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Listening to an installment of the podcast Lexicon Valley about constructed languages, I learned of one called Loglan. It's an attempt to make a language as logical and free from ambiguity as possible. This ambition makes for a very complex language because there has to be a one word, one meaning relationship and a syntactical way to make every phrase and sentence univocal. For example, "and" seems to indicate a pretty simple notion. But it comes in different flavors. For example, it can tie two things that do or are something with each other together or two things that are or do the same thing separately. "Mary and her mom swam across the pool" vs "Mary and her mom had Mrs. Smith for third grade." Each of these English "and's" would require in different word in Loglan.
What particularly got me thinking is that our "and" can couple both simultaneous and sequential events. "Mary walked from one end of the block to the other and counted all the sidewalk squares" vs "Mary walked into town and bought a new coat." This distinction reminded me of something about the Khmer language that has nagged at me from time to time. "Neng" is the Cambodian word for "and," but it can also be a future marker like "will" or "be going to" in English. Mary neng her mom go to the market" vs "Mary neng go to the market." I could never figure out what shared meaning underlay these two uses. But if you think of "and" as a sequencer as in "Mary walked into town and bought a new coat," then it is marking "bought" as in the future with respect to "walked."
Further, if you look at how Khmer expresses the past, it's often with a perfective particle, that is, a word that's added to the end of a phrase or sentence. This word is "hawy" and I think it's basic meaning is to indicate that whatever came before in the phrase has been fully realized. Sometimes it can best be translated by making the English verb the simple past or the present perfect. Sometimes it can be translated as "already." And sometimes as an emphatic like "very" or "really." I think "hawy" works in Khmer approximately the way "le" works in Mandarin, both in syntactical disposition and in range of meaning.
Anyhow, what I thought was interesting was the notion of time-indicating words having some underlying broader meaning that resulted in their having other meanings that are, at first glance,
unrelated.
What particularly got me thinking is that our "and" can couple both simultaneous and sequential events. "Mary walked from one end of the block to the other and counted all the sidewalk squares" vs "Mary walked into town and bought a new coat." This distinction reminded me of something about the Khmer language that has nagged at me from time to time. "Neng" is the Cambodian word for "and," but it can also be a future marker like "will" or "be going to" in English. Mary neng her mom go to the market" vs "Mary neng go to the market." I could never figure out what shared meaning underlay these two uses. But if you think of "and" as a sequencer as in "Mary walked into town and bought a new coat," then it is marking "bought" as in the future with respect to "walked."
Further, if you look at how Khmer expresses the past, it's often with a perfective particle, that is, a word that's added to the end of a phrase or sentence. This word is "hawy" and I think it's basic meaning is to indicate that whatever came before in the phrase has been fully realized. Sometimes it can best be translated by making the English verb the simple past or the present perfect. Sometimes it can be translated as "already." And sometimes as an emphatic like "very" or "really." I think "hawy" works in Khmer approximately the way "le" works in Mandarin, both in syntactical disposition and in range of meaning.
Anyhow, what I thought was interesting was the notion of time-indicating words having some underlying broader meaning that resulted in their having other meanings that are, at first glance,
unrelated.
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