-christian minorities. When they settle down and retain their unbelief, they suddenly will no longer be welcome. As for christians setting the rules, the moslems in west have gotten a few experiences already, in the theological disputes between these two religions. A christian is entitled to tell the world that he worships the same God as the jews. The moslem, however, who says that the moslems worship the same deity that the christians do, will provoke hard feelings from the christians. Why is the christian allowed to express his opinion of another religions deity, when the moslem must not? Is it perchance, because christianity is superior? Islam, however, has an insurance policy which judaism lacks - sheer number of adherents.

The jews, however, have another problem coming. Christianity has never managed to have a balanced relation to the jewish religion-people. They are obsessed with jews. For some reason, an observant orthodox jew is worthy of an effort that the christian would not care to give a jew whose parents converted for working in higher office, and who is secular or fully assimilated. Obviously, it is better that a jew be insincerely christian, than sincerely jewish. Is being consciously jewish somehow offensive to the christian? Even in a way that being secular is not? Isn't this a kind of antisemitism - get rid of the culture and the people will get rid of itself? This is exactly what happened to most jewish immigrants to Norway after the holocaust, whereafter the local ministry to the jews, Norska Israelmissionen, decided there was no need to evangelize the new immigrants, since they were already converting in masses. I think they did realize that these jews mostly were converting only in order to assimilate, not because of any heart-felt belief in Christianity, and this is telling: as long as they cease from judaism the objective is achieved. Do they want rid of judaism? Yes. Can one hate a culture, such as judaism, without hating those whose lives are formed by it? No. However, they can love the 'body' of a jew - since in the future, it just might be the container of a christian mind. The jewish mind is by its very nature an offense to the christian.

Until Christianity can balance its view on judaism and the jews, one should not blame the jews for hesitating in accepting kindness from christians. They have learnt it the hard way, throughout history.

Still don't really know why I got myself a blog, but it's at least an easy way of getting oneself a homesite.

I'm more or less celebrating my first entire year on Linux sometime in this month. Not too sure exactly when though. I am planning to take my first steps into the *BSD world before September, and let Linux take over some of the space I've let Windows reside on. So, ~5 gb BSD, 40 gb Linux and 15 gb Windows.

As for the self-imposed deadline of posting the Bryatesle grammar with sample sentences before September, the growth on the vocabulary side is too slow for that to be realistic. Too bad about that. I'll release what I have though. Next release might be scheduled for October.

Recent things I've dealt with is:
- gapping in main clauses
- syntactic properties of quirky case subjects
- case inflection of indefinite pronouns
- adjectival morphology

I've also been thinking about what to do with coordination and nonsubjects, but I haven't come up with anything definite yet, except that either direct objects, or the object that ranks higher can be elided in coordinated constructions, but I am not sure. Also, that would force me to come up with an explicit transitivity marker, something I have preferred not to do, in order to leave the verbal morphology rather light.