tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45601989850861714602024-03-27T16:54:30.362-07:00miniatureconlangsA blog about imaginary typology in imaginary languages.Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.comBlogger905125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-78304266641277719522024-03-20T08:47:00.000-07:002024-03-20T10:11:47.296-07:00Detail #439: Quasi-parts of speech and quasi-constituents and the Locus of the Abessive<p style="text-align: justify;">Different languages are analyzed with different sets of parts of speech and constituents/parts of sentences. To some extent these boil down to grammatical traditions, but to a great extent they also boil down to actual grammatical phenomena. However, if we were to compare, say, Swedish and English, the differences are largely superficial: both descriptive traditions work with barely any modifications to describe either language. A trivial example: Swedish grammar tradition has "subjunctions", which in the English tradition are subsumed under "conjunctions". Subjunctions are words that introduce subclauses, i.e. subordinating conjunctions. A description of English would be marginally different if this concept was introduced.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">In some languages, however, distinguishing adjectives from nouns - or adjectives from verbs in some other languages - makes way less sense. Applying such a distinction would be looking at it through a decidedly foreign lens. Sometimes, which part of speech a word belongs to is hard to pinpoint: a word may be both a verb and an adverb, or a noun and an adverb, or a noun and an adjective, etc.<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">A thing that interests me, however, are a variety of ways in which constituents and parts of speech may behave in ways that justify considering them some kind of quasi-PoS or quasi-constituent, constituents that show some kind of uniformity, but cut across other constituents.<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">One such example I have been sketching over recent months is what I chose to call "the locus of the abessive". This <i>locus </i>is marked by a certain case (which however also is used for some other constituents), but can appear as subjects, objects, indirect objects, possessors, possessums and other constituents. The abessive itself could also be considered a type of quasi-constituent.</p><p>The syntax of this entity gets complicated. First of all, the locus can be any of the following:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>topic <br /></li><li>subject: <i><b>I</b></i> miss her<br /></li><li>object: he deprived <b><i>them</i></b> of shelter<br /></li><li>indirect object: they gave <b><i>him</i></b> no food</li><li>location: there is no joy in <b><i>Aylesbury</i></b></li><li>possessor: the <b><i>orphan</i></b>'s mom</li><li>possessum: the man's <i><b>widow</b></i></li><li>infinitives of various functions: there's no reason to <i><b>hate</b></i> him<i><b> </b></i></li></ul><div style="text-align: justify;">What if the locus of the abessive could be coordinated over gaps, even when it isn't the same role? 'They deprived him of shelter and gave no food' would then have 'him' as the indirect object of 'gave'. This could get really tricky once possessors and possessums and infinitives start getting involved.<br /></div><div><div><br /><i><b> <br /></b></i><div><br /><b><i><br /></i></b></div></div></div>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-25914881176906687692024-03-19T13:14:00.000-07:002024-03-19T13:14:16.959-07:00About Bryatesle and its relatives<p><b>About Bryatesle and its relatives<br /></b></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Bryatesle is a dialect continuum encompassing about 30 million native speakers. It is the lingua franca of about 40 million additional speakers, has a rich literature - fictional, scientific, philosophic, religious and instructional, in both poetic and prose forms - liturgies in multiple religions, songs, humor, word games, and a variety of other linguistic devices. Dialectal differences are sufficient that several ends of the dialect continuum are not mutually intelligible, but the standard forms of the language provide common ground for scholars, businessmen, clergymen, government officials and regular people.</p><p><b>Short history</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;">The pre-historic connections between Bryatesle and its kin languages indicate a rather sudden expansion from the Dairwueh-Bryatesle urheimat about 3800 years before the present year (bpy), after a previous split from Sargalk.<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Bryatesle tribes started forming city states sometimes roughly 1800 bpy, at which time also writing systems were adopted from Tatediem cultures to the south. Maritime and fluvial trade networks led to about 40 city states forming around the sea of Sadgal and the sea of Gudnyt as well as the great lake Pajik over the next 800 years. Expansion both east- and northwards included assimilation of some Cwarminoid and Tatediem populations. Westwards, Dairwueh tribes partially resisted Bryatesle expansion, partially stood as equal partners in trade and industry, partially stood in political unity, partially expanded onto Bryatesle areas. Several westwards city states in fact were bilingual, and conflicts were not necessarily as much <i>between Dairwueh and Bryatesle</i>, but rather <i>between distinct alliances of dairwobryatesle states</i>.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">About 1200 years ago, a stronger political unity over the dairwobryatesle world emerged, with Ykred emerging as a capital of sorts. This unity lasted 300 years, but after 200 years of dissolution and strife, the last 700 years have seen a somewhat less centralized, but still united dairwobryatesle world, now under the domination of the city-state Sţesar. Although some consolidation of the various standard Bryatesle dialects has occurred due to improved communications, significant differences persist.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Geoculturopolitically, there are occasional confrontations with the Ćwarmin civilization to the east. In the far east, the Ŋ<span class="BxUVEf ILfuVd" lang="en"><span class="hgKElc"><span><span>ʒädär have some trade relations with the Dairwuobryatesle. Southwards, we find the Tatediem engaging in trade, diplomacy, proselytization and sometimes war. <br /></span></span></span></span></p><p><b>Related languages</b></p><p>The Sargalk-Bryatesle-Dairwueh family consists of the following languages and major dialects (italicized)</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The Hefnarač-Sargaĺk Branch</li><ul><li><div style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The Sarga</span>ĺk branch</div></li><ul><li>Sargaĺk</li><ul><li><i>northern Sargaĺk</i></li></ul><li>Inraj Sargaĺk</li><li>Geʔamik †</li><li>Tudiluk †</li></ul></ul></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li>The Hefnarač branch</li><ul><li>Hefnarač</li><li>Sindeʔʔet †</li><li>Bidlahʔa †</li></ul></ul><li>The Rilgouz branch</li><ul><li>Simiz †</li><li>Rilgouz</li><li>The Adrk languages</li><ul><li>Adrk</li><li>Tarts †</li><li>Vimil</li></ul></ul><li>The Dairwueh-Bryatesle Branch</li><ul><li>The Dairwueh Branch</li><ul><li>Dairwueh</li><ul><li><i>Western</i></li><li><i>Central</i></li></ul><li>Bundur</li><li>Vist †</li><li>Kappeuje †</li></ul><li>The Nerazg Branch †</li><li>The Bryatesle Branch</li><ul><li>Northern <br /></li><ul><li>Bryatesle</li><li>Western Tarist</li></ul><li>Southern</li><ul><li>Tarist</li><li>Kurelwai †</li></ul><li>Trinzlye †</li></ul></ul></ul><p></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">The Hefnarač-Sargaĺk Branch</h4><div style="text-align: justify;">The Hefnarač-Sargaĺk branch consists of three extant languages, Hefnarač, Sargaĺk and Inraj Sargaĺk. , Inraj Sargaĺk is moribund, with about 500 speakers. Hefnarač and Sargaĺk each have about 20 000 speakers, but language change towards Dairwueh and Cwarmin are weakening them both. More extinct languages are hinted at from old sources. Geʔamik, Tudiluk, Sindeʔʔet and Bidlahʔa have all gone extinct during the last 100 years. Small word lists for about a dozen other languages that probably were also related have been compiled by scholars and missionaries. The time-depth of the relation between Hefnarač and Sargaĺk is probably on the order of 3500 years or more. The most recent common ancestor between Hefnarač-Sargaĺk and Dairwueh-Bryatesle is probably about 4500 years ago or more.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>The Rilgouz Branch</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Rilgouz languages are spoken on islands west of the main Dairwueh lands. The total number of Rilgouz speakers probably is about two million, with Adrk and Vimil having about 3000 each. Whether these languages diverged earlier or later than the HS/BD split is unclear, and even then it is a bit unclear which branch they diverge from: there are isoglosses that pair any two of the three branches, exclude the third - both for sound changes, semantic changes and grammar changes. There even are lexemes that single-handedly occupy conflicting isoglosses.<br /></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>The Dairwueh branch</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;">An overwhelming amount of shared innovations indicate that the Dairwueh and Bryatesle branches are closely related, having diverged at most 3500 years ago. Dairwueh and Bundur separated about 1500 years ago, Vist and Kappeuje were arguably divergent dialects that have since merged into Dairwueh leaving substratal traces.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>The Nerazg branch</b></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A few moribund languages with clearly para-Dairwueh/para-Bryatesle features have been assigned into this family. Research is ongoing, but the evidence is unclear.<br /></div><div><b> </b></div><div><b>The Bryatesle branch</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Bryatesle's nearest living relative is Western Tarist, which diverged under the last 1000 years or so. Trinzlye and the southern branch encompassing Tarist and Kurelwai diverged about 1500 years ago, only to see Kurelwai mostly assimilate back into Tarist (but also to some extent into Bryatesle).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Trinzlye was largely assimilated into Dairwueh, where it has left some traits as well.<br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Arguably, there is a dialect continuum between Bryatesle and Western Tarist.<br /></div>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-65371576234897482742024-03-18T13:01:00.000-07:002024-03-18T13:01:16.644-07:00Detail #438: Split Marked Nominative<p>Split Marked Nominative is a phrase that struck me out of the blue, and I felt like it needs a post. However, let's begin by looking at something slightly related.<br /></p><div data-reddit-rtjson="{"entityMap":{},"blocks":[{"key":"8ftac","text":"On to some \"real language\" examples, and as usual, Finnish. Because that's where some pretty crazy stuff can be found. Finnish, in some sense, has a \"split marked accusative\" system. But first, we need to disentangle the Finnish differential object and subject system:","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"6ig4t","text":"Finnish marks existential subjects (but also objects) by the partitive. Existential verbs tend to be intransitive, so this doesn't affect the object marking much.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"a24tq","text":"Finnish marks atelicity or negativity by having the object in the partitive case. Thus, only telic, positive verb phrases have the object in the accusative.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"9gkdo","text":"Now on to the \"split marked accusative\". First: plural accusatives and pronominal accusatives have no split: -t all the way (for nouns, -t is the nom/acc plural marker, for pronouns, -t is the accusative marker). For singulars, however, if the verb licenses a nominative subject, the noun is in the marked accusative (identical to the genitive). If the verb licenses no nominative subject, however, it is in the unmarked accusative. (Certain auxiliaries require a genitive subject, and e.g. the passive has no subject in Finnish - the object isn't raised to subject. Also, imperatives license no nominative subject.)","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}}]}"><div data-block="true" data-editor="711c32" data-offset-key="co3q9-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="co3q9-0-0"><span data-offset-key="co3q9-0-0"><span data-text="true">We'll start, as usual, with Finnish. Because that's where some pretty crazy stuff can be found. Finnish, in some sense, has a "split marked accusative" system. But first, we need to disentangle the Finnish differential object and subject system:</span></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="711c32" data-offset-key="av2ii-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="av2ii-0-0"><span data-offset-key="av2ii-0-0"><span data-text="true">Finnish marks existential subjects (but also objects) by the partitive. Existential verbs tend to be intransitive, so this doesn't affect the object marking much.</span></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="711c32" data-offset-key="7pip8-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="7pip8-0-0"><span data-offset-key="7pip8-0-0"><span data-text="true">Finnish marks atelicity or negativity by having the object in the partitive case. Thus, only telic, positive verb phrases have the object in the accusative.</span></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="711c32" data-offset-key="6qm8e-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="6qm8e-0-0"><span data-offset-key="6qm8e-0-0"><span data-text="true">Now on to the "split marked accusative". First: plural accusatives and pronominal accusatives have no split: -t all the way (for nouns, -t is the nom/acc plural marker, for pronouns, -t is the accusative marker). For singulars, however, if the verb licenses a nominative subject, the noun is in the marked accusative (identical to the genitive). If the verb licenses no nominative subject, however, it is in the unmarked accusative. (Certain auxiliaries require a genitive subject, and e.g. the passive has no subject in Finnish - the object isn't raised to subject. Also, imperatives license no nominative subject.)</span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="6qm8e-0-0"><span data-offset-key="6qm8e-0-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="6qm8e-0-0"><span data-offset-key="6qm8e-0-0"><span data-text="true">Now, on to the split marked nominative. In case the atypical constructions require the nominative marking, I think it would be better to describe it by some other term - e.g. quirky case. However, if the nominative marker is present in standard transitive and intransitive clauses, and only get dropped in some contexts, calling it "split marked nominative" makes more sense. If e.g. pronouns keep their nominative in all contexts, and maybe some other markers (optional quantifiers, demonstratives, etc) also signal nominative, this should be good.</span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="6qm8e-0-0"><span data-offset-key="6qm8e-0-0"><span data-text="true"><br /></span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="6qm8e-0-0"><span data-offset-key="6qm8e-0-0"><span data-text="true">So, now, where does the nominative go less marked or unmarked?</span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="6qm8e-0-0"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>subclauses</li><li>with certain auxiliaries</li><li>(negative) existential statements?</li><li>with certain types of subjects? (E.g. proper nouns or mass nouns or something?)</li><li>Certain TAMs?</li></ul><p>How would a system like this come about? I guess a simple grammaticalization path would be "degenerate ergativity". <br /></p></div></div></div>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-76540945443582055122024-02-19T12:31:00.000-08:002024-02-19T12:31:26.608-08:00Regulations of Minor Dairwuo-Bryatesle Religions<p>The Dairwuo-Bryatesle communities are religiously dominated by a rather powerful "conglomerate" of religions, a dozen organized monotheisms forming a sort of religious "alliance". This alliance regulates and smooths the interaction of rather diverse religions under a single religious umbrella - imagine if all of the abrahamic religions had one pope, and lived in a weird denial about the fact that they're pretty different.<br /></p><p>This might seem to be a peaceful and tolerant arrangement, but the system does maintain a variety of oppressive practices. Among these, we find the treatment of minor religions.</p><p>The minor religions of the Dairwuo-Bryatesle word are generally regional religions that predate the spread of the main flavours of DB religion. Some of them clearly are related to some of the modern religious communities, others less so. However, in order to maintain religious peace, we find a variety of regulations that various local rulers have instituted.</p><p>We find a variety of rather different types of rules as well as approaches to rules, which after codification often have remained in effect for more than five centuries. Some rules are clearly capricious, intended to circumscribe the lives of the minority religions. Some are based on misunderstandings - e.g. the legate of the empire has banned something under the impression that it's important for the community, yet it turns out it never was of any significance. Sometimes, sympathetic legates have ruled in ways that enforce the minority religion's rules, i.e. giving imperial sanction to the community's rules for itself. Sometimes, this too has been based on misunderstandings - but due to the nature of the negotiations, the minority religions' voices seldom were heard very well.<br /></p><p>The leaders - oftentimes an inherited position - are afforded some of the respect of a major religion's middle-level clergy, but not all of it. Inherited leaders tend to be seen as comparable to noblemen, whereas leaders who are chosen by other means - meritocratically, democratically, randomly, or in some other way, are usually afforded less respect by surrounding communities.<br /></p><p>Primarily, all of these movements are banned from proselytizing, and their practitioners may not ascend to any (higher) public office. Additionally, noblemen may not join them. Only a handful of noble families are members of minor religions.</p><p>As they often are ethnoreligions (or even 'subtribal religions'), not all of them even accept converts in the first place. Further restrictions on conversion may exist:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In the south, it is common for members of the minor religions to be forbidden from converting to major religions. This does strengthen these religions' viability over time, but was for some reason understood as a punishment by the rulers instituting this rule.</li><li>In the north, rules for conversion w.r.t. minor religions vary strongly:</li><ul><li><i>Kmusre ves</i> is only permitted to accept female converts. This is an intentional legal irony, as kmusre ves only really is a religion practiced by men.</li><li>Members of <i>nybritmu ves </i>may <i>only</i> convert to the major nukper movement; however, a convert's offspring is not considered nukper, and must thus personally convert as well. This continues for as many generations as anyone can remember that someone's of nybritmu origin.<br /></li><li><i>Telat ves </i>may not convert, but they may convert an infant of theirs to the <i>kenoper</i> religion.</li><li><i>Sadres ves</i> can accept converts - but conversion must be for a span of five generations, i.e. the sixth generation reverts to the ancestral religion.</li><li>Several minor religions may accept converts <i>from other minor religion</i>s, but must never accept a member of a major religion.</li><li><i>Tilib ves, </i>a religion that does not really have a notion of conversion, must accept a freed slave if he wants to convert. This regulation seems to be inserted purely due to the great disdain which the tilib doctrine holds for slaves and non-tilib.<br /></li></ul></ul><p>Ritual rules also may apply:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The <i>tagrum uis</i> may not own horses, nor use them in either ritual or professional contexts, unless ordered to do so by a non-tagrum.</li><ul><li>This has led to the tagrum breeding donkeys into ever more horse-like breeds.</li><li>During the horse plagues of the seventh and tenth centuries, donkeys seem to have been way more resistent to the plague. Donkeys derived from the tagrum donkey population became an important export.</li></ul><li>The <i>kmusre ves</i> and the <i>nybritmu ves </i>are both under restrictions on fasting; fasting is an important religious expression in many areas, and the restrictions are thus:</li><ul><li>Any spontaneous fasting must be at least nine days long.<br /></li><li>The calendarically fixed fasts may not be longer than one day.<br /></li><li>Since a nine-day fast is very strenuous, the kmusre ves and the nybritmu ves have both gone in for not having spontaneous fasts at all. </li><li>Since fasts are seen as a way to call upon God to reduce a calamity, they often are used in times of plagues, which of course weakens the immune system. After several plagues, religious leaders realized that the kmusre ves and nybritmu ves had better survival rates than other religious communities: the restriction was scrapped, and I am happy to tell you that the nybritmu ves and kmusre ves are now permitted to fast spontaneously during times of plague.</li></ul><li>The southern<i> Daster uis</i> may only perform ritual magic for pay for members of major religions;the northern <i>Isam ves</i> may only perform ritual magic for members of minor religions.</li><li><i>Numbate uis</i> may not change their religious narratives or their rituals: for this reason, local officials have paid scholars to document their beliefs and practices as carefully as possible, and enforce orthodoxy and orthopraxy from the outside of the religion.</li><li><i>Tavan ves </i>may not commit any of their religion to paper, except for the bits that are present in the accords with the empire.</li><li>The <i>kmusre ves </i>and the <i>nybritmu ves</i> both have restrictions on them that permit their priests from offering certain sacrifices to certain gods at certain times. These restrictions are specific to the clergy of each religion. The workaround that tends to be used is that nybritmu clergy perform the kmusre ves sacrifices and vice versa.</li><li>Members of Telat ves <i>may not talk of their religious beliefs if asked by an outsider. </i>The law requires that they answer "I am forbidden by decree from the empire to speak of such things." Songs that are sung in public may only allude to their beliefs and never say them outright.<br /></li><li>Several of the religions may be forced to attend a major religion's house of worship once a year</li><ul><li>The <i>numbate uis </i>are forced to attend a <i>Kindaper</i> temple, but at a special event where no kindaper laity are present. The kindaper clergyman will generally berate the numbate uis for a while. Liberal kindaper clergymen may just go "nice, you're here, so, uh, wanna leave now?". Some really steadfastly chauvinist kindaper clergymen may "forget" to attend, leaving the numbate uis in a sort of legal limbo: they have no witness to prove that they attended, and they are legally mandated to do so.<br /></li><li>The <i>daster uis</i> must send contingents that have a progression through a lirbexper temple during service, singing certain traditional songs (that contradict daster uis beliefs).</li><li>The <i>kmusre ves</i> must be at the far back of the migdaper assembly halls, but are overseen by a clergyman to sign off that they were present.<br /></li></ul></ul><p>Rules on religious buildings may exist:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Tavan ves </i>may not repair their religious buildings (but they may build new ones)</li><li><i>Kmusre ves</i> may not build new religious buildings (but may repair them, and may reappropriate buildings that have had other uses)</li><li><i>Daster uis</i> may not have religious buildings at all.</li><li>The rules on where the religious buildings may be built are rather strict, as well as generally demanding them to be small, inconspicuous and humble. </li></ul><p>Rules on interacting with the civil society, with the army, and several other such concepts exist:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Military: <br /></li><ul><li>Some religions must form their own minor armies to fight for the empire.</li><li>Some are entirely forbidden from organizing armed groups.</li><li>Some have mandatory quotas for military service.</li></ul><li>Justice system:</li><ul><li>Some are permitted to have their own courts in minor matters.</li><li>Some are required to <br /></li></ul><li> Civil society</li><ul><li>The minor religions are mandated to keep a constant "census" of their members, and these books generally are considered "holy" in all of these religions.<br /></li></ul></ul><p><br /></p><p> </p><p> <br /></p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-19600892083666782672023-12-26T09:10:00.000-08:002023-12-26T09:10:35.785-08:00Conreligions Checklist III: Scripture, Language, Sex<ul style="text-align: left;"><li style="text-align: justify;"> Scripture</li><ul><li style="text-align: justify;">What function does it have?</li><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>Laws?</li><li>Moral guidance?</li><li>Ritual praxis? <br /></li><li>Just-so stories?</li><li>Philosophical consideration?</li><li>Philosophical speculation?</li><li>Explaining "historical" causes?<br /></li><li>Devotional praxis?</li><li>Beliefs?</li><li>A record of agreements?</li><ul><li>Who are the parties?</li><ul><li>Supernatural beings?</li><li>Tribes?</li><li>Families, dynasties, states?</li><li>Individuals?</li><li>Religious parties?<br /></li></ul></ul><li>Local records of families and recent history?</li><li>Scripture whose physical form has a ritual function</li><ul><li>The Torah scrolls in the synagogue service</li><li>The small Torah verses in the mezuzah and tefillin</li></ul><li>Scripture whose physical form has a borderline magic function <br /></li><ul><li>Swearing oaths "on the Bible"</li><li>Carrying the Bible as some form of talisman</li><li>Opening the Bible at random and parsing the first verse you see as providing the answer to your quandary</li><li>The mezuzah, again, can be seen as borderline magic in some of its claimed effects among orthodox Jews <br /></li></ul><li>Scripture as a sufficient "blueprint" to the religion vs. as only a part of the blueprint</li><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>In protestantism, sola scriptura has sometimes been an important principle, but it's also a principle that has always been curtailed in various ways. I think the standard now is "sola scriptura is sufficient for salvation, but church tradition is important for the actual day-to-day life of the church", even in churches that deny the existence of a church tradition.<br /></li></ul></ul><li style="text-align: justify;">How is it read?</li><ul><li style="text-align: justify;">Is it read in the vernacular, or in a specific language?</li><ul><li style="text-align: justify;">Are there especially respected translations (e.g. Jewish targumim, periphrastic translations into aramaic)<br /></li></ul><li style="text-align: justify;">Read in public?</li><li style="text-align: justify;">... in private?</li><li style="text-align: justify;">... in study sessions?</li><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>... with a friend?<br /></li></ul><li style="text-align: justify;">... carefully and deliberately while thinking deeply?</li><li style="text-align: justify;">... meditatively?</li><li style="text-align: justify;">... to ascertain its meaning?</li><li style="text-align: justify;">... just to hear its words (as a form of music, almost)?</li><li style="text-align: justify;">... is it read in a singing manner?</li><li style="text-align: justify;">... as prayer? <br /></li><li style="text-align: justify;">... is its surface meaning held to be the only meaning? How much meaning can a creative reader insert?</li></ul><li style="text-align: justify;">How uniform is it?</li><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>... as far as genre goes?</li><li>... linguistically?</li><li>... are the authors even adherents of a single religion, or do they vary strongly in beliefs?</li><li>... is it a compilation of books? Of even shorter texts? Of poems? Of sermons?</li><li>Are the authors necessarily considered supernaturally inspired? All of them?</li></ul><li>Symbolic language</li><ul><li>Do the authors use symbolic language to encode meanings? E.g. numerology, etc.</li></ul><li>Is it canonized?</li><li style="text-align: justify;">Is there multiple levels of scripture of differing levels of sacredness/authoritativeness?</li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In Islam, the Quran is accepted in its entirety; however, it is permissible to question the authenticity of hadiths, and different schools (madhhab) accept different hadiths as authentic. The compilations of hadiths are so important for islam that they undoubtedly can be considered a type of scripture.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In Judaism, the Torah is clearly the <i>crown</i> of scripture. The Mishnah, the Gemara, the Tosefta, the Talmud, the siddurs, the various midrashes, the Zohar form a somewhat nebulous family of texts of some level of sacredness.<br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In some forms of Christianity, not only the Bible, but also the hymnal has been ascribed almost magical powers. Same goes for the catechismus.</div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>Are believers expected to read or at least be familiar with the content?</li><ul><li>Is some content only meant for some members?</li><li>Is it even feasible for a member to read all the scripture? (In times before the printing press and industrial paper mills, this might not only be an issue due to lack of time.)</li></ul><li> How is it produced?</li><ul><li>Printed? </li><li>Copied by hand?</li><ul><li>In monasteries?</li><li>By a specialist caste?</li><li>By professional scribes?</li><li>Haphazardly, and in secret? (In case of a very persecuted religion)</li><li>Here, scribal mistakes become a very real and interesting factor.</li><li>The Jewish scribal tradition has a lot of interesting ways of mitigating scribal mistakes over time (imperfect ways, but nevertheless, ways). I have seen the claim that scribal traditions are among the most "esoteric" in all of Judaism.<br /></li></ul></ul></ul><li style="text-align: justify;">Language</li><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>To what extent has the religion affected the language?</li><ul><li>Names! Especially when a religion is imported into a culture it easily can bring a lot of names along. <br /></li><li>In countries of Christian culture, several plants may have names from the religion, here are those I know of:<br /></li><ul><li>parsley (Petersilie, Persilja, etc - named for Saint Peter)</li><li>carob is known as "John's bread" in several languages, due to a story of John the Baptist living off carob.</li><li>Saint John's wort</li><li>Aron's rod, Jacob's ladder <br /></li></ul><li> holidays serve well as waypoints in time, which of course affects language. Not to mention that our names of months as well as weekdays originate in religions that either are extinct or are very small minorities today.</li></ul><li>Religious terminology may go through semantic shifts<br /></li><ul><li>in my dialect of Swedish, "välsigna sig" (to bless oneself) has come to mean 'to relax a moment', mostly in idioms along the line of "didn't have time to bless himself".</li><li>religious buildings may figure frequently in sayings ("så jä ä jir i världen millan tjörtjon å kvärnen" - thus it is here in the world between the church and the mill")</li><li>religious functionaries, books, etc may figure in figures of speech as well</li></ul><li>Religions easily bring along a lot of terminology when a population changes language, or a religion is spread to a new language - c.f. how Germanic languages adopted a lot of religious, latin terminology in medieval times (here, the population converted), or how Yiddish conserves a lot of hebraisms and aramaisms (and there, the population changed language but kept the religion).</li><li>Cussing often has a religious component, likewise greetings, insults and other formalized utterance types.</li><li>Linguistic taboos may also be religiously informed.</li><li>In a religion with scripture (or memorized narratives), the understanding of the meaning of the text may change as the language changes. I have encountered people whose understanding of the Bible is far from the understanding that the translators of it expressed in the language of their time, yet these people believe their understanding is the sole acceptable understanding - this due to the language having changed since their translations were made.</li><li>The other way around, a religion may hold a certain language to be somehow "closer to reality" than other languages. I.e. the language has the true names of things (or whatever). In such a case, that language may be the main language used in ritual and in magic, even non-sanctioned such. The idea that language and reality have a much closer relationship than most modern people would hold was very common all the way to the 18th century.</li><ul><li>In such a world view, puns can be significant indicators of the nature of things.</li></ul></ul><li style="text-align: justify;">Sex</li><ul><li style="text-align: justify;">Religion isn't only anti-sex, and it isn't only modern religions that are pro-sex. However, sex and religion does deserve some attention, and the various attitudes towards sex also deserve being considered in the light of historical health concerns.<br /></li><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>Restricting sex isn't all that dumb in a context where pregnancy <i>very often </i>leads to death.</li><li>Control of sex is sensible in a context where resources are scant.</li></ul><li style="text-align: justify;"> Restrictions on what types of sex, or even what kinds of positions are common.</li><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>E.g. the Catholic church, orthodox churches, some protestants, most (all orthodox?) muslims ban anal sex. Bans on oral sex exist in several Christian movements.<br /></li><li>Some rabbis in the Talmud considered anal sex banned for non-Jews, but permissible for Jews.</li></ul><li> Ethnoreligions <i>need sex</i>. Ethnicities go extinct if they don't have sex.</li><li>The skoptsi considered the breasts and the testicles to be the forbidden fruit, which Adam and Eve had grafted onto their bodies. Devoted skoptsi would get castrated (or surgically remove the breasts and the labia). Various levels of extreme removal of genitals took place. The sect survived for over a century, potentially even 200 years. Somehow this says something about Russia, and I am not sure what.<br /></li><li style="text-align: justify;">E.g. Jewish law mandates that the husband satisfy his wife's sexual needs, and some such demands are also expressed in the ketubah - the wedding contract.</li><li>Rabbinic Judaism considers the sabbath <i>especially</i> good for sex; some movements of Christianity have considered children born on sunday to be proof that the parents were sinful (by having sex on sunday - the assumption being that a child always would be born on the same weekday as it was sired. Yes, people have believed that kind of thing). At least some karaite Jews forbid sex on the sabbath.<br /></li><li>Orthodox Judaism and Islam ban sex during (and for a while after) menstruation; a cleansing ritual is undergone after the time has passed. Some modern, liberal feminist Jewish thinkers have <i>adopted </i>this tradition for interesting reasons, e.g. the sexlessness for a couple of weeks (followed by two weeks with sex) can apparently be healthy for a relationship. Others, of course, see this as misogynistic and anti-female.<br /></li><li>I don't think there's much reason to write much about religious views on homosexuality here - there's variation there as well, although the pagan religions of antiquity probably didn't conceive of homosexuality as any kind of "romantic partnership" either. However, certainly a religion could have a modern view.<br /></li><ul><li>I have seen the claim that in the Talmud, the rabbis are a bit unsure if a wife who is unfaithful with a <i>woman </i>actually has committed adultery. I have tried finding this discussion, but to no avail.</li><li>Interestingly enough, even religions whose traditions and ethics basically leave the question open (or even can be construed with little to no effort to be decidedly pro-LGBTQ) seem to tend to have conservative groups who will be negative. Sikhism is one example. There's also a fair share of anti-LGBTQ Hindus, despite the fact that Hindu gods are pretty much omnisexual.</li></ul><li>In many shamanic religions, the shamans are somewhat intersex. Chukchi shamans use the female phonology. It is common for shamans throughout Siberia to dress femininely. I think I've seen similar claims re: American shamans as well.<br /></li><li>Celibacy, either temporary or permanent, for a variety of groups. Various possible causes!</li><ul><li>Fear that clergy would distribute church property among offspring / as inheritance.</li><li>A way of avoiding priestly dynasties.</li><ul><li>This might reduce the risk of secular rulers finding the church a threat?</li><li>This might reduce the risk for upper echelons in the church w.r.t. lower echelons.</li></ul><li>Various possible effects!</li><ul><li>People whose sexual identity is slightly unusual might find the celibate role attractive, and therefore pursue becoming a priest/monk/nun.</li><li>There's also dark possibilities here, very much realized in the real world as well.<br /></li><li>The celibate priest also is somewhat "outside" of the gender norms, and thus in some sense also similar to the shamans mentioned above.</li></ul></ul><li>Ritualized sex</li><ul><li>Ritualization also generally entails some kind of "sacredness" of whatever you ritualize, and sacred things generally have restrictions on them.</li></ul><ul><ul><li>Now, "ritual sex" might sound naughty and all, but might be something as simple as a married couple, when having sex, doing some minor boring ritual before or after (e.g. saying a blessing or lighting a candle - or blowing out a candle)</li><li>It might also, however, be a ritual where sex is part of the ritual and done in order to achieve some supernatural effect.<br /></li></ul></ul></ul></ul>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-62389550035963329572023-12-19T04:20:00.000-08:002023-12-19T04:20:37.848-08:00Detail #438: Pronouns that behave differently<p>I didn't find a good heading for this, so an explanation is in order.</p><p>English actually provides a morphological example of this idea:</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">he | she | <b>you</b><br />him | <b>her | you</b><br /><b>his</b> | <b>her | </b>your<br /><b>his</b> | hers | yours<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">So, each of these three pronouns conflate some form that a different pronoun distinguishes. But what other fields besides morphology could we have different behaviors in the pronouns?</p><p style="text-align: left;">1. Purely word-order based differences</p><p style="text-align: left;">Maybe the masculine and feminine pronouns (or the plurals or whatever) behave differently in the vicinity of adpositions, verbs or other nouns, consider a language where these were the only way of expressing possession:<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">the car of his<br />her car</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">i.e. the car of hers / his car would not be on the table</p><p style="text-align: left;">This, I think, is a fairly probable difference that I would not be surprised to find even in some Indo-European language, and at the very least as a statistical piece of grammar (i.e. "SOV for masculine pronoun objects 80% of the time, SVO 20%, and for feminine pronoun objects it's 60% vs. 40%). In my dialect of Swedish, I am also fairly sure that NOUN POSS (where POSS is possessive pronoun) is more common for a few pronouns, and POSS NOUN is more common for a few others.<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">2. Referential scope</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: justify;">The anaphoric properties of pronouns can be an interesting aspect of grammar. One could consider a language where the properties of masculine and feminine pronouns (or neuter pronouns or whatever) are distinct. Here are some examples of possible differences:</p></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">2.1 Implicit references</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: justify;">In some sense, the Swedish, German, Russian and Ukrainian 'it' (det, es, это, це) all seem to behave slightly different from the other third person pronouns, in that they sometimes clearly have non-neuter reference, and also are used to refer in somewhat implicit ways. I have no better way of phrasing what I mean by "implicit ways", but the example here should suffice:</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Vem är det? Det är min bror. (Who is it? It is my brother. Not "he is my brother".)</p></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: justify;">I am pretty sure similar use of the neuter pronoun beyond a strict neuter reference is permissible in many other slavic and germanic languages as well. I would not be surprised if this also holds for modern Greek as well as any other IE languages that have not lost the neuter.</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">2.2 Syntactical binding</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: justify;">In Old High German, 'sein' could be reflexive as well as third person masculine in general; thus, 'he sees his car' could be either the car of the subject or of some other third person. 'she sees his car' could be either the car of the subject or of some other third person. 'she sees her car' could only be the car of some other female third person. </p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">2.3 Use with underspecified reference</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: justify;">In several languages, masculine pronouns can be used when the gender of the referent is unclear. In some languages, neuter is used in some circumstances when the reference further is somewhat unclear.</p></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">3. Restrictions on usage / licensing / resumptive use<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">One could imagine a language where one particular pronoun can be used resumptively for any gender, or conversely, that one of the genders require resumptive use but the other doesn't.<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Certain verbs could also have restrictions on which pronouns may stand as various arguments, such that a noun that would be referred to by a 'forbidden' pronoun must stand in full, e.g.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: justify;">she [culturally specific verb that has a restriction on pronoun]-ed him</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: justify;">* he [culturally specific verb that has a restriction on pronoun]-ed her</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: justify;">John [culturally specific verb that has a restriction on pronoun]-ed her</p></blockquote><p style="text-align: justify;">Certain prepositions might not permit the use of one of the pronouns, or some distinctions may be conflated with one - or a three-way distinction might be two-way for any given pronoun (i.e. masculine conflates meanings 1 and 2, feminine conflates meanings 2 and 3). </p><p style="text-align: left;">4. Pro-drop</p><p style="text-align: left;">Conditions on pro-drop might well apply differently.</p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-66019520272625641292023-11-27T09:45:00.000-08:002023-11-27T09:45:08.848-08:00Split Ergative details in Proto-Cwarmin<p> Although Cwarmin itself has very little in ways of ergativity, most languages of the same branch keep some split ergative features of slightly unusual kinds.</p><p><b>Possessed subjects</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;">In Cwarmin, the possessive suffixes are nearly fully lost, with a few lexicalized retentions - both adverbs and nouns - where they have no function, as well as the reflexively possessed object case. In Proto-Cwarmin, there were two sets of (partially overlapping) suffixes: nominative ones and oblique ones. The nominative ones were applied to the nominative stem, the oblique ones on to either the oblique stem or on to case desinences.<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">However, in Proto-Cwarmin, the nominative possessive suffixes were almost exclusively used with transitive subjects <i>and complements of intransitive verbs. </i>The accusative stem and the oblique suffixes - obscuring the accusative morpheme itself - together formed a sort of <i>absolutive</i> case.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">This situation still is - at least partially - the case in R<span><span class="LrzXr kno-fv wHYlTd z8gr9e">æ</span></span>sm<sup>j</sup>in<sup>j</sup>, Ətimin and Atami. In Atami, the ergative patterning only holds with first or second person possessors. In R<span><span class="LrzXr kno-fv wHYlTd z8gr9e">æ</span></span>sm<sup>j</sup>in<sup>j </sup>there is now only one set of suffixes - stemming from the oblique ones - but for a handful of nouns and pronouns that stand with possessive suffixes, the ergative pattern holds and is visible due to morphophonemic traces of the accusative vs. nominative stem. Conservative dialects of Ətimin keep the proto-Cwarmin possession marking system intact, other dialects have either generalized the absolutive or the ergative form as subject.<br /></p><p><b>Constructions that don't license subjects</b><br /></p><p>- infinitive marking (poss suffixes), verb nouns and negative unmarked infinitives</p><p>Possessive suffixes on infinitives and verb nouns correlated with the object of transitive verbs or the subject of intransitives. An antipassive form whose possessive suffix correlated with the subject existed.<br /></p><p></p><p>Negative infinitives had the transitive subject in the genitive, and the nominative served an absolutive role. Atami keeps this for the negative infinitives.</p><p><b>Verbs of perception and causatives</b></p><p>Even though the verb congruence was nom-acc-like, the transitive subject of verbs of perception tended to be marked with dative, and the object with nominative. This is kept in <span style="text-align: justify;">Ətimin and Atami.</span></p><p>- passive causatives - (nom v for intransitives, gen nom v for transitives)</p><p>Causatives and passive causatives are fairly commonly used in Cwarminoid languages. For active causatives, the causee was generally in the genitive, and the embedded object was in the aaccusative. The proto-Cwarmin system survives in Atami.<br /></p><p><b>Verb-noun complements </b></p><p>Verbal complements of subjects of transitive verbs take a postposed short copula, all other complements take the nominative complement case. <span style="text-align: justify;">Ətimin</span><span style="text-align: justify;"> has slightly rearranged this, but the ergative distribution of it still holds, now with the short copula replaced by an instrumental case marker.</span></p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-79171640885385164692023-11-27T00:59:00.000-08:002023-11-27T00:59:35.620-08:00Detail #437: Unusual Grammaticalization Path for the Ergative<div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><p style="text-align: justify;"> In some languages, accusative marking is only used whenever the subject is not clear from verb congruence, i.e. Yukaghir where first- and second-person verbs' third person objects always are nominative.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">We could imagine a language where further, the presence of a third person nominative pronoun is also seen as sufficient to block accusative marking. (I.e. pronouns rank higher in the animacy hierarchy than nouns.) At this point, nominative pronouns might start appearing as subject markers in transitive clauses:</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">John he saw Eric.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">And by merging onto the noun, the third person pronouns become ergative markers.<br /></p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-5287040735878933902023-11-17T13:24:00.000-08:002023-11-17T13:24:44.821-08:00Detail #436: Really quirky stuff with the nullar number<p style="text-align: left;">Nullar numbers probably don't really exist in any natural language, but let's imagine they do. Let's now further imagine a language where nouns sometimes have a deficit number marking, i.e. like "pants" or "binoculars", and that the number marked on such nouns might deviate from the actual number, i.e. some kind of implicit singular or plural despite the opposite marking.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Now, let's go really wild, and imagine a noun which is marked for the nullar number, and this<i> </i>in no way negates the existence of the thing in question - it's just how you state that there's wind (or a ghost or smoke or whatever).<br /></p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-52229770951717715092023-11-10T13:36:00.002-08:002023-11-10T13:36:36.428-08:00More Questions for a Conlang Grammar<ul style="text-align: left;"><li> Word order operations</li><ul><li>Can emphasized words in subclauses be fronted to the onset of the main clause?</li><ul><li>If so, does this cause any weird effects?</li><ul><li>In many languages, the subjunctions cannot remain if the subject is removed from initial position in the subclause:</li><ul><li>I know that she can sing -> She I know can sing. (but in other languages, "she I know that can sing" is permissible.)</li></ul></ul></ul><li> Restrictions on placement of elements within a clause</li><ul><li>General restrictions on what can go where</li><ul><li>More complicated rules may require some kind of formal language(!) to express them.<br /></li></ul><li>V2</li><ul><li>Exceptions (e.g. Swedish permits a handful of adverbs to go between the subject and verb!)</li></ul><li>Anti-V2</li><ul><li>I.e. restricting some element from standing in a certain position altogether?</li></ul><li>V-2</li><ul><li>I.e. the verb goes second-to-last?</li></ul><li> Specific restrictions on some lexical elements - e.g. an adverb that just can't go right after the subject, or maybe a verb which does not permit for the object to be fronted.<br /></li></ul><li>Discontinuous phrases</li><li>Wackernagel position words and clitics</li></ul></ul><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">The Wackernagel position is the second slot in a phrase. In some languages, some elements go there, e.g. the (indirect) question particle 'li' in Russian and a bunch of words in Latin, such as -ne).</div></blockquote></blockquote><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>How are questions formed?</li><ul><li>Can you coordinate polar questions with other questions in the manner of this question form the previous list of questions: "How would you, or would you even, distinguish different spans depending
on whether the end- and starting-points are included or not, whether
they are both in the past, both in the future, starting-point in the
past, or either one happens to be the present?"</li><li>Can you have multiple question words?</li><li>Can you coordinate polar questions at all?</li><li>Do direct questions and indirect questions correlate formally?</li><li>Do questions and conditionals correlate? Reuse of particles? Reuse of word order operations? Reuse of verb forms?</li><li>Can interrogative pronouns reside in subclauses or do they have to be extracted to the main clause (and maybe even its onset)? <br /></li><li>Do interrogative pronouns correlate with some other kind of pronouns (indefinite ones, relative ones, other ones?)</li><li>Wh-in-situ or wh-fronting?</li><ul><li>Double wh-fronting? (I.e. if there's multiple question words), single wh-fronting (i.e. only one is fronted even if there are more), no wh-fronting?</li><li>Is there other mandatory fronting or dislocation, e.g. with imperatives? <br /></li></ul></ul><li> How do reflexives refer?</li><ul><li>Back to the subject?</li><li>Back to 'a hierarchically superior noun phrase'?</li></ul><li>Constructions where no single element carries the conveyed meaning</li><ul><li> E.g. in Finnish, one way of expressing "X must VERB" is "X.gen is VERB.passive_present_participle", where none of the elements by themselves contain any obligation (although the passive present participle can be used as an adjective to express 'a thing that has to be verbed', but also 'a thing that can be verbed' or even 'that will be verbed' or several different moods).</li></ul><li>How is ownership and other types of association between nouns expressed</li><ul><li>adnominally</li><ul><li>genitives vs. adpositional expressions vs. apposition </li><li>"coat of the man"</li><li>"man's coat"</li><li>"man his coat"</li><li>possessive suffixes</li><li>inalienable possession?</li><ul><li>workarounds for when general cases of such things are spoken of (i.e. just any old knee, not necessarily mine or yours)<br /></li></ul><li>is reflexive possessivity distinguished from non-reflexive such</li><ul><li>i.e. "the man saw them steal HIS car" when HIS is the man's vs. when it's someone else's.</li><li>In e.g. Old German, sein was reflexive AND third person masculine at the same time, so "The Königin saw them steal sein car" was ambiguous between the königin's car and some relevant man's car, whereas "The König saw them steal sein car" could be ambiguous between the könig's and some other relevant man's car. "ihr car", however, would always be the car of a female third person who was not the subject of the same clause.<br /></li></ul></ul><li>predicatively?</li><ul><li>A dedicated "have"-verb?</li><li>By X is ...?</li><li>X is with ...?</li><li>Other?</li><li>... is X's.</li></ul><li>Distinguishing types of ownership and association</li></ul><li>To what extent is sex distinguished in the language</li><ul><li>names?</li><li>pronouns?</li><li>titles?</li><ul><li>e.g. in Finnish, despite having no separate pronouns for masculine vs. feminine, names tend to be gender-segregated, and older titles also.</li></ul></ul><li>Valency of adjectives</li><ul><li>It is not unusual for adjectives to have somewhat ambiguous valency, e.g. "kär" in Swedish can mean both 'beloved' and 'in love with'. Does the adjective mark different roles differently in some contexts?</li></ul><li>Statements about 'general' noun things</li><ul><li>English is wild on this, making a general statement about the properties of a species may use singular or plural; in the singular, the definite seems more common ("the giraffe has a tall neck"), in the plural the indefinite. However, a language could well restrict this only to one number - or even one number/definiteness combination, or have them be lexically determined (or even lexically statistically determined, i.e. each lexeme or class of lexemes basically has a probability table for each type).<br /></li></ul><li>Symmetry of marking systems</li><ul><li>Does negated verb phrases mark all the information that non-negated ones do?</li><li>Do plural and singular nouns have the same cases available?</li><ul><li>this might differ for different nouns as well<br /> </li></ul><li>Do different tenses distinguish the same information?</li><ul><li>e.g. in Russian, past tense doesn't distinguish person, but does distinguish gender</li></ul><li>Do adjectives lose some distinctions in some forms?</li><ul><li>e.g. in Swedish, comparatives and superlatives have a less complex gender x definiteness marking; and adjectives with definite nouns do not convey as much gender information as indefinite ones.</li></ul><li>Is e.g. definiteness conflated for possessed nouns?</li><ul><li>In English and Swedish, this is true to some extent, although indefinite possessed nouns can be conveyed by circumlocution: "one of the man's coats".</li></ul><li>Is definiteness conflated after cardinal numerals? After ordinals?<br /></li></ul></ul>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-90574620284961211402023-11-07T07:26:00.001-08:002023-11-07T07:27:58.253-08:00Conreligions Checklist pt II: Holiness, Time keeping, DeathOnwards with questions regarding religions! <br /><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Holiness</b></li><ul><li><b>What is it?</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">'Holy' is one of these adjectives whose actual meaning is somewhat nebulous, and 'sacred' is no better. Oftentimes in descriptions of religions - even in depictions of real-world religions - these words are just plastered all over the place without much thought.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">If we describe something as being 'holy' to some group of people, we haven't really said anything other than that it's 'special' to them. This is not helpful in describing the relation they have to it, and may even serve to <i>delegitimize their relationship to it</i>. Consider, for instance, a people who derive their livelihood from the ecosystem that exists around some particular river, and whose customs contain a lot of locally ecology-savvy behaviors. A casual observer might think some of these customs are but superstitions (because he is unaware of the origin and practical benefits of the behaviors). The people may well have a word that they apply to the river and this word may well become translated as <i>holy. </i>However, <i>important, beneficial, central, primary, necessary, property, territory etc</i> may be equally justified translations. By this act of translating - maybe even arguably correctly - we have served to paint them as superstitious and ignorant people who relate to the world in a backwards and ritualized fashion. (Which they might well also do, but their relationship to their environment clearly also includes aspects which have enabled their survival. Sometimes, <i>holy</i> is a synonym for <i>important</i>. Sometimes, it's a synonym for <i>superstition.</i>)<b></b></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">I would just generally advice against using the word 'holy' without afterthought. I will violate this piece of advice systematically here, but consider 'holy' a placeholder variable.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Looking at the etymologies of some words for holiness might help a bit, but might also just serve to muddy the waters.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"><b>holy</b>: from the same root as whole and health</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"><b>sacred</b>: from a root that probably meant something like 'to make a pact, to make sacred, ritual'. Since one of the meanings already basically contains 'sacred', this sort of hints at it maybe being a "semantic prime". Latin <b>sanctus </b>has the same origin.<br /></div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"><b>pyhä</b> (Finnish) - cognates in other Finnic languages mean 'sin' (Erzya, Moksha), unholy/dirty/pagan (Udmurt, Komi). This probably simply means that it's somehow connected with 'transgression' - i.e. something that is holy is something that should not be transgressed.<br /></div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"><b>qaddosh </b>(Semitic) - some claim this comes from a root meaning 'set apart'</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"><b>kutsal </b>(Turkish) <b>- </b>fortune/luck + adjectivizer</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>naofa </b>(Irish) - <span class="mention-gloss-double-quote"></span><span class="mention-gloss">from PIE *neyb meaning blessed, holy, fortunate</span></div><b class="Armn headword" lang="hy"><div style="text-align: justify;"><b class="Armn headword" lang="hy">սուրբ </b><span class="Armn headword" lang="hy">(Armenian, "surb") - from PIE </span>*(s)ku-bʰ-ro- (?). Cognates mean 'beautiful, shining' and 'pure'. </div></b></div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: left;"><div class="firstHeading mw-first-heading" id="firstHeading" style="text-align: justify;"><b><span class="Goth">𐍅𐌴𐌹𐌷𐍃 </span></b><span class="Goth">(Gothic, weihs) - from PIE *</span>weyḱ-, 'house, village'.</div><div class="firstHeading mw-first-heading" id="firstHeading" style="text-align: justify;"><b class="Goth headword" lang="got">𐌰𐌹𐍂𐌺𐌽𐍃 </b><span class="Goth headword" lang="got">(Gothic, airkns) - from PGmc erknaz</span><b class="Goth headword" lang="got"></b> (pure, holy, genuine, precious), from a PIE root that might also be the root of a Tocharian stem meaning 'revere, venerate, honour'</div><div class="firstHeading mw-first-heading" id="firstHeading" style="text-align: justify;"><b>tapu </b>(Maori) - obvious cognate to 'taboo' (which we have borrowed from another polynesian language). Means both 'forbidden, restricted' as well as 'holy'. Apparently, there is also a verb <span class="Latn">ārai which can be used in related contexts, with secondary meanings 'to shield, to block out, to insulate'. The corresponding noun has meanings like 'obstacle, barricade, screen, barrier, veil, curtain'</span><br /></div></div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: left;"><div class="firstHeading mw-first-heading" id="firstHeading" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Aghb headword" lang="xag"><b>𐕌𐕒𐕡𐕟𐕒𐕡𐕙</b></span> (Aghwan<span class="headword-tr tr Latn" dir="ltr" lang="xag-Latn">, muc̣'ur</span>) - a word whose primary meaning is 'pure, clean, white'.</div><div class="firstHeading mw-first-heading" id="firstHeading" style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div class="firstHeading mw-first-heading" id="firstHeading" style="text-align: justify;">Of course, even then some of these are a bit unclear - what does <i>blessed</i> mean? What is a blessing? <br /></div></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>How is holiness imbued?</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In some traditions, certain things or places are holy by their very nature; in others, holiness can be imbued onto something by some simple ritual. In other traditions, holiness is imbued by complex rituals or by very great effort; look up how Jewish Torah scrolls are made, or the effort that goes into making and maintaining tefillin. Painting a Christian icon is also a very painstaking effort, and some traditions have very specific instructions how churches are to be built.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In the the Finnish Lutheran Church, rooms in which communion is to be celebrated must have been inaugurated for that purpose by a bishop, which in some sense <i>imbues</i> that room with a special status (a type of holiness).</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In several religious traditions, cemeteries are also 'exceptional' in some way that is akin to holiness: even to the extent that failure to be buried in one might be a cause for not reaching the afterlife.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Is there more than one type of holiness?</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">An important idea that I've hinted at above is that the holy is "set apart" in some fashion. Let's then consider the category of 'muktzeh' in Jewish halakha. These are things that are "set apart" for the time of the shabbat. They are not to be used during shabbat. Are they holy? In some sense one could consider the category of 'muktzeh' as a type of holiness, but I find it likely that most observant Jews either would find this a weird use of the word 'holy' or a weird interpretation of the concept 'muktzeh'.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Another type of 'holiness' could be the purity concerns of Judaism; holy scrolls, for instance, are <i>tumah</i>. So are menstruating women and any group of men and women under certain conditions. These are, in some sense, 'set apart', yet I do find it likely that most would balk at a description of this as a type of <i>holiness</i>. ... Yet, you will actually find some who conceive of them as a variety of holiness - including e.g. modern, liberal Jewish feminist thinkers, who find this time of separation to be something worth practicing as a form of rest, and as something that reinvigorates the relationship in other ways than purely sexual.<br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>How is it dealt with?</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><i>Holiness</i> as something to<i> </i>deal with might seem a weird turn of phrase, but consider: the holy is in some sense separate from the mundane. This might mean that it should be treated with respect. However, there are also religions that try to infuse the mundane with holiness, e.g. small acts of worship throughout the day. (C.f. the blessings that are uttered by orthodox Jews and by Muslims at a lot of different micro-events during the day; some Jewish works express the idea that it's good to utter at least a hundred blessings. These are maybe comparable to <i>grace before meals - </i>in fact, some of them are directly related to meals - but also whenever seeing anything remarkable, and a significant number of other events.)</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">This can have very important practical consequences for the religion: is the mundane supposed to be sacralized, or is the sacred supposed to be kept separate from the mundane?</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Is it achieved by ritual washing? Is it something you have to <i>wash off</i> once the holiness has run its course? Are there other rituals related to holiness?<br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Are holy things stored in special ways? Are holy people expected to behave in special ways? (E.g. zoroastrian priests, having undergone certain ritual purifications, have restrictions on how their bodily waste can be gotten rid of. This makes it very hard for a zoroastrian priest to travel, as the purification is basically cancelled whenever they violate the restrictions.) (Nazirs in Judaism are supposed to abstain from wine and grapes altogether, and not to cut their hair; upon having fulfilled the time span for which they promised to be a nazir, they must perform certain sacrifices, which currently are impossible to perform. Thus, currently, a nazir must be a nazir for life.)<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Unholiness</b></li></ul></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Unholiness, in modern parlance, generally means "evil". However, we might also be interested in just something as simple as "the absence of holiness" - i.e. mundaneness.</div></div></div></blockquote></blockquote><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>What is it?</b></li><ul><li><b>What causes it?</b></li><li><b>Is it naturally ocurring? Even recurring?<br /></b></li></ul><li><b>Is there more than one type and degree of it?</b></li><li><b>How is it dealt with?<br /></b></li></ul></ul><li><b>Holy persons</b></li><ul><li><b>Saints?</b></li><ul><li><b>"holy fools"</b></li><li><b>hermits</b></li></ul><li><b>Kings and chieftains</b></li></ul></ul></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">Is there a division of duties between a religious class and a political class? (Such a division is not universal.)</div></blockquote></blockquote><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Priestly families</b></li><li><b>"Prophets"</b></li><li><b>Temporary vows / Permanent vows</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In many traditions, being a monk or a nun is a lifelong commitment. However, one could compare the Jewish "nazir" concept with a being a 'temporary' monk of some kind. However, naturally, what exactly being a monk or a nazir entails differs significantly.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Status w.r.t society at large</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">In several cultures, monks and nuns are provided for by the laity. Clearly the stylites of early Christianity also were basically 'sponsored' by people on the ground. <br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Holy places</b></li><ul><li><b>Natural places</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><b></b><span> What makes</span><b><span></span> </b>the place special? (This might even be forgotten!) How does the holiness affect actions? E.g. a holy river - is bathing in it considered a good or a bad thing to do? Does it restrict traffic along the river in some way?<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Sacrificial places</b></li><li><b>Historical places </b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">The way in which a place is "historical" need not be true; consider, for instance, that there have been tribes that believe some caves to have given birth to the tribe. These caves are holy to them for a quasi-historical reason. Sometimes, civic religion also contains myths like this - and political parties as well.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Buildings</b></li><ul><li><b>Temples and 'churches'</b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">The design of temples and churches comes down to many factors - function, aesthetics, architectural techniques known to the people, building materials, etc. <i>Function</i> is probably quite central, however. Beyond this, consider e.g. the "fortress synagogues" that exist in eastern Europe, which were built to be able to withstand minor sieges, even. Sometimes, religious buildings also contain rather community-function oriented spaces as well, e.g. rooms for meetings or eating together. The only synagogue building I have attended contains an apartment for visiting rabbis, cantors and other guests.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>Monasteries</b></li><li><b>Open-air temples/churches</b></li></ul></ul><li><b>Holy times<br /></b></li><ul><li><b>Calendar!</b></li><ul><li><b>Delineating times</b></li></ul></ul></ul></div><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">How do you determine when a calendar day begins? (This might be relevant with regards to e.g. when some ritual should occur, when some obligation begins or ends, etc.) Is it sunset or maybe sunrise? (Quite a natural point, since it's fairly easy to calculate and predict unless your conworld has wild astrophysics or orbits.) Is it astronomical midnight? Is it some kind of "legal midnight" based on time keeping devices? Is it some other legal point? Is it when the moon gets visible?</div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">How about months? Back in antiquity, the Jewish calendar was based on observation of the moon, and to this day the islamic calendar is based on exactly that.</p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">How about years and year lengths? Are intercalatory hours, days, weeks, months or even entire years necessary for some kind of consistency of the cycles?</p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Are there multiple years overlapping each other? This might sound weird - but <i>even exists in western culture. </i>We have school/academic years, some countries may have fiscal years that differ from calendar years, some churches have a liturgical year that begins at first advent, and so on.</p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Judaism has four such years overlapping each other, to delineate different things: a fiscal year for taxes of tree-related agriculture, a fiscal year for cattle taxation, one 'main' year for several purposes, and one for counting certain time spans, both in relation to the Israelite king and in relation to certain obligations.</p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Western culture in some sense actually also has independent month cycles: the calendar months, the lunar months and the signs of the zodiac. (We 'have' the lunar month in the sense that the moon actually affects how much light there is in nighttime in a rather unavoidable way; we 'have' the signs of the zodiac in that they're still a thing people sometimes talk about and think about.) In some work-places, time might also be counted in some kind of quasi-month (usually called "increment" or somesuch).<br /></p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>Meaning of dates?</b></li><ul><li><b>Annual commemoration of historical events<br /></b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">These need not be accurate dates or even events that actually have happened; however, if they're ahistorical events that are purported to be historical, the way in which they have come to be associated with a particular date is of course of some interest.</div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><li><b>Numerologically derived cycles</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: left;">E.g. more astrologically-aligned cultures seem to base some observations on numerical speculation. The seven day week cycle may have this at its root? However! Its use in Judaism may be a subversion of the astrological origin, i.e. Babylonians seem to have thought of the Saturday as a profoundly unlucky day, the Jews rejected this notion and made it a festive day of rest.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><li><b>Cycles of nature (agrarian events)</b></li><li><b>Astronomical events</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: left;">New moons, full moons, equinoxes and solstices are among those whose importance even can be seen in western culture, with e.g. Christmas and New Years eve (and Midsummer) being close to two of the solstices, and easter as well as Halloween being close to the equinoxes. However, the correspondences here are imperfect (due to several reasons, including the precession of the equinoxes).<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><li><b>Other</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Different cultures have different cycles; most of them are based on the natural seasonal cycles, but even then subcycles of a variety of natures exist: the 19 months of 19 days among the ba'hai (which add up to 361 days, and an additional 4.25... "non-month" days), the 354/355 day years of the islamic 12 lunar month calendar, the Jewish lunar month calendar with additional intercalatory months for an average of roughly 365.25 day years. All of these have celebrations fall on certain dates, and these dates naturally 'move about' in relation to the western calendar. The western calendar, likewise, attempts to ensure that the astronomical situation on each date should be similar from one year to the next (with regards to the fixed stars, that is). Other solar calendars can "move about" in relation to the western calendar as well - the western calendar is not the 'most objective' measurement of time.<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">The way in which both the Jewish and Christian calendars operate do use astronomy and agrarian life to imbue time with structure. Islam, however, does a very interesting thing by having the year 'rotate' with regards to the cycle of nature. IMHO, this could lead to interesting variation in the festive foods eaten from one year to another. I am not sure how muslims deal with this fact.</p><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Finally, it would seem that the calendars of Mesoamerica had some clearly numerological things going for them with the 260-day calendar having purely numerological origins. However, they also had a solar year.</p><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">The seven day cycle of the week seems to be somewhat numerological, but the way the old Babylonians (or whoever) went about to come up with it is a bit interesting (and has lightly astrological concerns at the root of its design): 24 hours per day, 7 "planets" (in the sense of 'heavenly bodies that wander in relation to the fixed stars'): the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. (No more 'planets' were known, and naturally, this definition of planet is the "original" one which we have later altered to only cover fairly large, spherical bodies which conform to certain specific requirements). If every hour is assigned to a planet, and the planets are cycled through, every day will begin with a new planet.</p><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">This isn't a very "natural" way of arranging it, but still, the thinking behind it might be of interest. If the length of the hour was fixed, and the day actually was given a name by the hour in which the day begun - and the day begins at, say, dawn (or dusk), this could lead to interesting patterns where you sometimes skip a step in the cycle as the dawn (or dusk) comes earlier/later.<br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Holidays</b></li><ul><li><b>Commemoration</b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Among the celebrations in Judaism, <i>pesach, shavuot, hannukkah, purim, 9th of Av </i>and
several minor holidays are based on commemoration of events. On the
other hand, Rosh Hashannah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and some others are not
directly related to events that are supposed to have occurred on those
days. (However, of course, a variety of sources assign certain important events to those days.)<br /></div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Many
Christian holy days are based on dates when things are supposed to have
happened in the life of Jesus - Christmas, Easter, the Ascension, and
so on. Some Catholic and Orthodox holy days are based on events in the
lives of saints. However ... candlemas day and all saints' day seem to
be rather disconnected from any particular historical events.</div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>Agricultural cycles</b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">European <i>Pre-American</i> varities of Thanksgiving are clearly agrarian celebrations,
but in the American variety, it further celebrates a (relatively late!)
historical event.</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Pesach and easter also have some agricultural relevance - e.g. how Pesach always must occur in springtime (in the northern hemisphere).<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>Arbitrary dates</b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">The two main islamic observations eid Al-Fitr and eid al-Adha do seem a bit <i>arbitrary </i>to me, but this might be because of my ignorance about deeper islamic lore. But e.g. candlemas, all saints' day, the feast of Chrst the king do not seem to have any particular reasons why they are on those specific dates.</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Numerology and other related fields (gematria, etc) can also be causes for holy days: imagine that the phrase "fifth of january" in some language can have its syllables rearranged to spell out a name of God or something - in that case, this might be turned into a holiday for that very reason. Maybe the days or months spell out some significant number, etc. <br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b> Multi-year cycles</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: left;">There's no reason why a cycle necessarily would have to fit into the span of one year (or even be a multiple of whole years). Biblical Judaism had seven-year and fifty-year cycles for some particular commandments (and modern Judaism does maintain the seven year cycle). The Mexicas had 260-year cycles.<br /></div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: left;">In modern Judaism, there is a seven years and five months cycle for those who participate in the Daf Yomi ('a page a day') program for studying the Talmud. There are some celebrations at the end of the cycle, which thus occur at non-integer intervals of years. This is not "integral" to the religion, however, so this might not be a 'proper' religious holy time.</div></div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Unholy times</b></li></ul></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">In many Christian folk beliefs, Holy Saturday often considered nights when evil is at its most powerful: Jesus is dead and buried, and until he resurrects, the devil, in the mistaken belief that he has won, is rampaging. (Alternatively, due to the harrowing of hell, the devil is acting up in the world as well.) In some sense, Holy Saturday, ironically, could be seen as the most unholy time in some Christian folk beliefs.</div></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">In traditional Judaism, idolatrous holidays of surrounding religious communities might be held to be 'bad' times for a variety of reasons. "Nittelnacht" - Christmas! - often had a variety of restrictions in eastern Europe, but in part this was in reaction to significant harassment from Christians during Christian holidays.</p></blockquote></blockquote><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Holy things</b></li><ul><li><b>Ritual things</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">Things that are made for ritual use may be considered holy or not; the difference between these two possibilities come up in how they are stored and regarded <i>when not ritually used.</i> How are they disposed of? How are they stored? What kind of respect are they shown?</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">Holiness may also be something that is temporarily "awarded" to things for a while, during which they are treated respectfully.</div></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">As for ritual things, consider the Islamic prayer mat, the rosary in Christianity, Christian icons and crosses, and any number of Jewish religious items. Are these holy? Most religious people would treat them with respect and not e.g. throw them on the floor or so, so in that sense they are at the very least functionally holy.</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Holy deeds</b></li></ul><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">The word "sacrament" basically means 'sacred act'. However, this is a bit complicated - in catholicism, there is a list of important sacred acts (baptism, confirmation, communion, marriage, holy orders, penance, anointing of the sick). Various other Christian churches have fewer (or even none). A direct comparison to Judaism breaks down! Certainly, we could draw the following comparisons:</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">baptism ~ circumcision</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">confirmation ~ bar mitzvah</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">marriage ~ marriage</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">communion ~ participating in/hearing the Torah reading<br />holy orders ~ semikhah<br />penance ~ teshuvah<br />anointing of the sick ~ ?</div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">However! This is problematic! By doing this, we first of all have ignored how <i>relatively important </i>these things are in Judaism vs. Catholicism, and we also ignore a variety of Jewish things that could deserve being on the same list, and implied similarities that might not actually exist.</div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">E.g. - from an outsider point of view, I would think that acts like <i>sitting shiva, the various observances for pesach and yom kippur</i>, the work of the chevra kadisha, observing shabbat, ... all could be seen as important sacred acts. In fact, one could argue that Judaism in fact is <i>full of sacred acts, </i>to the extent that some varieties of Judaism basically is a <i>project of filling the world and the day with holiness. </i>Meanwhile, such a comparison also kind of reduces the importance of all kinds of <i>other</i> ethical acts in Christianity, so its an unbalanced comparison. <br /></div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Sacrifice</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Sacrifice might be rather regulated or more of a free-for-all. Animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, fruit sacrifice, etc are all things that have existed in religions. </div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">The reasoning behind sacrifice differs from religion to religion, and the reasoning may also be an afterthought, or even something that has been revised multiple times throughout history.<br /></div></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In Judaism, at some point, sacrifices were almost exclusively restricted to one single temple (that in Jerusalem). Disagreements over where the sacrifices were to be carried out even led to the Samaritan schism (or at least that was one contributing factor). Before the first temple in Jerusalem, multiple local sacrificial altars seem to have existed.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In Christianity, communion is a form of stand-in for the sacrifices of the Hebrew Scriptures, although the exact understanding of the relation between communion and scripture is not uniform, and will depend on multiple independent variables.</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Prayer</b></li></ul></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">The general impression irreligious people have of prayer is that it's people asking their imaginary friend for stuff. This is far from a fair description (<i>although</i>, I will grant, some religious movements' prayer and e.g. some varieties of "manifesting" seem to be pretty much that - but with an even more nebulous notion of divinity involved). </div></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Prayer comes in several forms, and it's best to consider its functions depending on the type. </p></blockquote></blockquote><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li>communal prayer</li><ul><li>group cohesion</li><li style="text-align: justify;">some research indicates that participation in group prayer leads to increased willingness to contribute to charity, so some kind of psychological effect might be present.</li></ul><li>prayer in really small groups</li><li>prayer alone </li><ul><li>might provide some mental benefits?</li></ul></ul></ul></ul></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">In some religions, there's a preferred language for prayer. If this is the case, there's often also the case that the religion has a <i>holy language. </i>Religious people who also are anti-dialect grammar nazis essentially also are saying that only the official standard language is holy enough for God to hear.</div></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">In Christian traditions, prayer is sometimes considered to consist of the following parts:</p></blockquote></blockquote><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><ul><li>praise</li><li>thanksgiving</li><li>supplication</li><ul><li>for oneself</li><li>for others</li></ul><li>confession / repentance / request for forgiveness</li></ul></ul></ul></ul></ul></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">It is not unusual for christian writers to further subcategorize by what's being asked for, and so on. But a full subcategorization is not necessary and doesn't really tell us much - except that people ask / give thanks / praise / ... for a whole lot of different things, and we ultimately end up categorizing the things rather than the type of prayer.</div></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"> However, not all prayer in all religions follow this typology! Not even Christianity!</p></blockquote></blockquote><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><ul><li style="text-align: justify;">retelling key points of the belief system to emphasize them for oneself (or the community), i.e. a Christian explicitly mentioning the crucifixion in a prayer.</li><li style="text-align: justify;">reverential silence (not unusual in Christianity)</li><li style="text-align: justify;">in Judaism, study of Torah is considered a form of prayer; conversely, the liturgy contains sections that <i>are</i> study of Torah. Specifically, some of the laws of sacrifices are read in the daily liturgy - illustrating the idea that prayer is a substitute for sacrifices, currently.</li></ul></ul></ul></ul></ul></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">In Judaism, the etymological connection between tefilah (prayer) and the root word meaning 'judge' (tefilah is reflexive, thus 'to judge oneself') is sometimes emphasized, indicating that while praying, one should consider one's deeds and judge oneself and decide to do better. Also, during weekdays, prayer should be accompanied by donating to charity (through the use of a tzedakah box).</div></blockquote></blockquote><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Sex</b></li></ul></ul></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Irreligious people often assume religions are <i>against</i> sex itself. While there are genuine cases of this - and maybe even many - most religions in some sense consider sex something sacred - but much like you wouldn't use consecrated wine in a cocktail bar in order to get drunk, sex is restricted to the right contexts. </div></blockquote></blockquote><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Life events</b></li><ul><li><b>Early life</b></li><ul><li><b>baptism? circumcision?</b></li><li><b>"first cutting of a lock" and similar</b></li><li><b>sacrificing something for redeeming the child</b></li></ul><li><b>Coming of age</b></li><ul><li><b>confirmation, baptism in some Christian movements, Bar mitzvah</b></li></ul><li><b>Weddings</b></li><li><b>Near death</b></li><ul><li><b>"extreme unction"</b></li></ul><li><b>Burials</b></li><li><b>After death</b></li><ul><li><b>sitting shivah</b></li><li><b>yahrtzeit</b></li><li><b>days of remembering all the dead ('alla helgons dag')</b></li><li><b>studying Talmud by someone's gravesite</b></li><li><b>leaving flowers or stones at gravesites</b></li><li><b>maintaining a grave</b></li><li><b>prayer for the dead? prayer <i>to</i> the dead?</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul></div><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Holy beings</b></li><ul><li><b>Supernatural ones?</b></li><ul><li><b>Ways of attracting them and getting their help </b></li><li><b>... or even enslaving them?</b></li></ul><li><b>Natural ones?</b></li><ul><li><b>Animals</b></li><li><b>Humans</b></li><ul><li><b>Dynasties</b></li><li><b>Malformed people, albinism, people of unusual stature</b></li></ul></ul></ul><li><b>Holy words</b></li><ul><li><b>"Prayer Punctuation", Mantras, ...</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><i> 'Om'</i> is held in high regard in some eastern religions, and is considered imbued with many mystical properties.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">'Amen' in the Abrahamic traditions is used in several different ways - e.g. the most common liturgical use of it in Judaism is for a person to 'concur' with a benediction or prayer uttered by someone else. However, it is also in some prayers (and apparently in the sephardi tradition) used like in the Christian tradition - as a 'punctuation mark' for prayer.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Names of holy beings</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In mainstream Judaism, the holiest name of G-d is not used, as nearly any use of it would be considered a violation of the commandment not to take G-d's name in vain. This is further extended to <i>other</i> names of G-d's, and even to the extent that the word 'god', when used to refer to G-d, is written with a dash in place of the 'o' by some Jews. Another often used "nickname" for G-d is simply the Hebrew word "Hashem", i.e. 'the name', which also has, for some users, a similar dash-replacement.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">On the other hand, some movements of Christianity hold the use of the tetragrammaton is <i>very</i> important, and use it regularly. (E.g. Je-ovah's witnesses. As I personally follow the Jewish taboo on using the tetragrammaton, I will not even write out the full name of that movement.)</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Karaite Judaism - a form of Judaism that rejects the rabbinic tradition - does use the tetragrammaton in certain contexts, such as prayer.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In Judaism, names of God are not to be destroyed. For this reason, religious literature is not destroyed, but buried. This has had some interesting archaeological implications - see e.g. the Cairo geniza.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Names of people<br /></b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">In some tradition, knowledge of names gives power over something. Therefore, a person may have a 'secret' name, which is, in some sense, held "holy".<br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Holy Languages</b></li></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">Some religions have the concept that a certain language is <i>holy</i> in some sense.</div></blockquote><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li style="text-align: justify;">The language is the underlying language of the cosmos or the language of God/gods?</li><ul><li style="text-align: justify;">In a Jewish tradition, angels don't understand aramaic.</li><li style="text-align: justify;">If a language is holy in this way, it means its words might carry "underlying truths" about the world; in such a view, <i>puns </i>suddenly are nearly magic.</li></ul><li style="text-align: justify;">In ethnoreligious communities, often for ethnolinguistic reasons?</li><li style="text-align: justify;">In larger religions like Catholicism, Islam and Buddhism - but also Judaism, the scope of the historically important religious literature may make several languages <i>somewhat </i>functionally "holy" - in Catholicism, Latin is fairly holy, but Greek also has an important function (especially in eastern rite Catholicism), in Slavic orthodox churches Church Slavonic is functionally holy. In Islam, there is a significant amount of Persian literature, giving Persian a quasi-holy status. In Judaism, in addition to Hebrew, you have Aramaic which is important for scholarship (the Talmud is in large parts written in Aramaic, as is the Zohar). Yiddish, Ladino and other judeo-languages generally aren't held as holy, but in e.g. Yiddish-speaking chassidic communities, Yiddish now functions as "holy" in the sense of 'separating' the community from other communities.</li></ul></ul><div><br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Unholy places, persons, times, things, actions and beings</b></li><ul><li><b>Types of unholiness</b></li><ul><li><b>"Regular" and "more extreme" forms</b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Unholy is often used as a term for some kind of 'evil', but literally, it just means 'not holy'. We could also see this as a term for anything that is separate - but not in a desireable state of holiness, but in an undesireable state. This is not necessarily an evil situation, but can be something 'natural' and even recurring.</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">In Christianity and in modern horror and such, 'unholy' often is used to denote something rather anti-holy - something evil.<br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>'Hygienic' terms</b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">In e.g. traditional Judaism, there's ritual uncleanliness - but this is part of a natural cycle of human life, where both men and women regularly become unclean, you go through a cleansing ritual, and you're clean again. The cleansing ritual itself is a <i>mitzvah,</i> a commandment, and thus being unclean enables the practitioner to perform a religious duty.<br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>Forbidden things <br /></b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Is an animal you refuse to eat privileged or excessively hated? C.f. the dog vs. the pig. Most westerners wouldn't eat a dog, yet we generally love dogs. Most muslims wouldn't eat a pig, yet they generally don't love pigs.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>Evil</b></li></ul></ul></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Does evil exist? If so, is it a thing unto itself, or is it just an absence? (Absences do exist, so evil being an absence does not mean 'evil does not exist' in much the same way you wouldn't deny that there's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza.)</div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Cursing</b></li><ul><li><b>"Cussing"</b></li></ul></ul></ul></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Demonology</b></li><ul><li><b>Exorcisms</b></li><li><b>Behaviors and things designed to avoid attracting demons </b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">In the Babylonian Talmud, it is taken for granted that <i>pairs</i> of things or actions attract demons; but ... the pesach seder requires <i>four glasses of wine,</i> which is a <i>pair of pairs!</i> Ways to alleviate this conundrum are presented.</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">The taboo on cussing in Christian culture does seem to be designed to avoid attracting evil.<br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>... to evade or confuse demons</b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">In mongolian culture, names such as 'worthless', 'noone', 'nothing', 'shit', etc have been used to make demons lose interest in children. This seems to have been especially common for the next child after a stillbirth or one that has died young.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>... to scare off demons </b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: left;">Fat Tuesday / Mardi Gras / Carneval traditions in some places have been 'noisy' with the intention of annoying or scaring off demons and trolls.</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: left;">The Jewish use of the shofar - a rams horn wind instrument - has also been associated with driving evil beings away.<br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>... to trap or even control demons</b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">In medieval European castles, you sometimes find labyrinths etched into the walls. These were apparently meant to trap demons, who would not be able to pass them without getting caught in them. This seems to have been a fairly mainstream practice, probably even sanctioned by the church.</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Many medieval occult Islamic, Christian and Jewish magic manuals contain methods for trapping and controlling demons.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><ul><li><b>Death</b></li></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px;">In ancient Norse religion, the nails of the dead had to be removed - a ship named Naglfar was being built from the nails left on dead people by the evil powers, and once this ship was ready, Ragnarrök - the end of the world - would occur.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px;">Between death and burial, many religions have a variety of ideas about the status of the dead.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px;"><br /></div></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>The afterlife</b></li></ul></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Not all religions have notions of the afterlife, and among those that do, complexities exist: reincarnation - limited reincarnation? - directly to the afterlife or sleeping in the ground until the end of Days and then resurrection followed by the afterlife? Various stages of afterlifey existence? Some kind of important passage - maybe fighting some evil or doing some tricky thing or getting 'weighed' in some manner. Ideas about ghosts were formalized and taught by religious authorities in both Catholicism and early Protestantism. The Talmud also discussed ghosts.</div></blockquote></blockquote><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Intoxicants</b></li></ul><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Full ban? Ritual use? All kinds of possibilities exist. Judaism famously have a lot of traditions about alcohol, some examples:<br /></div></div></div><div><div><ul><ul><li style="text-align: justify;">Purim famously is a holiday of drinking and revelry</li><li style="text-align: justify;">Shabbat should be started with a glass of wine</li><ul><li style="text-align: justify;">If wine is not available, "the wine of the land" may be used - i.e. beer. (Whether mead or cider or fermented palm sap or such qualify is hard to find out.)</li></ul><li style="text-align: justify;">The end of shabbat often is celebrated by a ceremony called havdalah, where wine or some other alcohol is also to be included (it is less regulated what type of drink it should be, i.e. even hard liquor can qualify afaict?)</li><li style="text-align: justify;">During passover, each person at the table should have four glasses of wine</li><ul><li style="text-align: justify;">There's a historical controversy where it was unclear whether wine is permissible on pesach - the ban in the Bible on <i>leaven</i> could be argued to include anything fermented. Mainstream Judaism interprets it to be <i>leavened grain products</i> from certain specific types of grain. Some karaites include non-grain products in the ban, others don't.</li><li style="text-align: justify;">Due to the ban on leavened grain, drinks like beer, whiskey, vodka, gin etc are banned on passover (even owning them!); It seems in eastern Europe, passover acquired a tradition to drink <i>mead</i> - which was popular in general at the time; the reasoning seems to be 'any drink that is permissible is meant to be enjoyed, and mead is clearly permissible, so we should enjoy it'.</li></ul></ul></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Mysticism</b></li><ul><li><b>What is it even? <br /></b></li></ul></ul></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Mysticism is a rather eclectic collection of religious practices, often with the intention of experiencing altered states of mind and to find out 'hidden' things about the world. However, <i>secondary mysticism</i>, where one learns of what someone has experienced and through that gets to increase one's knowledge without oneself having experienced any such things is also a thing. Thus, mysticism is a lore that could be said to be 'experience-based' w.r.t. the supernatural, rather than based on rational thinking.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In western religion, mysticism often is associated with occultism as well. Not all mysticism has to be occultism, nor does all occultism have to be mysticism.<br /></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>What use does it have?</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b><br /></b></li></ul><li><b>Lore</b></li><ul><li><b>Doctrine</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">Doctrine, for the purpose of this essay, is any belief that is <i>mandated</i> by the faith community or its leaders. <br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Narratives<br /></b></li><li><b>Books? </b></li><ul><li><b>Canon?</b></li><ul><li><b>Levels of canonicity? </b></li><li><b>Competing canons</b></li><li><b><br /></b></li></ul><li><b>"Apocrypha" <br /></b></li><li><b>Beyond canonicity</b></li></ul><li><b>Tradition</b></li><ul><li><b>Levels of canonicity?</b></li><li><b>Regional variation</b></li><li><b>Codification</b></li></ul></ul></ul></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div>Mainstream Judaism considers the written Bible incomplete - in the sense that understanding it requires an additional 'oral tradition'. Originally, it was not permitted to write down this oral tradition, but some time after the fall of the second temple, rabbis decided to write down a significant chunk of this oral tradition. This first resulted in the work called the Mishnah (and baraitas/toseftas). Later interpretation of the mishnah and baraitas developed into the Gemara, and together, these works are called the Talmud, which is something as "peculiar" as a written oral tradition. ... However. The nature of the writing still ensures that an oral oral tradition is necessary for the understanding of the written oral tradition.<br /></div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></div><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">A religion that originates in an illiterate community which turns literate might well go through a process of codifying oral traditions; this might be a challenge, with variant traditions in different places: but even for the literate Jewish culture this was a challenge. Both resolving and conserving variation might be intentions of the codifiers. (Resolving implies eradicating variation, either by adjudicating in favour of one option or by merging them into a single average form. The rabbis, after 70CE, seem to have utilized both approaches in different questions, with the intent of maintaining a coherent community: not too many groups that split off due to disagreement, but not too great a divergence of practices either. A difficult needle to thread.)<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"> </p><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Types of lore</b></li><ul><li><b>Historical Narratives</b></li><li><b>"Mythological narratives"</b></li></ul></ul></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">In the Jewish aggadic literature, there are all kinds of rather wild stories; few Jews, even among the orthodox, take these stories at face value. As one rabbi expressed it ,"these stories are the ambience of Judaism". They are voices in the background that lend Judaism a certain atmosphere. They are stories worth keeping, and they may be stories that encode information that the sages <i>did not want to be widely understood</i>.</div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: justify;">The parables of Jesus' can be seen to give a similar ambience to Christianity, even though their points often are reasonably clear (not always, though). Some of them are rather remarkably down-to-earth, with few miracles or anything and in that sense "within the realm of realism", yet clearly fictional. <i>Very </i>few Christians believe that the reason Jesus spoke of the prodigal son <i>was that that exact narrative actually had happened, and that Jesus wanted us to know that exactly that had happened, and that believing that that had happened was important.</i> I have, however, encountered at least one Christian who does seem to think exactly that.</p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>Instructions</b></li><ul><li><b>Magic vs. Miracles</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: left;">Generally speaking, these terms merely distinguish whether a supernatural or unlikely event came about by religiously sanctioned or non-sanctioned practitioners or practices.<br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>"Scientific lore" <br /></b></li></ul></ul></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Sometimes, misunderstood or outdated science is conserved in a religion; the kosher rule on not combining fish and meat in a dish stems from medicinal science of late antiquity, where this was held to be unhealthy. Fish and meat are permitted at the same meal, just not in the same dish.</div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>Beliefs about the future<br /></b></li><ul><li><b>End-times?</b></li><li><b>Specific times?</b></li><li><b>Is time linear or cyclic? Or something even weirder? </b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: left;">Read some topology, and you'll start getting weird ideas about how one could conceive of time as being structured (and of course, in a conworld, time might be really weird in the first place, but beliefs about time need not comport with the actual nature of time.)<br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><li><b>How are false prophecies dealt with?</b></li><li><b>Is ... improving or declining?</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: left;">"..." would of course
generally be 'the world', with things like ethics or nature or whatever
in focus. However, other things can also be held to have 'tendencies':
among orthodox Jews, there's an idea that the ability to understand how
to draw correct inferences about Jewish law is declining by every
generation, but the ability to understand kabbalah - the Jewish mystical
lore - is improving by every generation.</div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: left;"> </div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: left;">Although
it's commonly held among Christians that ethics is in decline,
ultimately Christianity has an "optimistic" view of the long run - evil
will be fully vanquished. Judaism and Islam hold a similar optimism -
and the Talmudic Rabbis even to the extent that they speculated that if
mankind gets its act together, the messiah will never 'go public' about
his mission. He'll just live and die, and then be the first man to be
resurrected on judgment day.</div><b></b><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><li><b>The messiah <br /></b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">This is a concept that is somewhat overused in fiction, but given that western culture has 'grown up' with the concept, it might not be all that weird.</div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;"> <br /></div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">Not every religion has a messiah concept, and the ones that do have rather different ones: Christianity believes the messiah to be G-d incarnate. Jews and Muslims believe him merely to be a servant of G-d's. It's hard to find very concrete information on the Zoroastrian Sayoshant.</div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">In Judaism, the idea of the messiah has many variations, and looking into, say, Shabbetai Zvi is well worth it.<br /></div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: left;"> <br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Rules</b></li><ul><li><b>Negotiation of rules</b></li></ul></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Sometimes, rules will be unclear or hard to extend into new situations. Systems for negotiating how to parse them in new situations may differ from one religion to another - c.f. rabbinic Judaism vs. karaite Judaism, or protestantism vs. catholicism, or conservative Judaism vs. orthodox Judaism.</div></blockquote></blockquote><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Arbiters of rules</b></li></ul><li><b>Ritual activities</b></li></ul><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Rituals can be split up in several ways, and some of these 'splits' can serve as inspiration for the conworlder: are rituals communal or private? Are they formalized or somewhat non-formalized? Do they require two or more people interacting or are they individual?<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Seasonal activities? <br /></b></li><li><b>Reasons?</b></li><li><b>Prayer</b></li><ul><li><b>How is it carried out? </b></li><li><b>Accompanying activities?</b></li><li><b>Social prayer, solo prayer?</b></li><li><b>What is the intention of the prayer?</b></li></ul><li><b>Meditation<br /></b></li></ul><li><b>Death and the afterlife</b></li><ul><li><b>Rituals</b></li><ul><li><b>preceeding burial</b></li><li><b>during burial</b></li><li><b>after burial</b></li><li><b>regularly recurring after that</b></li></ul><li><b>Afterlife</b></li><ul><li><b>Does proper burial have an effect on one's standing in the afterlife?</b></li></ul></ul></ul></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">It is a common folk belief in Christianity that burial in hallowed ground is <i>necessary</i> for peace after death. </div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"> Not every religion concerns itself with the afterlife.</p></blockquote></blockquote><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>Reincarnation?</b></li><li><b>"Just a place" </b>(sheol)</li><li><b>Merger with something greater?</b></li><li><b>Punishment?</b></li></ul><li><b>The dead affecting the living</b></li><ul><li><b>Ancestor worship<br /></b></li><li><b>Appeasement?</b></li><li><b>Interactions?</b></li><li><b>Ghosts<br /></b></li></ul></ul></ul></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">Ghosts were of sufficient concern to both Catholics and protestants that there exists theological literature about their existence and the theological implications thereof; among early protestants, belief in their existence was theologically orthodox.</div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Symbols</b></li><ul><li><b>Functions?</b></li></ul><li><b> Sub-varieties</b></li><ul><li><b>Geographical varieties?</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">Most religious variation throughout history is regional, e.g. Catholics tend to live in some places, Orthodox Christians in other, protestants in some other places. However, religious variation along geographical lines need not entail splits: there are Catholics who adhere to Eastern Liturgy, and eastern Canon Law, and other eastern practices - largely in the geographic east. (And nowadays also western rite orthodox Christians!)<br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">For a long time, one of the important internal divisions of the Jewish community has been regional: ashkenazi, sephardi, and a few smaller groups: iranian, teimani (yemenite), mizrahi, romaniote, italian, etc. Some authors conflate the various near middle eastern and mediterranean 'tribes' of Judaism under 'sephardi', and so reduce it to the two-way split of ashkenazi and sephardi. AFAICT, there's some truth to the notion that the other groups tend to align more closely with the sephardis in praxis, but I am far from an expert.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"> </div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">This split is not a "schism" - there are liturgical differences, there are differences in interpretation of halakha (Jewish law), and differences in customs, cuisine, music and so on. An Ashkenazi Jew will (generally) not view Sephardi praxis as offensive or wrong or mistaken, but will adhere to his own tradition.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">In Islam, the major schools of sharia tend to be geographically distributed and seem to hold each other in similar regard as different traditional Jewish communities do.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Schisms</b></li><li><b>Divisions (that might not be schismatic!)</b></li><ul><li><b>to save someone's life</b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: left;">During WW2, in eastern Europe a question arose among the nazis: were Karaites Jews or not? They consulted with rabbis, who ruled that <i>no, karaites are not Jews, </i>thus saving their lives. (At least partially. In other communities where the karaites and Jews had closer ties, the nazis simply assumed the karaites to be Jewish.) <br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>over interpretation of doctrine</b></li><li><b>over authority</b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: left;">In reality, the protestant reformation in northern Europe was over authority - namely that of local kings vs. the pope.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><li><b>over dynasty?</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: left;">Ostensibly, the shia/sunni split was over dynasty. Some splits between minor chassidic movements are also over dynasty, but these splits are not "schismatic" in the usual sense.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><li><b>over succession in some other way?</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: left;">The various antipopes should be obvious examples.<br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>over decisions on ethics or other behaviors</b></li><li><b>over "meta-stances" on doctrine</b></li></ul></ul><li><b>Food</b></li><ul><li>Jewish kosher rules, Muslim halal rules both serve to create a sort of dependency on the community: not everyone can shochet lambs at home.</li><ul><li>Back in the day, the chassidim separated strongly from other Jewish groups by making some rules stricter - thus making it hard to be sociable with other Jews</li></ul><li>Look into any Jewish religious magazine; half of it is recipes.</li><li>Traditional foods on holidays seems to be a common thing - but sometimes traditions can be surprisingly recent, e.g. "julskinka" (Christmas ham) in Sweden and Finland is often thought to be since medieval times, but is really just about 150 years or less.</li><li>The Jewish celebration of hannukah with foods fried in oil, of purim with hamentaschen, of pesach with its four bitter herbs, four glasses of wine, lamb, no fermented grain, the tu bishvat seder with dried fruits and nuts, the shabbat with challah, ...</li><li>Separation of foods that aren't supposed to mix: in rabbinic Judaism, milk and meat famously are not eaten together. </li><li>Finnish rye malt pudding with bitter orange rind on easter - mämmi, Russian tvarog-based pascha, eggs on easter through large segments of Christianity, some major meat on Christmas (turkey in the anglosphere nowadays, ham in Sweden and Finland, pinnekjøtt (lamb ribs) in Norway, ...), ...</li></ul><li><b>Agriculture & related things</b></li><ul><li><b>Hunting</b></li><ul><li><i>easily </i>develops rituals</li></ul></ul><li><b>The Arts</b></li><ul><li><b>Music</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Music can easily get a variety of religious practices around it: from the mythical ban on the use of the tritone, to actual views of certain music styles or instruments as sinful (or even demonic), to stylistic guidelines (e.g. the catholic church demanding that polyphony not overshadow the lyrics too much), to the orthodox Jewish thought that ever since the temple was destroyed, every synagogue service is a mourning service - and therefore, no instrumental music is permitted in the service. (However, weddings - definitely!)<br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Throughout Christian history, supernatural powers have been ascribed to church bells, and there's ideas of it scaring away demons and the devil himself, and there are also a variety of stories of lost (or nearly ghostly) church bells in lakes or sunken ships.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In Islam, the <i>adhan</i>, the chant from the minaret, is generally not counted as a form of music (although it fulfills the formal requirements for being a type of music).</div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Poetry</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">Poetry isn't just "words that are pretty", oftentimes, poetry makes writing more memorable. For this reason, having doctrines and instructions in a poetic form is beneficial for a religion, especially in times of low literacy.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">This can also easily lead into superstitions about poetry, notions like "anything that rhymes is canon" or other ideas like that.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Imagery and statues</b></li><li><b>Fiction</b></li></ul></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Now, let's here consider as "fiction" any work which explicitly is presented as such, and is held to be such by believers - this puts the Bible, significant parts of which probably do not agree with historical reality, outside of the category of fiction. </div></div></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><div style="text-align: justify;">One of the most significant books in the history of the English-speaking part of Christianity is John Bunyan's <i>The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come</i>. This is a work of fiction, clearly stated to be such, yet its significance is rather high. It is rather conceivable that other religions may value <i>explicitly fictional narratives</i> to communicate theology and ethics.</div></div></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"> </p></blockquote></blockquote><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Theatre</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Theatre has been an important aspect of Christianity for quite a while now, and I'd even posit that the Christmas nativity plays at schools is one of the most loved parts of Christianity by many Christians.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">One can also find significantly larger productions, such as the Oberammergau Passion Play every tenth year, which can be considered a ritualistic religious theatre.</div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Film</b></li></ul></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Christianity has several famous films, most famously maybe The Passion and Ben Hur. In addition to this, It's a wonderful life could be considered a Christian film. There's also more purely apologetically inclined films like God's not dead.</p></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">The gender segregation in orthodox Judaism has lead to there being a small film industry where female actors who <i>don't want their movies to be seen by men</i> get that promise. This is not a universal requirement in orthodox Judaism, but seems to be an accomodation specifically for women who want to live by that restriction?</div></blockquote></blockquote><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Architecture</b></li></ul></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">This might apply to things beyond temple and church architecture.</div></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Some Christian and Jewish works understand the description of the Temple in the Torah as expressing some kind of divine cosmology - i.e. the Temple is basically a preshadowing or a blueprint for the structure of reality. </p></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Many temples and cathedrals have a variety of important symbolism in how they are built, down to numerological considerations for the number of pillars or whatever. However, meanwhile, many really ancient religious structures do seem to have astro(n|l)ogical aspects to their design - but keep in mind that being able to draw a line among a bunch of pillars and finding that at some point so-and-so long ago this line intersected that star's rise on this or that date does not necessarily mean that it's an accurate analysis. Christianity also has traditions about how churches should be oriented, etc.</p></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Churches and synagogues also sometimes have <i>functional</i> details in their design, i.e. some eastern European synagogues basically being designed so as to be able to be used as fortresses in times of strife. </p></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Sometimes, creative architecture is forced upon a group: many Christian and Muslim cities had rules that required the tallest synagogue to be lower than the lowest church or mosque, forcing many synagogues to go partially underground (it was especially common to build one very small church or mosque to ensure that the Jews would be forced to do this).</p></blockquote></blockquote><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Dance</b></li><li><b>Circus artistry</b></li><li><b>Blood sports</b></li><li><b>Games</b></li></ul></ul></div><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">Consider the Jewish use of the dreidel, the search for hidden candy in many Christian traditions at easter, the Jewish tradition of hiding chametz (some baked risen dough) in the time leading up to passover, so that the children can search for it and get rid of it.</div></blockquote></blockquote><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Iconoclasm, "musicoclasm", "saltatoclasm", "architectoclasm"</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">The main rejection of a type of art that tends to be mentioned in circles like these are the various abrahamic iconoclasms - rejections of images of God (and sometimes even more), and especially the rejection of statues and images as representatives of the divine. </div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">However, rejection of music can also be found (e.g. in some branches of Islam), similarly some branches of Christianity (and Islam) are pretty suspicious of dance, and some branches of protestantism reject the grand cathedral architecture, in favour of basically "house churches".</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">I am not aware of any religion that entirely rejects poetry, but I imagine some forms of extreme fundamentalist protestantism might reject all poetry except the poetry in the Bible and in their hymnals - which they may even fail to recognize as forms of poetry.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">I am aware that a precious few protestants reject <i>fiction</i> altogether. I have no idea how they square this with the short, fictional episodes Jesus used to convey a variety of teachings. (Well, actually, I sort of do know - if the person I asked about this isn't a Poe, he actually holds that every parable that Jesus told is also an event that had actually happened. He also holds that there's no meaning to be gleaned from them, only that one must believe that they have happened, since otherwise Jesus would not have told these stories.)<br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Clothing</b></li><ul><li><b>Clothing as </b></li><ul><li><b>... a reminder of God(s) (or other)<br /></b></li><li><b>... in-group signaling</b></li><li><b>... showing respect</b></li><li><b>... marking rank</b></li><ul><li><b>hats. Seriously.</b></li></ul><li><b> ... to ward off evil (e.g. repel demons, the evil eye, etc)<br /></b></li><li><b>... to reduce temptation</b></li><li><b>... a way to enforce social control<br /></b></li></ul><li><b>Special clothing for</b></li><ul><li><b>... special events (weddings, funerals, other life events)</b></li><ul><li><b>for the groom and bride?</b></li><li><b>for the deceased?</b></li><li><b>for guests?</b></li><li><b>for officiating clergy?</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">Catholic, Anglican and some Lutheran traditions have several different-coloured coats for the priest / minister depending on day and event; look up "liturgical colours".</div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>... holidays</b></li><li><b>... specific times and actions:</b></li><ul><li><b>prayer (</b>see e.g. tefillin and tallit, but also head coverings for Christian ladies, which the NT commands!<b>)</b></li><li><b>various activities that require special blessings</b><b> </b></li></ul></ul></ul><li><b>Importance of ...</b></li></ul></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">Not all religions rank their component parts equally, and some religions may entirely forget the presence of one or another aspect of itself. By this I mean that e.g. sermons, teachings, and literature might entirely forget to speak about 'the community', and focus 100% on beliefs - yet it turns out in practice, maybe the community is central to the survival of the religion. OTOH, sometimes you get teachers in a religion that reject some aspect, e.g. Christians who reject the Christian community and become devotional hermits, or who reject ritual in favour of faith, or reject faith in favour of community and ritual.</div></blockquote><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>... community</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Christianity is a very faith-centered religion, where one often is lead to think that doctrine is the primary fact of religion. However, for many religions, community is the primary facet of religion - not beliefs - and this aspect is not absent in Christianity either. This leads to westerners sometimes being very confused about, say, a buddhist or hindu who doesn't believe in buddhism or hinduism, or likewise, atheist Jews. Such people are part of the buddhist/hindu/jewish community, and as such <i>are part of their religion</i>.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">But let's consider this w.r.t Christianity for a moment:</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Not everyone who utters the apostle's creed <i>actually believes in it.</i> Sometimes, uttering a creed untruthfully is a way of fitting in. Some people don't even think about what the act of uttering a creed is, but rather think of it as, say, singing a song or participating in a play. They don't even lie, because they don't perceive the act as a normal kind of utterance.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">With the rise of Christian nationalism in the west, we also see one kind of 'community'-centered view of Christianity - one that is at odds with several central tenets of Christianity - take root, and a community-centered view that has several problematic traits to it. This kind of tension within a theological system is <i>entirely possible.</i><br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>relationships to other communities<br /></b></li></ul></ul></ul></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div>Although religions sometimes take up antagonistic stances with regards to one another, this is not necessarily a universal situation. Consider these examples:</div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p>In traditional Judaism, during passover Jews must not have any leavened grain products in their home. They may not <i>own</i> leavened grain. This is traditionally done by selling any such products to a gentile neighbor, and buying it back after passover. <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/398051?lang=bi">In Morocco, this has developed into a festive event involving Jews and Muslims</a>.</p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p>The relationship between reform Judaism and unitarian universalism in the US was at one point so close that the movements considered merging their organization (but continue as two communities).</p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p>In the Gulags of the Soviet Union and during wars, there have been examples of orthodox and catholic clergy ministering to the members of the other group, up to and including giving communion.</p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><p>The classification of religions in India seems to be somewhat problematic: it assumed a very neat correspondence to western ideas of it. It seems hinduism consists of multiple rather separate faith communities, but the overlap towards jainism and buddhism and even sikhi may be somewhat unclear. Thus, the relationships between communities within the fold of hinduism might be very complex, and comparable to relationships between different religions.</p></div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>... belief</b></li><ul><li><b>systematized belief systems or unsystematized ones? <br /></b></li><li><b>is the systematized belief even intellectually attainable by the regular member?</b></li><ul><li><b>if not, is this a feature or a bug?</b></li></ul></ul><li><b>... ritual</b></li><ul><li><b>is there a systemization going on here?<br /></b></li></ul><li><b>... ethics</b></li><li><b>... other parts of the religion</b></li><li><b>... mysticism?</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Mysticism may be an important, openly practiced aspect, an absent or suppressed aspect, or a hidden - <i>occult </i>- aspect. Attitudes to it may also vary over time, see e.g. how many protestants nowadays are rather suspicious of medieval mystics, yet pentecostals openly practice an experiential mysticism - without necessarily even realizing that that's what it is, while many of the reformers were quite interested in various medieval mystics.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Mysticism has many forms, including inducing oneself (or others) into a trance, doing substances, just reading and speculating, using word-play to figure out how the world works, maybe even using dice or other random number generators to get answers; in some sense, flipping a bible open to a random page and finding the first verse one's eyes land on, and then deciding that this verse hints at the answer to the question at hand is a type of mysticism.<br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Interfaces with</b></li><ul><li><b>State and government</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Some religions clearly developed to be "state bearing", with legislative systems and ways of managing power - Judaism and Islam are two pretty clear examples. Judaism fairly soon had to deal with the loss of that power, yet kept a sort of autonomy in some areas for quite a while.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Christianity, on the other hand, does shed a lot of that "statecraftsmanship" baggage, and has very little in the New Testament for dealing with such power, as the early church expected the world to end <i>any day now</i>. As the church gained power and soon became state bearing, church fathers like Augustine soon formalized teachings on how to hack state-bearing responsibility.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">However, at the time christianity spread in Europe, north Africa and the middle East, the role of the state was not quite the same as it is in the modern world; to some extent, the church has shaped the relation between the state and the people - but it also has shaped the relation between the church and the state.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Sikhism seems to have a strong idea of democracy - and support for the idea that the people (also outside of sikhism) should be governed democratically, I would be interested to hear how developed the theory of <i>how</i> a state is to ensure democracy is developed in sikhism.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Few newer religions seem to develop "statebearing" ideas - though e.g. Mormonism does seem to have begun such a project at one time. It is unclear to me whether e.g. Bahá'í retains the islamic state-bearing concepts or not. </div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Today, of course, the secular state has replaced the religious state in the west, in Japan and China, and in a few other places beside that. In other places, it seems the state didn't so much replace a religious state as impose a Christian, Islamic or secular state onto an area with other religions.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Organized justice</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In some cultures, organized religion is also the foundation of a court system. This holds in Judaism and Islam and to a lesser extent in the Christian west as well. However, at the very least Rabbinic Judaism leaves open a possibility for a secular court system maintained by the Jewish king. In the modern world, organized justice is often associated with the state, but this is not necessarily true for all states.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In the dhimmi system of Islam, minority religions can maintain a court system for community-internal enforcement. To some extent, even in the west, non-criminal law can be adjudicated by religious court systems, such as Islamic or Jewish courts.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Educational system</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Many cultures have had their first organized educational systems as a result of religion. However, many philosophical schools also arguably have been 'religious' in some sense of the word, although these philosophies often have clashed with the mainstream beliefs of the population.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Other religions<br /></b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">Sometimes, religions may overlap: if two religions answer <i>very different questions</i>, and these answers do not conflict, a person might well believe in both. Consider, say, <b> </b>a believer in shintoism that also practices buddhism.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">Or, for a more interestingly complex case, a believer in 18th century sailor lore who also is a Freemason?</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Beliefs</li></ul></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;">How do religious systems' beliefs "interact"? Different religions have different views on this, and these may be somewhat difficult to assess.</div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;">A religion may be old enough that concepts like 'the law of the excluded third' and such had not yet been developed; in such a religion, even contradictory religions may be held to be <i>genuinely true.</i> OTOH, more 'developed' notions of truth may include notions like "God doesn't mind that other religions are wrong" or "all religions have an incomplete set of puzzle pieces" or "contradictions with other religions are mere accidents of language".<br /></div></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"> </div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Bans</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">Sometimes, religions are banned, yet continue living in hiding. Cryptojudaism, cryptoislam, occult varieties of Christianity, paganism, etc.<br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Occultism</b></li></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In some religions, occultism is <i>normal. </i>The occult is simply "hidden teachings", only kept for an educated elite. In Judaism, kabbalah <i>was</i> occult, until kabbalists made it a project to spread kabbalah to as many Jews as possible in the wake of the expulsion from Spain. Arguably, the Druze system also is one of institutionalized occultism.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In some other religions, occultism is either rejected entirely, or held to be something suspect - or at the very least problematic.</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Finally, there are religions that have multiple incompatible stances on, or even forms of occultism within them. Arguably, for instance, some forms of Christianity have occult traditions - others reject occultism entirely as something frivolous if not even satanic. Sometimes, a branch of a religion may practice something that <i>very clearly is a form of occultism,</i> while maintaining that occultism is wrong.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Science</b></li></ul></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">Today, there is some controversy between science and religion ... and in fact, we find similar controversies in antiquity as well (some of the church fathers were really anti-science, some were more nuanced in their views).</div></blockquote></blockquote><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li style="text-align: justify;"><b>"Religious Parasitism"</b>*** A religion can be unable to sustain its community sufficiently through the 'usual' ways (e.g. biological reproduction followed by the offspring remaining in the fold). Causes for such an issue may include members leaving or even dying unusually quickly (due to refusal to care for health, or indifference to physical risks, or even risky behaviors that the religion brings on.) ***Such a religion may still survive for a while if it somehow manages to attract converts from different populations, whose population is not beset by the issues the religion causes. *** A less extreme case of "religious parasitism", where I am not fully convinced that the relationship can be described in exactly those terms, but at the very least some weakened form of it, is that of Je-ovah's witnesses to 'mainstream' Christianity - I have a hard time imagining that the movement would survive without mainstream Christianity. However, mainstream Christianity has a fairly large following, among whom some will take issue with certain 'complications' in Christian theology. The witnesses then offer solutions to these complications, and can thus "skim off" some regular Christians. *** The suggestion for a person describing a conreligion we can draw here is: if you want to have a somewhat problematic cult in your world, create "major minor" issues in the mainstream religions that the cults can use to market their teachings.</li></ul><li>Religion as a factor in life</li><ul><li>Coordinating habits</li><li>Organizing society</li><ul><li>E.g. 'Chevra kadisha'-associations in Judaism arranging for the proper care of the bodies of the dead.</li></ul><li>Socializing people</li><li>"A language"</li></ul></ul></div><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Religion can in some sense be compared to <i>language. </i>Religion fleshes out multiple things to allude to, to illustrate emotions by, to connect emotions to, to inculcate strong emotions, etc. Knowing how to respond to things because there's (religious) traditions how to respond to them is a bit like knowing to say "how do you do" in response to "how do you do".</div></blockquote></blockquote><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li style="text-align: justify;">Evolutionary conserving agent</li></ul></ul></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Darwinian evolution doesn't only apply to biological entities, but also to memes, to societal organization, etc. A societal change is "a mutation" in some manner. Having some agent that strives backwards when change happens is not always bad - if the change turns out to be detrimental, a group that has refused to adopt it might contribute to undoing the change faster. Naturally, they will also counteract the adoption of beneficial changes, so there's a balance here that is hard to get right.</div></blockquote></blockquote><div><div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><br /></div></div><div><p></p></div></div>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-61667064118240385152023-09-19T03:53:00.003-07:002023-09-19T03:53:57.560-07:00Ćwarmin: Participles - an outline<p>The <span>Ćwarmin verb morphology contains a system of participles, and these contribute a significant amount of mileage in the morphosyntax of the verb phrase.</span></p><p><span><b>Morphology</b> <br /></span></p><p><span>A primary division among the participles is that of transitivity: intransitive participles are merely infinitives with case suffixes. There is no reason to distinguish active from passive for an intransitive participle. However, some exceptional verbs exist - both intransitive verbs marked as transitive ones, and vice versa. [See this for more.] <br /></span></p><p><span>The nominative is explicitly marked with -ij/-uw, but the other cases behave like any other noun case. Tense is not distinguished for intransitive participles. The perfect aspect can be marked by the suffix -em/-am, but is not mandatory. No explicit imperfect aspect marker exists.<br /></span></p><p><span>Transitive verbs' participles, however, are formed with the marker -nem(e)-/-nam(a)- for active participles, and -yezi-/-wozu- for passive ones. <br /></span></p><p><span>TAM is somewhat distinguished, with the active transitive verb having {perfect, imperfect} x {present, past} and the passive transitive verb having {perfect, imperfect}. </span></p><p><span>The transitive active participle defaults to imperfect present. The reduplicated suffixes -nenem/-nanam convey perfect past. The past imperfect adds an -et/-at, but reducing the first syllable: -nmet, -nmat. Past perfect is a further reduplication- -memet/-mamat.</span></p><p><span>The passive morpheme <i>-yezi/-wozu</i> implies perfect aspect, but an extra morpheme -te/-ta gives the imperfect. In some eastern dialects, single -yezi/-wozu gives imperfect, -jejesd/-wowosd gives perfect. (In turn, we find dissimilated forms like -yedzest/-wolost, -</span><span><i>ź</i></span><span>ejest/-lowost, -rejest/-lowost, -jerest/-wolost, and even weird combos of them, as well as -ejd</span><span><i>ź</i></span><span>/-owdz).<br /></span></p><p><span><b>Usages</b></span></p><p><span><b>Participles in general</b></span></p><p>Participles function as adjectives and adverbs, expressing what someone is/was doing or what they were experiencing. More complex relations to the verb than subject, object or recipient generally requires rewriting as a clearly delineated subclause<b>. However</b>, the main verb in a subclause is often also inflected as a participle. Thus, participles could, at least partially, be considered subordinate finite verbs. (Non-relative subclauses tend to have <i>normal</i> finite verbs a bit more often, but this is not mandatory.)<br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>With verbs of perception to express subordinate actions ('see someone eating' etc)</li><li>With some verbs of causation and other transitivity changing operations<br /></li><li>Heads of the verb phrase in relative subclauses<br /></li></ul><p><b> </b></p><p><b> </b><span><b>The active participle<br /></b></span></p><p><span>The active participles (i.e. the transitive active one, or the intransitive one) are used for these roles besides the prototypical subordinate verbal use:</span></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span>copositive present tense verbs (there is a post upcoming about what they are)</span></li><ul><li><span>This is restricted to the imperfect aspect form, but this does not convey an actual imperfect aspect, but rather copies the aspect of a different verb in the copositive construction)<br /></span></li></ul><li><span>head of the verb phrase in relative subclauses, and sometimes other subclauses as well</span></li><li>(were used as gerunds for a while in late middle Cwarmin)<br /></li><li><span>with some auxiliaries to express certain moods</span></li><li><span>with some causative constructions and some embedded constructions (perceive someone doing something, etc)</span></li><li><span>expressing general, impersonal things like 'it's raining', 'it's <i>sunsetting</i>', 'it's night', etc.</span></li><li><span>Expressing 'while X:ing' or 'after X:ing' when used as an adverb, depending on the aspect used. The passive requires a periphrastic expression for this. </span></li><li><span>In place of a finite verb in expressions of surprise or adoration or appreciation.</span></li><li><span><b>(transitive active only) </b>used to express the additional verbal specifications as to how a direct object is affected by the subject's action<br /></span></li><li><span><b>(transitive active only)</b> combined with the dative to express that the dative argument desires to do something<br /></span></li></ul><p><span><b> The passive participle</b></span></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span>copositive present tense verbs (restricted to perfect aspect form, but the actual aspect is implicit)<br /></span></li><li><span>head of the verb phrase in relative subclauses, but never in other types of subclauses</span></li><li><span>with some auxiliaries to express some voices</span></li><li><span>can form temporal adverbs for 'before/after/while being X:ed' with adpositions.</span></li></ul><p><span><b>The imperfect participle</b></span></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span>exhortation<b> </b>to continue<b></b></span></li><li><span>in combination with the verb 'hold', signifying 'having the energy to go on doing x'</span></li></ul><p><span><b>The perfect participle</b></span></p><p><span>This lists features that unify the passive and active <i>perfect </i>participles, but differ from the passive and active present participles.</span></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span>with some verbs, as an imperative of cessation. This especially in combination with the conjunction 'and'. This is mostly used with <i>active </i>perfect participles, but some passive participles are also used - usually ones whose argument structure is a bit unusual.<br /></span></li><li><span>with some verbs, as an imperative of immediate action.<br /></span></li></ul>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-67168730219874545312023-07-21T04:15:00.002-07:002023-07-21T04:15:19.139-07:00Ćwarmin: To Have<p style="text-align: justify;">Predicative possession is an important expression in languages. Naturally, <span><em>Ćwarmin </em>has expressions for it as well. As it turns out, there are <i>two</i> different expressions, mainly depending on the definiteness of the object, but other factors also may force the 'definite' form to be used.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span>For indefinite possessums, you simply juxtapose the owner in the nominative with a noun in the <i>accusative complement </i>case. Use of a copula is optional, and governed by the same rules as the copula in general.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span>For a definite possessum, the possessum is in the definite accusative, and there is a dummy pronoun in the accusative complement case. The dummy pronoun is either nitce (for singulars) or (g)initce (for plurals). Copula use is optional, but might be slightly more frequent than with indefinites.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;">More detailed quantification (indefinite quantifiers, numbers, etc) require the definite construction even if the possessum is not definite.</p><p>Negated possession <i>always</i> takes nitce, but puts the object in the negative object form.</p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-2973211656724172012023-07-03T12:48:00.002-07:002023-07-03T12:48:25.614-07:00Minor Dairwueh and Bryatesle Religious Communities<p style="text-align: justify;">The Dairwueh-Bryatesle religious landscape is clearly dominated by ten religious communities which together form a sort of "religious federation". The interactions between these ten communities is fairly well formalized and managed by this federal model of religion. However, there are some smaller communities that fall between the cracks, as it were. They are tolerated, but with some restrictions. </p><p><b>The communities - their beliefs, praxis and social standing</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;">There are about four dozen small communities, spread across the entire Dairwueh-Bryatesle world, which could be considered "second class" religions. There is also a third class of religions - heresies, more recent arrivals, and old traditional religions that did <i>not</i> comply with the power of the religious federation while the window for such an agreement was open.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Generally, all of D-B religion derives in some form from proto-DBS religion. However, different regions have had different amounts of influence from pre-DB inhabitants, Cwarmin, Tatediem and other cultures. The federated religion emerged with monotheism gaining traction in the area, and unified many rather different types of monotheism.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Many of the small religions are increasingly monotheist, but many have very obvious traits of their polytheist roots. The federated religion reinterprets these religions as being servants of the angels, rather than servants of God, and it seems this is a description they would be willing to apply to themselves. Non-compliant groups tend to be more explicitly polytheist, although exceptions can be found.<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"> The main objective of the restrictions would seem to be <i>limiting the likelihood that these communities ever become a threat to the stability of the religious federation.</i> There are several perceived threat vectors:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Heresy or heteropraxy</li><li>Failure to observe ethical norms, including sexual norms <br /></li><li><span><span>Loss of members (and thus popular support and revenue)</span></span></li><li>Loss of divine favour</li><li>Lack of loyalty to the secular imperial administration </li></ul><p><span> </span><b>Some common restrictions</b></p><p><span> </span><span> </span><b>Community size</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;">It is common for the size of the community to be determined by law. 4 900 is a common number - fifty hundreds less one. A few communities are restricted to only 1000 members.<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">For several of the minor religious communities, life in a proscribed geographical area is a prerequisite. This prerequisite sometimes originates with the community itself, which may consider a certain region to be<b> </b>the mandatory, sole place for its worship practice.<b> </b>Other times, it's the majority culture that restricts the members to stay within the area. Occasional forays elsewhere - business trips, etc - are permitted, but permanent residence elsewhere is often banned.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Clergymen of the minor religions are forbidden from negotiating with each other if not supervised by representatives of two major religions. These major religions may have the right of 'quasiveto' (where the other representative may block the veto).<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><b>Conversion</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Although conversion to or from these religions is not entirely forbidden, there are some usual types of restrictions:</p><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li><span>One or the other gender may be forbidden from converting to some religion - and oftentimes, this is selected by the authorities to be the only gender the religion actually considers proper members. Thus, for the Ramils, the empire only permits males to convert, but the Ramils only accept female converts.<br /></span></li><li><span> Converts <i>from</i> the small communities may have to become slaves upon joining some other religion.</span></li><li><span>Converts may be forbidden from having their offspring join the religion, or may be forced to promise a certain number of offspring for generations to be held by the religion.</span></li><li><span>Converts from the major religions may have to become slaves of a non-member of the minority religion if converting to certain minor religions. </span><br /></li></ul><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><b>Codification</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Unlike the major religions, codifications of the teachings is forbidden. A technicality is that the ban does not cover non-members who want to document them, and so a rather unique twist on religious scripture results from this: the three holy books of the Labim-community are written by outsiders, as is the single holy book of the Tonoks.<br /></p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-89639903379091257402023-06-27T00:00:00.001-07:002023-06-27T09:05:08.610-07:00Conreligions Checklist Part I: Questions, Answers, Membership, Functionaries<p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">I
previously compiled a list of topics for consideration for anyone
trying to come up with a grammar. This attempts to be a similar list for
<i>religions</i>. However, I think there's a point in having some
elucidating texts for many of these points, so it will be wordier than
the corresponding linguistics list. This is the first part, and I have no idea how many parts it will swell out to become.<br /></p><p>Many of the examples will be taken from real-world religions.</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Primary concern of a religion</b></li></ul><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;">In
western culture, it's easy to live under the impression that the
primary concern of religion is some set of specific beliefs, which the
member is expected to hold true. This is not necessarily true for all
religions, and even Christianity and Islam - the main examples of this <i>trope</i> in the real world - hold certain other aspects as important as well. Among these <i>other</i> important things we find:</div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><ul><li>Social Order and Cohesion</li><ul><li>How is social life regulated and why?<br /></li></ul><li>Behaviors and rituals</li><ul><li>What are their intended effects?</li><ul><li>Appease god(s) or spirits?</li><li>Maintain natural order?</li><li>Maintain social order?</li><li>Inspire practitioners?</li><li>Remind practitioners or something?</li></ul><li>What are their unintended effects?</li><ul><li>Social effects</li><li>Economic effects</li></ul></ul></ul></div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;"><div style="margin-left: 40px;">A ritual that requires some particular objects might lead to price gouging.</div></div><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"><ul><ul><li>What concepts govern them?<br /></li></ul><li>Community</li><ul><li>What role does <i>the </i>community have in the religion?<br /></li><li>How is the community structured? </li><li>How is the community's boundary to other communities delineated?<br /></li></ul><li>Natural order </li><ul><li>What things are even considered natural orders?<br /></li></ul></ul></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Questions</b></li></ul><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;">It's
easy to conceive of religions as a set of claims; however, this is not
always the best way of conceiving of what a religion is. Sometimes, the
questions may be more interesting than the answers. A religion may very
well have few clear answers, but a set of questions that unite the
members. And of course, the questions need not be defining aspect either.<br /></div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;">One
sort of famous example of a question-centered religion is Judaism, which almost seems like a
question-generator at times. One could probably make a typology of questions in
Judaism, and all manner of analyses of their function in the community. Some people who have read the Zohar mean that at its heart lies the
question "why does God want the Jews to adhere to the commandments in
the Torah".</div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;">Conversely,
Buddhism and Shinto concern themselves with very different questions
from one another, and this, in part, is the reason they have gotten
along fairly well in Japan - basically, their concerns are different
enough that it's fairly possible to integrate both of them into both
personal and communal life.</div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;">The order in which questions emerge in the community might affect how the answers develop.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Answers </b></li></ul><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;">The
existence of questions hints at the existence of answers. Naturally,
some answers may become entrenched and 'mandatory' in a religion. These
answers need not be of the type 'this is what you should believe', but
may well be of the type 'this is what <i>you should do</i>', or 'this
question is nonsensical' (even though it might well be a sensible
question), or even 'we don't know (and can't know)' or 'we won't know
until so-and-so occurs'. </div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b> </b><b>Membership</b></li></ul><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;">In the usual modern western view of what religions are, a "member" is generally seen to be a <i>believer</i>
and vice versa - a believer is a member. This does get a bit complex,
though, even in the case of Christianity: some Christians would not
consider a non-baptized Christian a proper believer, and some Christians
would consider a non-believing, baptized Christian a Christian. However, in e.g. USA, a significant portion of Christians are not baptized - which to me, a former believer in Lutheranism, seems very weird. <br /></div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;">Clearly,
belief and membership are, for at least some religions, distinct
categories. This goes even deeper once you start looking at religions
outside of Islam and Christianity.</div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;">Oftentimes,
membership of a religion is the same thing as membership of a
community; this membership might also be further complicated by
confounding factors like inheritance of membership going by paternal,
maternal or <i>mandatorily both</i> or <i>optionally either </i>line.
Conversion may take more than just a declaration or simple ritual - in
Judaism it's a process of at least a year, with classes and
participation in the community.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>'Ranks'</b></li><ul><li><b>Castes?</b></li><li><b>Dynasties?</b></li><li><b>Outsiders?</b></li></ul></ul></ul><div><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Some
religions do not perceive themselves as being in opposition with
non-members, but rather may consider non-members to be outsiders. Other
have a more antagonistic view of outsiders, others have a view whereby
outsiders need to be made politically subordinate.</p><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">There
are some interesting examples from history where religions have
cooperated in ways that seem weird today: when the Chinese emperor
wanted to impose a very harsh tax on the Jews of Kaifeng, the <i><b>local muslim population rioted in favour of the Jews and in opposition to the emperor.</b></i></p><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Religions form networks of relations<i><b> </b></i>that can be fairly complicated and not necessarily antagonistic. There may well be antagonistic relationships <b>within</b><i> </i>a religion, and these need not necessarily be the result of politics (but will necessarily result <i>in politics</i>).<br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>Quasi-members?</b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote style="border: medium none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div>Strictly
speaking, a sikh is a person who has taken the sikh vows. Not all
believers in sikhism do take those vows, but do align with and identify
with sikhism. These could be considered two types of members of sikhism,
where there clearly is some kind of a difference in "how" the
membership is expressed. (Not trying to be offensive here, but
"quasi-member" seems to fit the unvowed members?)<br /></div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></div><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">In
the Druze religion, the 'uqqal are initiated members who know the holy
books, juhhal are ignorant members who have not been initiated - and
most will not be initiated.<br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>Gender?</b></li></ul><li><b>Conversion?</b></li><ul><li><b>Is it relevant?</b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Some very praxis-oriented (and some very belief-oriented) religions might not even really put a lot of stock in the notion of a <i>community</i>. If there is no community - just people who <i>do</i> (or believe) the rituals (or doctrines), conversion might be an entirely irrelevant idea.</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">It would seem that for shintoism, conversion is not generally "relevant". One just ... practices it.<br /></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>Is it possible?</b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Not all religions permit conversion.</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">The
Druze believe themselves to be a community that is continuously
reincarnated within their community, and letting anyone else in would
just not work out. The Zoroastrians in India do not accept converts -
but this seems to be the result of an agreement the community signed
when moving to India.</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Syrian Jews do not accept converts, and this seems to be <i>strict</i> - they do not consider converts to other Jewish communities <i>real</i> Jews.</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Karaite
Judaism has not accepted converts for centuries - but has recently
started accepting them. It seems the lack of "proper infrastructure" for
dealing with converts was the cause (and also, potentially, the risk of
repercussions from Christian and Muslim rulers).</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">The Yazidi and the Mandaeans do not accept converts.</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"> </div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>Is it an objective of the religion?</b></li></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Some
religions that do accept converts, do not strive to acquire them
particularly eagerly; Judaism and Sikhism both accept converts, but they
won't go out of their way to gain them.<br /></div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Orthodox Judaism teaches that the rest of mankind have fewer
commandments to obey, and that it's better to be a righteous gentile
obeying all those commandments (about 100), than to be a Jew who obeys 95% of
the more than 600 commandments of Judaism. I.e. every single violation
done by a Jew is by their view something to avoid, and thus accepting an
insincere convert would be causing problems.</div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">For
those Zoroastrians that do accept converts, and in part for Jews,
external historical pressure from other religions is also one cause for
the reluctance. This may also explain e.g. the Mandaean, Yazidi, etc
bans on conversion. </div><div style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>What is the "unit" of conversion?</b></li></ul></div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">Some
religions accept anyone as a convert - conversion thus being
individual. Others will not convert e.g. half a married couple, but
require both to convert. I imagine a religion could even permit only for
<i>married couples</i> to convert, and thus never accept singles. </div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">Sometimes,
Christianity has accepted for conversion a whole tribe or 'nation' (the
concept of 'nation' is probably more recent than any such conversion,
so 'tribe' might be a better term.) Islam probably also has accepted
such conversions at times?</div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">For some religions, it would make sense for 'the village' to be the unit of conversion.</div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">As protestantism gained steam, it seems the agreement between Catholicism and Lutheranism was basically that 'principalities' determined which to side with, i.e. conversion to Lutheranism was not individual, but "statelet"-level.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><li><b>What's the status of a convert?</b></li></ul></ul></ul><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Converts
in orthodox Judaism may not marry levites and cohanites, thus giving
them some restrictions that other Jews do not have. This restriction is
no longer enforced in conservative and more liberal forms of Judaism.</p><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">In
medieval Christianity, Jewish converts to Christianity were likewise
often prohibited from marrying "real" Christians and had severe
restrictions put on them (and were required to preach christianity to
their former co-religionists regularly, but were otherwise forbidden to
interact with the Jewish community; this ban was mutual, b.t.w., i.e.
enforced both by Christian and Jewish communities.). This continued into
early protestantism, but it seems some Lutheran priests of the time did
give their own children in marriage to Jewish converts in order to
facilitate assimilation into the Christian community. <i>Yes, those were weird times. </i></p><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Up
to fairly recently, the Lutheran churches in Scandinavia have had two
separate liturgies for the adult baptism of a non-Christian: one for the
Jew, one for gentiles. The version for the Jewish convert contained
some "beef" with Judaism.</p><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">Some
Anglican movements permit converts that are in polygamous relationships
to continue in those polygamous relationships. Other movements of
Christianity require divorcing all but one of the wives.</p><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: justify;">How a wife with a 'shared husband' who converts is dealt with is unclear. <br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Privileges of membership?</b></li></ul></ul><p style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In
Judaism, a Jew can do certain jobs that non-Jews can't, e.g. the works
of being a kosher butcher, a scribe, and a variety of other Jewish
communal works. The Bible also forbids Jews from lending at interest to
other Jews. However, N.B.: this doesn't mean that the lender is at an
advantage w.r.t. non-Jews, but rather that the lender has a weakened
profitability in his own community. It's only when Islam and
Christianity banned interest that the Jewish lender suddenly was given
an advantage in European and Muslim countries. Students at Jewish
religious schools - yeshivas - are generally funded by charity from
other Jews, and charity among Jews is a fairly common phenomenon.
However, charity from among Jews to outsiders is not unknown either.<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In
Islam, muslims have certain advantages both in the eyes of the muslim
state and in the eyes of the sharia courts. However, e.g. a halal
butcher <i>can</i> be a Christian or a Jew as well.</p><p style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Only observant Jews can be witnesses in orthodox beit din courts.<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;"> In Christian Europe, e.g. Sweden only accepted non-Christians to work as officials of state as late as the 1950s! <br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Responsibilities of membership?</b></li><ul><li><b>Ways of dealing with failure to observe the responsibilities?</b></li></ul></ul></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Religious functionaries</b></li><ul><li><b>Clergy</b></li></ul></ul><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote style="border: medium none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div>The
function of clergy can vary; in some religions, clergy mainly perform
ritual duties, in other religions, they are responsible for ritual
duties as well as teaching the laity. Let's compare the function of the
rabbi and the Lutheran priest:</div></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: medium none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p>The
rabbi has very few specific ritual functions (although local Jewish
tradition may have some small ritual observances like 'the rabbi should
never turn his back on the congregation'). Any adult, bar mitzvah Jew
can perform (nearly) any of the rituals that are part of modern Judaism.
The rabbi, however, is of course expected to <i>know the ins and outs</i> and thus, by default might often end up performing these rituals.<br /></p></blockquote></blockquote></div><p style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In
the form of lutheranism I grew up in, only the priest is permitted to
perform several rituals; a communion must be presided over by a priest.
Weddings must be presided over by a priest. If communion is to be had in
a room, this room must at some point have been 'dedicated' by a bishop
(and bishops are basically a rank of priest). Baptism can be performed
by any member if there is reason to believe an unbaptized person is
about to die, but if a regular member of the laity baptized someone
without good reason, it would be frowned upon. I am not sure it would
even be accepted.<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">Judaism
has remnants of the old Levite/Cohanite priesthood, however. This was a
hereditary priesthood that served in the temple, and to this day they
have a few specific ritual <i>privileges </i>in orthodox Judaism, e.g.
certain turns for Torah-readings are reserved for a levite in case one
is present. Back when the Jewish temple in Jerusalem still stood,
levites and cohanites carried out ritual functions there, including the
various sacrifices.<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: justify;">In
Zoroastrianism, clergy primarily performs a ritual function - regular
members do not participate in rituals frequently. The clergy, however,
need to be very meticulous about ritual hygiene. These ritual rules
involve how to dispose of bodily waste, and makes it impossible for a
Zoroastrian priest to travel any considerable distances by train or by
air.<br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><b>Monks and nuns</b></li><li><b>Scholars</b></li><li><b>Other possible religious functions</b></li><ul><li><b>Examples:</b></li><ul><li><b>Scribes</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><p style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">A scribe might well write <i>other</i>
things than just the holy books. In Judaism, several ritual objects
have small slips of biblical verses in them, and the Jewish marriage
contract (ketubah) is usually written by a scribe.</p><p style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">Before the printing press was invented, monks did a lot of scribal work, and probably still do.<br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><li><b>Butchers</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">In
islam and judaism, halal and kosher meat are important concepts; this
has lead to the emergence of specialized butchers who know the religious
rules of slaughter.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><li><b>Cantors</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">In
catholic and some protestant traditions, cantors are musicians who
accompany the service, i.e. playing organs or some other suitable
instrument, and often also leading the hymns. However, in other
traditions, the musicians of a service may not even have an actual
title, and may be much less formalized.</div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">Cantors also often lead choirs and other music workshops and such in the religious context.</div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">In
traditional Judaism, the cantor is the leader of the service -
basically leading the reading of prayers and singing of songs. This is a
separate title from rabbi.</div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><li><b>Criers</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">To
what extent publicly crying at funerals in exchange for pay ever has
been a full-time job I have no idea, but at least some people have been
tasked with crying at funerals.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><li><b>Sextons</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">In Scandinavia, the sexton was not only a supervisor of church property, but also a supervisor of village morals.<br /></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><li><b>"Shadchan" </b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">In Judaism, the schadchan - the <i>matchmaker</i> - can be seen as a type of religious functionary. Of course, this is also a bit complicated, as they're also <i>well basically just communal or social functionaries</i> ... but this would be a failure to appreciate just how communal a concept of religion Judaism has.<br /></div></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><li><b>Producers and custodians of ritual objects</b></li><li><b>Prophets</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><p style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">In
popular media franchises and media, and even in some ~sorta okay
sources, the concept of a prophet is simplified to 'someone who predicts
the future'. In serious religious studies, however, a prophet is
"merely" someone who conveys a message from God (or similar). This need
not pertain to the future (although e.g. future punishments for
transgressions aren't exactly very uncommon in parts of the Bible).</p><p style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">Some religions seem to think prophecy is <i>finished</i>,
e.g. Judaism generally teaches that prophecy is currently not
available; Islam considers Muhammad the seal of the prophets; some
movements of Christianity hold that no prophecy currently is given (and
at the very least no prophecy of global interest). Other forms of
Christianity have prophecy as an active phenomenon.</p><p style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">Active prophets are <i>problematic</i> in one sense, since it can be kind of hard to determine whether a prophet really <i>is the real deal. </i>(Personally,
I hold that no such thing exists; however, given a religious tradition,
a prophet may either be compatible with the tradition, disruptive,
revolutionary, innovative, etc. Thus, having active prophecy can cause
instability.)</p><p style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">'Holy fools' in Russian Orthodoxy fulfill a similar role.<br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><ul><ul><li><b>'Surgical' functionaries</b></li></ul></ul></ul></ul><div style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: justify;">Besides
e.g. circumcision, there are religious traditions that involve tattoos,
tooth chiseling, scarring, and arguably finger amputation in some movements
could be seen as a near-religious action. Functionaries that carry out
these body modifications may well be seen as religious functionaries.</div>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-90614914873448666312023-04-24T09:04:00.001-07:002023-04-24T09:04:13.730-07:00Subject adpositions in Dairwueh and Bryatesle<p>This is a draft for some work that 'ties' together one detail in Dairwueh, Bryatesle and Sargaĺk. Details may still change.</p><p>Proto-Bryatosargaĺk had a subject postposition, probably something like <i>dant</i>. It's most clear descendant is the pegative marker -ta in Sargaĺk, the two -at-suffixes in the Dairwueh case system are probably descendants as well but less obvious examples. Some masculine and feminine nouns in Bryatesle have also incorporated it into their lexical forms.</p><p>However, subject adpositions seem to have been a sufficiently important trait in the syntax of PBS that new ones took its place in branches that lost 'dant'.</p><p>From the evidence, we can gather that it is unlikely the subject postposition was mandatory in every subject NP - rather, subjects with certain particular semantic or syntactic properties called for it. In all descendant languages, the subject postposition leaves some traces, but the traces are somewhat spread out.</p><p>1. Sargalk</p><p>In Sargalk, the postposition became the pegative case. This case marks the subject of a ditransitive verb, but also appears in some other contexts:<br /></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>with some particular verbs</li><li>before some postpositions</li><li>to mark intensity of actions</li><li>for subjects of generic statements about a class (generally in singular)</li></ul>A different subject preposition 'ved' also emerged, which was used thus:<p></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li> agent-like, or agent-associated comitatives</li><li>an optional marker for transitive subjects that had been displaced from their expected place in the clause</li><li>entire subclauses and gerunds standing as subjects of a verb</li><li>after a demonstrative that is a subject, when its referent is the previous sentence</li><li>contrasted subjects</li><li>whenever an explicit subject is present with an imperative</li><li>the agent of passives</li></ul><p></p><p>2. Dairwueh</p><p>In Dairwueh, dant has no direct descendant outside of morphology, but the preposition 'bur' has taken up a similar role. It appears in the following contexts:<br /></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>as a marker of resumptiveness in subclauses</li><li>emphasized 'continued same subject'-pronouns</li><li>sometimes to mark definite intransitive subjects</li><li>with loan words that cannot be inflected for case, and with NPs that have no case-bearing marker (e.g. a subclause or similar)</li><li>subjects in subclauses, and as an introducer of subject-oriented subclauses</li><li>in comparisons of subject to subject, the subordinate subject has this marker</li><li>in clauses with a vocative, to distinguish which NP is subject and which is vocative.</li><li>in some dialects, atypical subjects such as mass nouns take it</li><li>enables subjects to take a preprepositional, which usually used to convey in what capacity someone does something.</li></ul><p></p><p>3. Bryatelse</p><p>Modern Standard Bryatesle lost 'dant', but gained a postposition 'uid', in some dialects 'uib'. There are also dialectal traces of 'dant'.</p><p>The 'uid' postposition:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>relative clauses that relativize the subject mandatorily have this marker on the subject - even if it strictly speaking is outside of the subclause.</li><li>comparisons of subjects</li><li>subjects in subclauses mandatorily take 'uid'.</li><li>generic statements about a class of things (generally singular)</li><li>a handful of verbs require 'uid' for the subject.</li><li>similar vocative distinction as in Dairwueh</li><li>a few dialects have adapted 'uid' to be a copula.</li></ul><p></p><p>Traces of 'dant':<br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>in northeastern dialects, the definite form is a result of *dant → end.</li><li>in southeastern dialects, *dant → ''tẽum" functions as an existential verb.</li><li>In some dialects, *dant → -tɨnt is the secondary subject marker. The majority of dialects have -nisr, which probably derives from a different postposition that also operated as some kind of subject-postposition-like thing.</li></ul><p><br /></p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-10537037982351218452023-04-12T10:41:00.001-07:002023-04-12T10:41:11.184-07:00Detail #435: Reflexive markers<p>This is a companion post to <a href="https://miniatureconlangs.blogspot.com/2021/11/detail-422-variations-on-reflexives.html">Detail #422: Variations on Reflexives</a>. Detail #422 mostly elaborated on the syntax of reflexive reference. This post will elaborate on ways of encoding reflexiveness.<br /></p><p>This was inspired by this quote in a paper I recently read:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"> "<span lang="en">There are three types of reflexives in the world’s languages (Lichtenberk, 1994, p. 3504): </span>
</p><ol class="texte" style="list-style-type: decimal; margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><li><span lang="en">nominal (nouns or pronouns), </span>
</li><li>
<p class="texte"><span lang="en">verbal (the reflexive marker is a part of the verb morphology), </span></p>
</li><li>
<p class="texte"><span lang="en">possessive (e.g. the possessive adjectives).</span>"</p></li></ol><p><br />This naturally made me wonder if we can imagine some additional ways. Naturally, a few ideas emerged.<br /></p><p>1. Adverbial reflexive markers</p><p> Adverbs like 'back', 'in return', 'alone', etc.<br /></p><p>2. Adpositional reflexive markers</p><p>One could imagine some types of adposition to be more strongly associated with reflexivity, but maybe have a lower semantic granularity than other prepositions in the language. Consider, e.g. a situation where 'on him' develops to be reflexive but 'at him' to be non-reflexive.<br /></p><p>3. Auxiliaries</p><p>One could easily imagine verbs like 'get' developing into more of a reflexive meaning than a passive meaning. I.e. 'get fucked' could just as well develop to mean 'fuck yourself'. <br /></p><p>4. Omission / Default reflexivity</p><p>To some extent, this is sort of something already; 'wash' in some languages defaults to a reflexive meaning. However, ... this is of course only reflexive in the sense of 'reflexive in some target language'. However, if you were to ask 'who are you washing' in those languages, an explicit reflexive would probably be given.<br /></p><p>5. That weird Finnish thing</p><p>A related thing is the Finnish reflexive -nsa/-an possessive suffix, which is reflexive when no genitive pronoun precedes it, but just a regular third person possessive when the noun is preceded by a genitive.<br /></p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-75109734349036639472023-03-29T08:10:00.003-07:002023-03-29T08:29:55.925-07:00Detail #434: Number, Clusivity, Personal Pronouns<p>I imagine this might actually be something that exists in a language. Consider first and second person pronouns and number. Normally, the number marked is the number of the group discussed. I.e. when I say '<i>we</i>', I might very well be the single person present who belongs to this 'we'. Of course, there's clusivity which can clarify this, but let's consider plural 'you'. This may very well be uttered towards a <i>single person</i> who represents a group that mostly is absent.</p><p>Is there any language that encodes both the number of the group it refers to, as well as the number of persons currently present out of that group?</p><p>In part, however, this might even be a bit redundant, and we could introduce a further complication beyond the redundancy.</p><p>The obvious uses are:</p><p>1-singular-plural: I who am the only person present, and some people<br />2-singular-plural: you who are the only person present, and some people</p><p>Is the second slot meant to signify number of non-present, or is it meant to include 'the full number of referents'? These two give different interpretations:</p><p>interpretation 1: 1-plural-plural: I, and some people<br />interpretation 2: 1-plural-plural: I, and some people who are present, and some other people</p><p>Thus, we here have two options: conflate the distinction whenever several members of the group are present, or distinguish them thus:</p><p>1-plural: I and some people who are present<br />1-plural-plural: I, and some people who are present and some people who aren't</p><p>Naturally, this should be easy to extend to duals and trials.</p><p>An interesting simple approach for a conlang could be this though: just have singular and plural, <i>and distinguish by number of addressees.Also, 'I' can mean 'we' if only I, out of the whole group, am present.</i></p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-61290815596849011932023-01-11T12:32:00.003-08:002023-01-13T00:29:31.042-08:00Questions for a Conlang Grammar<p> Here's a few questions for any conlanger who doesn't know where to go with his grammar.<br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>How do the tenses work?</li><ul><li>What tense would you use in a question such as 'how long have you lived here', in case the person still is living there? In e.g. Russian, it's the imperfective present. NB: Russian imperfective present is non-future with possible extension into the past.</li><li>How would you, or would you even, distinguish different spans depending on whether the end- and starting-points are included or not, whether they are both in the past, both in the future, starting-point in the past, or either one happens to be the present?</li></ul><li>Does tense/mood/aspect/polarity/evidentiality/... ever 'raise' to the main verb of a surrounding clause? Is this restricted only to some verbs?<br /></li><li>How do moods work?</li><ul><li>When would you use which mood? Do conditionals require extra marking for the apodosis and protasis, or is the verb mood itself sufficient? Do moods influence word order (or is word order even the sole marker?)<br /></li></ul><li>How does deference work? Special pronouns or filler vocatives? Special verb forms? Special phrasing?</li><li>How do you resolve third person pronoun reference?</li><ul><li>This doesn't even have to have an unambiguous strategy, most real languages probably have no single resolution strategy for this.</li><ul><li>This doesn't prevent people from thinking such a strategy exists in their language, e.g. "the most recent third person subject of the same gender and/or number as the pronoun in a previous clause or subclause" is popularly believed by Swedish grammar nazis, but when you point out when they themselves deviate from this rule, they always have some ad hoc explanation, not realizing that this ad hoccery just goes to show that their rule is incomplete.</li></ul><li>Are there ways of affecting the resolution strategy a listener will use by changing some details?<br /></li></ul><li>How do relative subclauses work?</li><ul><li>Are they entirely replaced by participles and the like?</li><ul><li>Do you have dedicated participles for each tense/mood/aspect, and</li><li>for each possible relativizeable role? (E.g. "the man to whom you gave a pineapple" > the from you a pineapple to-given man?")</li></ul><li>How much of the accessibility hierarchy are you going to cover? </li><ul><li>Subject > Direct Object > Indirect Object > Oblique > Genitive > Object of comparative <i>(replace Subject and Dir Obj with Abs > Erg for ergative langs)</i></li><li>This means 'if you can express 'the man whose car was stolen' using a relativizer that expresses the genitive relation, then you should also be able to say 'the man with whom I was guarding the treasure', but not necessarily 'the man than who I am taller'.</li><li>Those parts of the hierarchy that you exclude, how would you express the same sentiment? <br /></li></ul><li> Can all nouns in a clause have a relative subclause follow them?</li><li>Can relative subclauses stand by themselves?</li><ul><li>i.e. can you have things like 'whosoever can help, speak up'? </li></ul><li>Do relative subclauses have a special word order?</li><li>Do relative subclauses have a specific alignment? (Not entirely unusual in split-ergative languages) </li><li>Can relative subclauses be discontinuous?</li><li>Is there adposition stranding (c.f. 'the house which I waited <b>in</b>')<b> </b>- unusual globally, but not unknown outside of north Germanic and a few examples in west Germanic.</li><li>Do you have resumptive pronouns ('the man who I know his wife')</li><ul><li>Even if you don't have them in the typical relative subclause, do they appear in more complicated, embedded subclauses?</li></ul><li>Can you have a subclause where the outermost relative subclause actually doesn't assign the relativized noun a role?</li><ul><li>"The man who they told me about a time when he stole a car from a moving train"<br /></li></ul></ul><li>How do other subclauses work? <br /></li><li>How does comparison work?</li><ul><li>See the different types here: https://wals.info/chapter/121</li><li>Can other things beyond adjectives and adverbs be compared - e.g. locative cases or adpositions ('closer to'), instrumental cases or adpositions ('with greater strength'), nouns ('more of a substance', 'a thing of greater size')</li><li>How do you do "cross-cutting comparisons" ("he can run faster than they can pursue me")</li><li>Can superlatives be indefinite? If yes, is this restricted to a few specific phrases? (A youngest child). How do superlatives and definiteness interact?<br /></li><li>In case you go for a typical European-style comparative construction with a word similar to 'than'</li><ul><li> Is it a preposition that governs some case?</li><li>Is a subordinating conjunction that preserves case?</li><li>Is it a bit of both with conflicting behaviors in different situations?<br /></li></ul></ul><li>How are the spatial locatives "cut out"?</li><ul><li>Does a painting hang "on" or "in" the wall?</li><li>Are there special exceptions to the general rule? ("På sjukhuset" in Swedish, where you normally are 'in a house', you are 'on the sickhouse', i.e. the hospital.) <br /></li></ul><li>When would you use directions and when would you use locations?</li><ul><li>This is not entirely trivial: German, Russian and Finnish prefer to "put things somewhere" with direction marking on 'somewhere', Swedish prefers to "put things somewhere" with location marking on 'somewhere', except conservative dialects.<br /></li></ul><li>How do reflexives work?</li><ul><li>separate marker for all persons or one unified marker?</li><li>marker on the verb or separate object?</li><ul><li>can the verb marker maybe also go on adpositions? <br /></li></ul><li>full case morphology for the reflexive pronoun or defective?</li><li>is there a reflexive possessive? <br /></li><li>does the reflexive marker only refer to the subject, or can it refer to other participants of the clause as well ('They showed him himself in a mirror, a marvel he had never encountered before")</li><li>how do reflexives operate over subclause boundaries? ("he knew that <b>his</b> father was a youngest child".)<br /></li><li>Are there reflexive possessive markers, i.e. a distinct possessive pronoun for 'he saw his car' when it's the subject's vs. when it's some other male referent's?</li><li>Are reciprocals distinct from reflexives? If so, are the answers the same to all of the above, only with distinctive markers? Are they conflated in some constructions? Or do the answers differ strongly?</li><li>Can reflexives lack an actual thing to refer to? e.g. "to know oneself is important".</li></ul><li>Definiteness</li><ul><li>Does the language encode definiteness? How? (Articles, suffixes on the noun, suffixes on adjectives, differences in congruence on the verb for definite or indefinite subjects or objects, differential case marking - e.g. definite objects take one case, indefinite ones another)</li><li>Does the language conflate specific with indefinite or with definite?</li><ul><li>Specific = 'known to speaker, but not to listener'</li><li>English conflates specific with indefinite, some languages with definite ("I am looking for a car", when I know exactly which car I am looking for <i>or </i>when I am just looking for a car that I'd fancy buying at the car store.)</li><li>Does it perchance even distinguish all three?<br /></li></ul></ul><li> Attributes in the noun phrase</li><ul><li>Are genitives a form of adjective or something else? (This can have syntactical effects, e.g. word order for adjectives vs. genitives, but also e.g. the lack of definite or indefinite articles in possessive constructions in e.g. English!)</li><li>Can genitives combine with indefinite and definite articles if such exist?</li><li>Can infinitives stand as attributes (c.f. in Swedish, 'the art of playing the violin' would be 'the art to play the violin'</li><li>Can adpositional phrases be attributes? Would the speakers prefer saying 'the roof on the house' rather than 'the house's roof'?</li></ul><li>What kind of a system of indefinite pronouns does the language have? Is it different when they stand as determiners for NPs or when they stand independently? (For more info, see <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20041118130534/http://math.berkeley.edu/~apollo/my-conlangs/mcindpro.html">this</a>.) <br /></li><li>Does the language have infinitives? How do they work? What kinds of infinitives are there?</li><ul><li>Can they take "real" subjects or do they require some kind of oblique marking on their subject? How about other arguments, such as objects?<br /></li><li>Can they take tense, aspect, moods? (Not as impossible as it might sound!)</li><li>How do they interact with verb phrases and with noun phrases and maybe with adjectives?</li><ul><li>E.g. can you have constructions like "John is easy to please" vs. "John is eager to please".</li><li>Can you have something like "I saw him run away" (or does that take a dedicated special form, or a bona fide subclause, e.g. "I saw as he ran away"?)<br /></li></ul><li>Do clauses even require a finite verb?</li><ul><li>C.f. Russian or Finnish or colloquial Finland-Swedish:</li><ul><li>"kak najti rabotu" - how find a job?</li><li>"hur hitta ett job?" - how find a job?</li><li>"miten löytää työpaikka?" - how find a job</li></ul><li>Are some auxiliaries maybe actually nouns or adjectives or adverbs? ('to me (there is) a need for ...')</li><li>Zero copulas?<br /></li></ul></ul><li>How do you <i>hedge</i> statements?</li><li>How do you express evidentiality? <br /></li><li>How do you express volition?</li><ul><li>Lexically distinct verbs for volition vs. non-volition, and maybe some verbs just don't show the distinction?</li><li>Verb forms?</li><li>Auxiliaries?</li><li>Embedding the involitional or volitional in a subclause where the main clause gets to express the volitionality?</li><li>Adverbs?</li><li>Differential subject marking?</li></ul><li>Are there quirky case things?</li><ul><li>These don't necessarily require a case system per se, but e.g. an adposition might serve just as well</li><li>How do quirky cases interact with coordination over gaps with non-quirky case stuff</li></ul><li>Differential case things? (I.e. different cases for the object convey different things about definiteness or aspect or whatever.) <br /></li><li>Numerals</li><ul><li>How are higher numbers formed?</li><li>Is there dedicated morphology for fractions? (e.g. 'half, a third, a fourth' with distinct morphology)<br /></li><li>Are there ordinals? Do 'twice, thrice, etc' have a pattern that continues? Are there collective numerals? Adverbs of group size (Fi: kahdestaan: by twos, 'together (in a group of two)'? Other numerals?<br /></li><li>Are cardinals followed by singulars or plurals? Is this distinct for different types of nouns (animate vs. inanimate, for instance)? Is it different in different cases? How does verb congruence work with this?</li><ul><li>In e.g. Finnish, verb congruence is singular unless a demonstrative pronoun or somesuch is involved, in which case the verb congruence again is plural.</li><li>In Russian, it's a mess.</li><li>In Finnish, in case the noun lacks singular forms, the numeral is also inflected for plural, and each constituent numeral of the numeral is in fact inflected for plural. This also occurs for the ordinals, so 'the twentythird (pair of) pants' in Finnish comes out as "the twentieth.plur third.plur pants", of course with each segment also inflected for the same case, etc.<br /></li></ul></ul><li>Negation</li><ul><li>Is there negative congruence (i.e. 'double negatives good') or not ('double negatives bad')?</li><li>How does the scope of the negator interact with subjects and objects, with different types of determiners?<br /></li></ul><li>Congruence</li><ul><li>What types of congruence are there? Do they break under some circumstances?<br /></li></ul><li>Coordination: how does coordination over gaps work for </li><ul><li>... verbs with a shared subject</li><li>... objects with shared verbs</li><li>... adpositions with a shared noun</li><li>... nouns with a shared adposition</li><li>... congruence when the coordinating conjunction is a disjunction ('he or she is suspect.PLUR? or suspect.masc? or suspect.fem?...)<br /></li></ul><li>How do complements of the copula work?</li><ul><li>Usually, they're not objects but in some languages they are!</li><li>In some languages, they take non-nominative forms, and in some, the form they take can signify a variety of things.</li></ul><li>Is there a standard grammar? In case the language is set in a conworld of some kind, the following questions may be of interest:<br /></li><ul><li>In what ways does this deviate from the "actual" grammar?</li><ul><li>Are there scholarly <i>mistakes </i>or <i>misunderstandings</i> in the standard grammar?</li><li>Are there scholarly <i>prejudices</i> informing some of the rules in the standard grammar?</li><li>Do the scholars lack some of the conceptual tools needed to be able to describe certain aspects of the grammar correctly?</li><li>A conlanger can naturally, by their say-so, define the language one way or another. A linguist in the real world cannot. This is an important difference to keep in mind.<br /></li></ul></ul></ul>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-61923650596113582292022-12-05T10:00:00.003-08:002022-12-05T10:06:30.966-08:00Some family terms in Ćwarmin<div style="text-align: justify;"></div><p style="text-align: left;">The basic family terms:</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">julo = <i>son</i><br />ot = <i>oldest son</i><br />zel = <i>daughter</i></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">father = <i> aru<br /></i>mother = <i>viri</i></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">brother = <i>raŋa</i><br />older brother = <i>cawot </i><br />sister = <i>zuja</i></p><p style="text-align: justify;">In older <span>Ć</span>warmin, possessive suffixes existed, but are used in very restricted contexts. However, in some lexemes, they appear as derivative elements of unclear meaning. Thus</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">-ata | -ete, formerly 1sg possessive</p><p style="text-align: left;">has lead to these terms:</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><i>raŋata </i>('my brother') = uncle<br /><i>zujata </i>('my sister') = aunt<br /><i>aruta </i>('my father') = grandfather<br /><i>virite </i>('my mother') = grandmother<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Apparently, parents referring to their siblings and parents has become a way children refer to their uncles, aunts and grandparents, and this was lexicalized. Other synonyms do exist, however. In addition:<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;"><i>aruta </i>and<i> virite </i>are sometimes used as formal address to parents.<br /><i>julata </i>and <i>zelete</i> are used by some clergymen to refer to congregants.<br /><i>cawata </i>is used by some clergymen to refer to their senior clergymen.<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">The plural forms never have the possessive suffixes in use, as the morphological complexities for that has been largely forgotten. '<i>Otata</i>', 'my oldest son' appears in some testaments and such.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Parents- and siblings-in-law also have forms such as </p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">raŋa<span>ś<br />zuja</span><span>ś</span><span></span><br />aru<span>ś<br />viri</span><span>ś</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span>In some regions, second person suffixes (-aba/-ebe) are used instead of these historical third person suffixes. Why second or third person suffixes won out in different regions is unclear.<br /></span></p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-63375779266241425072022-11-18T12:00:00.004-08:002022-11-18T12:01:12.676-08:00Detail #433: The Antideponent Verb<div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p style="text-align: justify;">Let's for a moment consider the <i>deponent verb</i>. This is a verb which lacks morphologically active forms, despite being active. This might seem a bit weird, but let us have a look at some Swedish deponent verbs.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">First, Swedish has a morphological passive, mostly formed by affixing -s to verb forms. (Swedish also has <i>two</i> periphrastic passives, but this is irrelevant for now.)</p><p style="text-align: left;">Here are some verbs which never appear without their -s:<br />andas (to breathe)<br />hoppas (to hope)<br />minnas (to remember)<br />låtsas (to pretend)<br />brås (to take after, to be similar to someone - in both cases due to family connections)<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Some of these <i>can take objects</i> (granted, a minority). Andas can take the gas which is breathed ('breathe air', or, say, the aliens of Jupiter breathe methane - <i>varelserna från Jupiter andas metan</i>). "Hoppas" can take <i>det</i> ('that, it') as its object, signifying 'I hope <i>so</i>' (but literally 'I hope that'). <i>Minnas</i> can take any person or thing or fact as its object. Låtsas often is an auxiliary with a transitive verb under it.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">In Swedish, these lack a past participle - but some do have a gerund (that morphologically looks exactly like a past participle; however, syntactical differences clarify that it indeed only is a gerund). I will warn against looking into lists of Swedish deponents, because some of them do seem to be just passives with slightly odd semantic shifts, or sometimes even just ... passives. The Swedish -s form also imho is not just a passive marker but also happens to be a reciprocal <i>and </i>an aspectual marker.<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Other languages with deponents may have other restrictions - maybe all the deponents are intransitive, or maybe a verb is only partially deponent (i.e. deponent in, say, the participles but not in the finite forms).</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Let's make up a set of features:</p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;">+ active syntactically<br />+/- transitive<br />- active finite forms<br />- active infinite forms<br />+ passive finite forms<br />+ passive infinite forms<br />- can take agent adverb (e.g. the 'was seen <b><i>by us</i></b>' part)<br /> </p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Let's use these features to consider the antideponent.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Verbs such as 'boil' in English seem to permit somewhat similar behaviors, i.e. they can be passive in meaning (or active), thus <i>passive syntactically </i>is partially true. However, English does have active finite and infinite forms for <i>boil</i>, i.e. 'to be boiled' and the participle 'boiled' itself. The active form, 'boiling' interestingly enough does serve to convey the passive meaning of 'being boiled' as well. It cannot, however, take the agent:<br /><i>the egg is boiling by me </i>is wrong, <i>I'm boiling the egg </i>is acceptable<i>.</i></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Let's inverse the above table fully:</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: justify;"><i>- active syntactically<br />+/- transitive<br />+ active finite forms<br />+ active infinite forms</i><br />- passive finite forms<br />- passive infinite forms<br />+ can take agent adverb</p><p style="text-align: justify;">The interesting bit here is the +/-transitive, and I think that's where we could distinguish this from run off the mill split-ergativity, where some verbs just happen to have an ergative-like behavior. If we restricted this so it only ever happened with <i>intransitives, </i>and the actual subject was demoted to agent adverbial, whereas the subject either is empty or a dummy pronoun, this is getting us into some interesting ground.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Another option is just simply having these as a sort of lexical restriction: <i>these verbs just don't do passive. </i>I think English maybe actually might have some of those even beyond the auxiliaries?</p><p style="text-align: justify;">A further option is of course to take something like English 'I broke the window' but only permit these two options:</p><p style="text-align: justify;">The window broke.<br />The window broke by me.<br />*I broke the window.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Once more voices are involved, some interesting options emerge, such as gaps in the voice paradigm for verbs.<br /></p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-18086178377584025972022-11-17T06:15:00.002-08:002022-11-17T06:15:09.030-08:00Detail #432: Generalized Wh-movement<div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><p style="text-align: left;">Wh-movement tends to come in two forms in conlangs, as far as I can tell: English-like or wh-in situ. Let's consider some other options! This post was inspired by some questions in the conlang mailing list.<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">1. Wh-at the end</p><p style="text-align: left;">There are, apparently, some reasons to consider this highly unlikely in languages. OTOH, it might not be <i>entirely</i> unattested.</p><p style="text-align: left;">2. Wh-in wackernagel</p><p style="text-align: left;">The Wackernagel position, i.e. the second word in a clause, seems a rather natural option.</p><p style="text-align: left;">3. Wh-next-to-verb</p><p style="text-align: left;">Both the position after and before the verb seem to make sense as possible attractors for the interrogative pronoun.</p><p style="text-align: left;">4. Discontinuous wh <br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;">There are further complications we can consider, such as discontinuous-wh. I find this most likely for <i>two </i>types of interrogatives: determiners and adjectival interrogatives ('what type of a', 'yes/no-query determiner', 'which', 'of what qualities', etc).</p><p style="text-align: left;">These actually occur in some Slavic languages with interrogatives like "kakoj" and "kotoryj". </p><p style="text-align: left;">Anyways, discontinuous-wh can probably be combined with <i>any</i> of the three previous forms, and in different ways - maybe the head noun is moved instead and the wh remains? Maybe vice versa. <i>Different movements</i> for both parts of the interrogative noun phrase seems unlikely, but parts of the noun phrase may well be pulled along with the interrogative particle.<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">Let's imagine "Q" is an interrogative particle that forms a yes/no-question focused on the noun it belongs to. Congruence makes it clear it pairs with "house" in this imagined language, marked by roman lowercase numerals picked at random. We can now imagine that Q pulls along pertinent 'factors' along with it:<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Q.iii red.iii you saw house.iii?<br />did you see the <i>red</i> house?</p><p style="text-align: left;">Verbal interrogative markers seem somewhat more likely to be discontinuous - just consider the English polar question.<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-11220070031403358892022-09-17T07:05:00.000-07:002022-09-17T07:05:15.201-07:00Relative Clauses in Dairwueh<p> I have previously given a <a href="http://miniatureconlangs.blogspot.com/2017/06/dairwueh-relative-clauses.html">short introduction to relative clauses in Dairwueh</a>. Let's up the ante a bit.</p><p><b>Resumptive pronouns in relative attributes</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Since the relativizing verb does not carry (much) information about the syntactical role that the referent has in the subclause, resumptive pronouns are often used. Some dialects and varieties of Dairwueh have a resumptive pronoun stem ner- (from a historical nez, the fricative popping back in some forms). Most use the neuter pronoun stem, but inflected for gender - the capital literary form specifically uses the t-stem version of the nominative and accusative.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">A peculiar thing about the resumptive pronoun is that it can even be used for the subject of a subsequent subclause, as if this were how to form two subclauses in English:</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">the man who plays the guitar and he sings.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Weird restriction</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Consider an utterance like 'don't reject applicants for being too boring'. In English this cannot be rephrased as 'don't reject applicants who are too boring', since this alters the meaning significantly. A strict reading has the rephrasing signify that no one that is too boring must be rejected, whereas the first only means that boringness must not influence the decision.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">In Dairwueh, use of the irrealis form of the subordinating verb is used, among other things, for this particular structure.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">The irrealis form can also be used to communicate a purely irrealis subclause, e.g. 'those who would do so-and-so'. To enforce the "purely irrealis" reading, a resumptive pronoun is used. To enforce the purely 'for being X' reading,the subordinate verb may be irrealis instead of infinitive - or in some varieties, a demonstrative pronoun is placed before the relative verb.<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Finally, the irrealis form of the relative verb can also express an indirect question: I wonder the men who will sing -> I wonder whether the men will sing.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Use of the interrogative pronoun before a relative subclause requires irrealis in some dialects, and requires irrealis for present tense in many dialects.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Adjectives have a similar function as well when using the irrealis participle marker e-...-šis on them.<br /></p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-79296723335547974382022-08-29T11:28:00.010-07:002022-09-09T11:41:06.591-07:00Things I would like to research or develop<p style="text-align: justify;">A while ago, in a post I said something like "more research required" regarding a particular
feature of Swedish grammar. This made me think of things I'd like to research,
but which I probably never will. These would all be at least somewhat
original research. <br /></p><p><b>Linguistics</b></p><p>A variety of tiny syntactical and typological questions that have occurred to me over the years:</p><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>Does the Swedish relative pronoun or relativizer "som" permit exceptional coordination over gaps?</li><li>How uniform are the rules for partitive-vs-accusative among speakers of Finnish?</li><li>What case do speakers of Swedish prefer for the complement of a copula in contexts where the subject of the copula is a non-subject syntactically? ("We will let you be you").</li><li>How does congruence and number work in coordinated-over-gaps compounds in Swedish?</li><li>Do speakers of English naturally prefer the accusative for complements of the copula? I am pretty sure that examples like "it is difficult to be me" and a few others showcase that accusative in fact is the natural case that everyone prefers, and that most "it is I"-speakers have a cultivated and artificial case selection that fails whenever a single complication arises. The test could be one of "select the correct case" with sentences with a gap, and measuring response times. Needs to start out with simple clauses and progress into increasingly long ones, with some of them there only to be able to calibrate for expected response time. Comparably complex structures also need to be used.</li><li>Syntactical differences between standard Finland Swedish and middle Ostrobothnian.</li><li>Figuring out the full set of sound changes of Björkö dialect. (Conlang idea: apply all these sound changes to late proto-norse and create a 'fully björkö' dialect.)</li><li>How common is it for existential statements to have quirks in terms of congruence, case marking, word order, ...)</li><li>To what extent are 'than' and 'as' (and 'än' and 'som' as element of comparison) <i>objectively speaking </i>prepositions in the grammars of speakers of English and Swedish - even among those who claim they exclusively are conjunctions.<br /></li><li>To what extent can we find evidence that the rule against definite form after 'denna/detta/dessa' in prescriptivist Swedish is made-up to spite southern and southwestern Swedes?</li><ul><li>Swedish has two patterns for forming "this": "denna" and "den här". (Both are further inflected for gender and number.) 'Den här' is always followed by the definite form of the adjective as well as the definite form of the noun. 'Denna' is - in prescriptive usage - followed by definite adjectives but indefinite nouns.</li><li>In texts predating the middle of the 18th century, you find variation on this: both the definite and indefinite noun are used in the nominative. (Other cases only take the definite.)</li><li>'Denna' is predominantly used in the south and southwest, 'den här' is predominantly used everywhere else.</li><li>"denna + indef" quickly gains ground in books printed in the "den här"-area towards the end of the 18th century, and basically becomes mandatory in writing in the 19th century, but "denna + def" never goes extinct in the south and southwest.</li><li>There seems to be at least some 18th century correspondences between publishers that hint at this actually being an intentional change to turn southern Swedish "wrong".<br /></li></ul></ul><p><b>Theology</b></p><p><br /></p><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>It is my firm belief that even many apparently philosemitic Christian
clergymen in their sermons plant the seeds for antisemitism. The
research would require the following steps:<br /><div style="margin-left: 40px;">Finding a corpus of sermons and sermon-like texts that in one way or another discuss Judaism and the Jews, and their role and their beliefs from a Christian p.o.v. In this corpus, statements that misrepresent Jewish beliefs in ways that may lead to negative perceptions about Judaism, and statements that use Jews as a negative example - when similar negative examples can be found within Christianity itself - have to be found, and the "actual" fact about Judaism needs to be verified. (Examples: does Judaism teach that all who are born non-Jewish will automatically burn in hell? I have heard this claim from Christians. I know it is false. It is often presented in order to prop up certain Christian dogmas and to make Christianity seem the compassionate alternative.) <br /></div></li><ul><li>The way in which such mistaken statements nurture antisemitism needs to
be evaluated in some way, and the effect on listeners - both believers
and non-believers alike - need to be estimated. </li><li>Some measure as to how
common this is would either reassure me that it's just a few bad apples, or confirm my own experience that it's fairly common.<br /></li></ul><li>it would also interest me to research the use of fabricated Jewish traditions to prop up Christian theology. It is not entirely uncommon for Christian preachers to claim that there is an ancient Jewish tradition about so-and-so, and this tradition explains some detail in the NT or even later Christian traditions. Sometimes it might hold up, most of the time it doesn't. <br /></li></ul><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>It would greatly interest me to find examples of humour in the Bible, in the Talmud, in the midrashes and targums, in the baraitha literature, and even in more general literature from ancient Mesopotamia - that have failed to be identified as humour. I am convinced that the cultural gulf between modern humans and those of antiquity is so great that we may fail to appreciate just how some of the statements in the literature mentioned above very well may been intended as jokes to convey some point. Many Jewish scholars - and even fairly "average yeshiva-level" students seem to be aware of some of these jokes, but secular scholars often seem to fail to spot such jokes. I am not saying this is a universal problem, but I get the impression that there may be a fair share of humour that no one's identified as such. It is not inconceivable that greek philosophers as well have jokes that have been missed.<br /></li></ul><p><b>Music</b></p><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>Tymoczko has (and possibly other theorists have) identified that modulation and chord progressions are very similar phenomena. He doubts that listeners could manage keeping any kind of track of a third similar level. Using, say, pentatonic scales embedded in diatonic scales embedded in uneven extended meantone chromatic scales could provide a way of creating exactly that structure. Extended meantone chromaticism could also be used for extending the chord_progression-modulation complex to a chord_progression-modulation-metamodulation complex.</li><ul><li>What kind of notion of "keeping track of" do we have in mind?</li></ul><li>To what extent can listeners appreciate functional harmony using isoharmonic triads that are not predominantly 4:5:6 (and its utonal version). Do they need to be rooted at powers of 2? Does 8:11:14 do a better job than 6:7:8, 7:9:11, 7:10:13 or 9:11:13 <i>because</i> 8:11:14 is rooted at 2³? How important is root motion of 3/2 (i.e. by perfect fifths)? (I believe the tritone substitution G7 → C 🠮 G7 → F# shows that a root motion of a fifth is not necessary.) (Normally, the tritone substitution is given from p.o.v. of the tonic, so G7 → C 🠮 Db7 → C, but sometimes, it's good to think of it in other ways as well.)</li><li>Can asymmetric chords in the wholetone scale help facilitate a functional tonality in it?</li><li>Temperaments such as <i>mavila</i> warp familiar relationships. Can this warping be 'eased in' by modulating into successively more warped regions of a very warped temperament while <i>fully</i> maintaining the relationships - i.e. the relation between root and third still feels as though it passes through the cycle of fifths in the same way?<br /></li><li>Figuring out how to use sus<span class="music-symbol" style="font-family: Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode;"><a class="image" href="https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/File:Arabic_music_notation_half_sharp.svg" title="half sharp"><img alt="half sharp" data-file-height="200" data-file-width="106" height="12" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e3/Arabic_music_notation_half_sharp.svg/6px-Arabic_music_notation_half_sharp.svg.png" width="6" /></a>4-chords as an extension to normal harmonic praxis? (Notice the </span><span class="music-symbol" style="font-family: Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode;"><a class="image" href="https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/File:Arabic_music_notation_half_sharp.svg" title="half sharp"><img alt="half sharp" data-file-height="200" data-file-width="106" height="12" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e3/Arabic_music_notation_half_sharp.svg/6px-Arabic_music_notation_half_sharp.svg.png" width="6" /></a> - not</span><span class="music-symbol" style="font-family: Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode;"><span class="music-sharp">♯.) Other uses of quartertones as subtle additions to harmonic praxis are also of some interest.<br /></span></span></li><li><span class="music-symbol" style="font-family: Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode;"><span class="music-sharp">Can we somehow formalize the "similarity" between the use of chords in functional harmony and jins in maqam?<br /></span></span></li></ul><p><b> Maths and CS</b><br /></p><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>How well can games make players get used to weird geometries and topologies?</li><li>Can a player discern things about the geometry of a game from hearing warped intervals in the music that directly correspond to the geometry? </li><li>Comparing the complexity of a variety of geometrical problems in different types of geometries.<br /></li></ul><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Design of things</b></p><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>A string instrument with plastic frets ('fishing line'). The frets are attached to two beams that are easy to attach to the neck. At least one of the beams needs to be small enough to fit under the strings. <br /></li></ul><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Software design:</b></p><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>Some cursed versions of gomoku.</li><li>Improve my pitch perception practice app</li><li>Some basic topology/geometry toolkit, especially with the intention of visualizing some of the topologies and geometries present in microtonal theory<br /></li><li>A set of scripts that utilize some sound change applier and <i>git</i> to make managing multiple a priori conlangs easy. (Separate repos for sound changes, for input vocabulary, and for output. Also, the sound change applier can parse certain extra commands for splitting a language, for borrowing vocab from a different language at some particular step, etc)<br /></li><li>An AI for writing microtonal harmony and counterpoint.</li><li>A duolingo-like web engine for conlangers to use.</li><li>Some games that utilize weird topologies and such.</li><li>A game with very forgetful terrain generation<br /></li></ul><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="margin-left: 40px;"><b></b></p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4560198985086171460.post-76244017568330764782022-08-22T11:36:00.002-07:002022-11-19T00:30:23.086-08:00A Conreligious Practice: Alphabetic Thread Manipulation<div style="text-align: justify;"></div><p style="text-align: justify;">Among some of the more ritualistic Bryatesle-Dairwueh religions, a devotional practice involving strings of wool and the hand has developed.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Strings (regionally, this varies from ribbons of about half an inch width to actual strings) are wrapped around the hand in order to imitate the shapes of letters.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Words are written through repeated application of this. This is done in order to emphasize important words in a prayer or meditation. Very few would write an entire sentence this way, but sometimes, groups collaborate in writing full hymns on their hands.<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Varieties</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">The first <b> </b>main difference is between ribbon-users and string-users. Naturally, ribbons and strings behave slightly differently, with ribbons not permitting quite as sharp 'turns', thus leading to significant differences in the notional 'fonts' they use.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Not a single tradition</i> tolerates both ribbons and strings; they all are strictly one or the other. All manner of justifications for their favoured type exist. Their opinion of the <i>other</i> group is not violently hostile, but always somewhat negative. However, negative opinions may exist between different groups that share the ribbon (or string), and sometimes over purely technical details: linen vs. wool, blue vs. red, patterned or plain ribbon, woven or crotcheted ribbons, single thread or three threads? All threads of the same colour or different colours?<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Ribbon-users tend to have different colours on the two sides, and they may consider which side is visible to be of some importance. Ribbons can also use folds that are difficult to form with strings. Strings can have tighter loops.<br /><br />Weaving beneath and above fingers, forming angles, using the palm, etc are all parts of this. Both sides of the hand are used in some varieties, whereas in some, only one side is used.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">In some traditions, letters are also tied with strings around the hands of the dead, usually one letter on top of the other, so that the outermost letter is the first letter of the word. Which words are used tends to vary strongly.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Really strict beliefs</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Although these practices are far from universal, in some areas they are considered important. Special importance is ascribed to the letters tied on the hands of the dead, and they are often considered passwords for the afterlife. (The tradition, however, rather seems to have originated as a way of conveying messages to angels and relatives and God himself, rather than as passwords.)</p><p style="text-align: justify;">This of course may cause problems for people who lose a hand or who have lost fingers. Losing a hand in such a way that the hand is physically 'available' often leads to performing this ritual before burying the hand. Some traditions are strict about which hand the letters should be formed on, and so losing 'the other hand' may be less important. In traditions where which particular hand it is doesn't matter so much, it still happens that people bury the first hand with letters in case the other were to be entirely lost in the future.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Loss of fingers may also cause issues, and grafting wooden sticks into the hands of the dead as a solution occurs. Entire wooden hands are sometimes used.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Further developments</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Hand-shaped growths on trees<b> </b>sometimes get similar words tied o nthem. These are not of a sign-post nature (signposts are either cut out or chiseled or some other method), but purely ritualistic. Such growths are sometimes also buried as a message to the other side.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>Miekkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03254032879671190589noreply@blogger.com0