Kran nouns, both amateur and pro

[Rigwyn]

And "worser" is even worse ...

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.

"Worser" is is not used because we've been taught as children that this is wrong... But without really understanding why.

I think there's a technical reason...I'll look it up in more detail later. Typically we'll say something like "even worse" or something like that.

[gonger]

And "worser" is even worse ...

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.

"Worser" is is not used because we've been taught as children that this is wrong... But without really understanding why.

I think there's a technical reason...I'll look it up in more detail later. Typically we'll say something like "even worse" or something like that.

The English language has evolved quite a bit since The Bard wrote more than 500 years ago. Some very quick research seems to show that the form "worser" was common up to the early 17th century before being replaced by today's "worse". This happened probably out of human laziness, as many linguistic changes do: "worse" is shorter and easier to pronounce than "worser".

[LigH]

Blame the development of chewing gum for the invention of the term "ain't"

[Aeghiss]

Well, I'm no English-speaking native but... Isn't 'worse' simply an irregular form and nothing more ? Worse is a comparative already, so I think it doesn't make sense to say worser. I mean, you wouldn't say, for example, that an anvil is "heavierer" than a hammer.

[gonger]

Well, I'm no English-speaking native but... Isn't 'worse' simply an irregular form and nothing more ? Worse is a comparative already, so I think it doesn't make sense to say worser. I mean, you wouldn't say, for example, that an anvil is "heavierer" than a hammer.

I am not a native speaker of English, either, but I studied English Language and Literature, starting more or less with Chaucer (14th century).
Half of the answer is in my previous post already - "worse" and "worser" were apparently used as synonyms for a couple of hundred years, before "worser" disappeared. Today "worser" would be considered as a double comparative, like your "heavierer" example.
And, yes, the whole thing is irregular. A regular sequence of positive - comparative - superlative goes like this: nice - nicer - nicest. Among the very few exceptions are bad - worse - worst and good - better - best.

Apologies to the Kran community, but I did not start this thread deviation! 

[Can-ned Food]

During a recent Meet The Devs event, I brought this up and was told that I should submit it to Settings.  However, I can't see an email or other method of contact anywhere.

Anyways, I was thinking that I should resurrect my proposal first.  Response in the past has been mixed:  some people were pleased that I made the endeavor to catalogue and to syntactically diversify the Kran nouns and pronouns; some did not seem to have any problems with it, but were not very enthusiastic either; others complained about the phonetics.  Of those that complained, I did not get many suggestions for how to improve my proposal, although I did get a few who mentioned what they did not favor.  I guess people did the best they could.

First, I'll post a revised edition of the proposal.  I took several comments into consideration; overall, I made it much more systematic and consistent with kranic phonetics.

		subjective	objective, directly or indirectly
	nominative, singular	kra (she, he)	kran (her, him)
	nominative, plural	kre (they)	kren (them)
	possessive, determiner, singular	kral (her, his)
	possessive, determiner, plural	krel (their)
	possessive, genitive, singular		kraln (hers, his)
	possessive, genitive, plural		kreln (theirs)
	reflexive, singular		kran-self (herself, himself)
	reflexive, plural		kren-selves (themselves)

Kran

• Kre know the difference between a species and a people, but kre do not distinguish for kren-selves.  Other races will occasionally use the uppercase letters to capitalize ‘Kran’ when making the distinction, but this is foreign to kren; articular syntax will suffice.
  Ergo, their nouns are indistinguishable from their pronouns.  However, in English, the only way to distinguish objective and subjective nouns is grammatical:  Therefore, to accomodate for modality of English speakers, use of the subjective noun ‘kra’ is interchangeable with the objective form if it is preceeded with a particle ‘a’ or ‘the’.

Gem

• may be used as a courtesy title generic to any kran

Gemma

• kra who has given birth to a child kran — thus a title for elders
• Also, improperly used as a blanket courtesy title, much like ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’.

gemmor

• parent — familiar form

gemmite

• an unborn kran fetus

gemling

• a young kran, especially the newly birthed (similar to ‘newling’)
• child — familiar or affectionate form

vitalith

• analogous to ‘flesh’

Some of these may sound unfamiliar.  That is to be expected.  Kre have a gemmatory gender which no sentients on Earth have, meaning that there are no pronouns in any Earthly language which recognize their alien gender, meaning that was no pattern on which to base these pronouns.  Furthermore, they will be unfamiliar until people become familiar enough with them to use them correctly.
All I can say is to look at the English equivalents beside each kranic pronoun:  English already has at least as much variety with its pronouns as does this proposal.  What would English look like if you replaced the pronouns shown in one cell of the table above with those of another?

If it is not already obvious by the number of times I continue to bring this up, I really do think that something like this is necessary.

If anyone with authority in the PlaneShift Settings has gotten this far:  what do you think?  How can this be improved well enough to be formally included?

[Dilihin]

      subjective   objective, directly or indirectly
nominative, singular   kra (she, he)    kran (her, him)
nominative, plural   kre (they)   kren (them)
possessive, determiner, singular   kral (her, his)
possessive, determiner, plural   krel (their)
possessive, genitive, singular      kraln (hers, his)
possessive, genitive, plural      kreln (theirs)
reflexive, singular      kran-self (herself, himself)
reflexive, plural      kren-selves (themselves)

Do we really need all of these? I mean i don't have any sort of doctorship in english but do we have something this race specific like do we have nominative plural for cats like cets? It doesn't seen to make any sense to have race specific. Having gender specific eg. he/she/kra does make sense but do we need those others for real.

gemmite
an unborn kran fetus

I'm really nitpicking here but does Kran even have fetuses? If there isn't a word for those maybe adding a word for that aswell?  maybe Kratus lmao

[Volki]

It. They. Them. Whatever.

[Can-ned Food]

Hey, thanks for responding.  Actually, I had a question for you which I'll ask later in this reply.

Personally, as a writer (and with some knowledge of engineering and an interest in linguistics), I find that pronouns leave much to be desired.  They could be used as ancillary nouns which serve to describe aspects of their target in a manner that is not fully utilized by many languages.  There are a few which do have many more cases than most; I'll let those readers who are interested do a few quick searches of their favorite information resources.

None of the plural pronouns need be formally accepted in the Settings; that would be acceptable:  I made them simply for the sake of consistency.  You could use ‘they’ et alia when refering to kren — I mean kran.
However, all of the other pronouns are necessary… well, let's make up an example:  say that there are only three pronouns, ‘she’, ‘her’, and ‘herself’ — much like with ‘kra’, ‘kras’, and ‘kraself’.  How would that change a few sentences? 

She went to her home on the beach.  There was a new mat before the door, but it was not her.  She said aloud to herself, “Now, that is strange!”

You would need to insert a new phrase and compound that sentence to make it intelligible, of course: 

There was a new mat before the door, but it did not belong to her.

You could just also

She went to home of she on the beach.  There was a new mat before the door, but she did not own it.  She said aloud to the self of she, “Now, that is strange!”

And, so on.  Increasing the flexibility of language allows for more nuance in expression and better narrative voice; we should resist the tendancy to simplify things when the losses outweigh the gains.

Now, I had a question for you:  with an older post in this thread, you said that ‘kraselves’ sounded better to you than did ‘kranselves’; does that have something to do with Finnish vowels?  I don't know much about Finnish phonology, so I don't know how frequently the ‘ns’ combination occurs.

p.s.  There is no need to vary the noun ‘cats’ the way that you did; in my proposal, an ‘e’ is used in the plural forms because kran — there, I used the old form! — don't make sibilants very well.  ‘cats’ is already the plural form of ‘cat’.

p.p.s.

gemmite
an unborn kran fetus

I'm really nitpicking here but does Kran even have fetuses? If there isn't a word for those maybe adding a word for that aswell?  maybe Kratus lmao

Well, in the background history of my kran, I explored gemming and reproduction of kran.  Also, if you look at the books in Jayose's house of Tomes and Librams, you will read one — if i remember correctly — which talks about how the baby kran forms inside the gemmor — or gemma, if you prefer.  Yes, there is a fetus which emerges through the abdomen; in my story, the gemmor was translucent, and so you could see the ‘gemmite’ through kral — kras, if you prefer — vitalith.

Again, thank you for your useful comments, Dihilin.  Do not think that I do not appreciate them simply because I disagree — although, as you say, the plural cases could certainly be cut from the proposal if people don't like the vowel change.

[Dilihin]

Now, I had a question for you:  with an older post in this thread, you said that ‘kraselves’ sounded better to you than did ‘kranselves’; does that have something to do with Finnish vowels?  I don't know much about Finnish phonology, so I don't know how frequently the ‘ns’ combination occurs.

Well, it could be. After several secondsof thinking i couldn't figure any word with 'ns' combination so i suppose it's not that often. But most propably it's just me being me since now i'm really confident kranselves is way better for it's consistency and makes way more sence.

Again, thank you for your useful comments, Dihilin.  Do not think that I do not appreciate them simply because I disagree — although, as you say, the plural cases could certainly be cut from the proposal if people don't like the vowel change.

Thanks for you, good that actually someone has the effort to think about the nouns and whatnot language things. You said you are intrested in linguistics? Ever considered about the language projects in the wiki?

[netforce10]

as a simple hobbyist my thought would be as follows:

personally I would simplify it to at least the following:

	subject:	object:
nominative singulare:	kra(he, she)	kran(him, her)
nominative plural:	they(they)	them(them)
possessive determiner singular:	kral(his, her)
possessive determiner plural:	their(their)
possessive genitive singular:		krals(his, hers)
possessive genitive plural:		theirs
reflexive singular:		kranself, kraself(himself, herself)
reflexive plural:		themselves(themselves)

we don't really need a special plural for kran in my opinion, I would also replace kraln with krals, given that 'ln' isn't really a common sound in english I think which means that it would be likely to drift away from that pronunciation even if it was used. Alternatively kral and kraln could both be replaced with kras.

I would also remove the '-' in kran-self to fit better with himself and herself, I do see however how "kran-self" is quite a bit clearer than "kranself"

I would also be a fan of merging kra with kran and kre with kren. Because using the same pronoun for subject and object seems more kran-like to me but I don play a kran so take that how you will.

All I can say is to look at the English equivalents beside each kranic pronoun:  English already has at least as much variety with its pronouns as does this proposal.  What would English look like if you replaced the pronouns shown in one cell of the table above with those of another?

The issue with this reasoning is that each time you can reapply that, every time you do it adds more pronouns and more complexity. different pronouns serve mainly, according to what I observe and my conlanging, to differentiate without decribing exactly who you're talking about. So the less pronouns you have the more often you need to describe who you talk about but the more pronouns you have the more cumbersome it gets. in short, I think we have the amount of pronouns we have because it's just what naturally followed from balancing of it's users. Now in Planeshift that balance may be at a different point so perhaps we would indeed have more pronouns.

[Can-ned Food]

Well, I too am something of a hobbyist.  I'm not much of a studied linguist.

Before I go any further discussing, I thought that it was time for me to explain some of my reasoning.

There is at least one book which uses the pronoun ‘kra’ in a way which seemed incorrect to me:

Konroran's desire pushed kra so hard that sleep was something that was rarely seen.

  So, I then began thinking about what would be the objective form of the pronoun.  I wondered why their pronoun so nearly resembled the name of their species.  I figured that they had no pronouns, exactly, but a form of inflecting nouns which indicated case in the same way that pronouns do in English.
A few faltering attempts later, I figured it was something like this:  ‘kran’ is the objective form of the noun, and ‘kra’ the subjective form.

The absence of the ‘S’ in my latest revision is indicative of the fact that I've never seen it in a Kranic name.  It occurs in Lemurian names, but I figure that any difference is accounted as an accent, rather than a dialect, and is a difference of phonemes which do not cause collision.

I personally like the ‘ln’ combination, and I use it in a few of my own conlangs.  It could be ‘lg’ if that seems more kranish.

The hyphens were only there to separate the English word ‘self’ from the other piece.  Use would be at the discretion and preference of the writer.

However, as you see with English, I did misrepresent the diversity earlier in this thread.  There are fewer forms for each case of the singular pronouns than there are grammatical functions.  So long as people use intelligble grammar, the modern, contemporary pronouns in English serve well enough.
Of course, English has much more rigid grammatical requirements than Latin, for example, which declension for all its nouns.

Homonyms in the table of pronouns can be used in a grammatic syntax — but with caveats.
I didn't want any because it seemed demeaning to kran.
You will need to ensure that the sentence is formed in a manner that cannot confuse metaphor, subject, or object.
I wanted to go on about different constructions, and how they avoid or risk multiple interpretations, but I decided against that.  I will say that anyone can see from my tables where the English pronouns have homonyms and where they do not.

With my proposals — especially with the latest one, — I figured that would be better for me to begin big and trim it down.

So far, I think more people here are in favor of simply using the plural pronouns paronymic with ‘they’ as more of a catch–all than it is already — something I don't quite favor, but hey:  I'll say that something gets lost in the translation.  After all, they don't speak English or any other Earthly language in Yliakum:  Kranic–Lemurian is being translated for our convenience, much like Tolkien did with Westron.

SUMMARY

Here is the table of pronouns as they seem to be used now:

		subjective	objective, directly or indirectly
	nominative, singular	kra (she, he)	kra (her, him)
	possessive, determiner, singular	kras (her, his)
	possessive, genitive, singular		kras (hers, his)
	reflexive, singular		kraself (herself, himself)

Taking criticisms in to consideration, my revised proposal would be:

		subjective	objective, directly or indirectly
	nominative, singular	kra (she, he)	kran (her, him)
	nominative, plural	they	them
	possessive, determiner, singular	kral (her, his)
	possessive, determiner, plural	their
	possessive, genitive, singular		krac (hers, his)
	possessive, genitive, plural		theirs
	reflexive, singular		kran-self (herself, himself)
	reflexive, plural		themselves

It pretty much looks like the one as suggested by Netforce10.

Those elements which I think to be inarguably necessary are these:

• The objective form ‘kran’ — most languages have that distinction, which helps to distinguish between the passive and the active format, and I think Kranic–Lemurian deserves the same distinction, too.
• The change of the ‘S’ to something else.  Both ‘L’ and ‘C’ occur in Kranic names, and I take the ‘C’ to be a alveolar or palatal fricative — not simply another letter for the same sound as ‘K’.  The phonetics of ‘L’ seem somehow possessive–ish to me, and ‘C’ is not too different in its phonetics.
  My proposal has both ‘kral’ and ‘krac’, but other people can use either interchangeably and I shall personally — in my “headcanon”, if you will — see that as unfamiliarity with the Kran–Lemur language.  I will have each of my characters, those who speak Kranic–Lemurian well, know and use my proposal regardless.

In regards to the ultimate statement in your reply,

different pronouns serve mainly, according to what I observe and my conlanging, to differentiate without decribing exactly who you're talking about.

That is one function of pronouns in most languages — as a convenient handle, — but, as I described above in this reply, I was figuring that there is no pronoun per se in Kranic–Lemurian as there is in English.

[netforce10]

Those elements which I think to be inarguably necessary are these:

• The objective form ‘kran’ — most languages have that distinction, which helps to distinguish between the passive and the active format, and I think Kranic–Lemurian deserves the same distinction, too.
• The change of the ‘S’ to something else.  Both ‘L’ and ‘C’ occur in Kranic names, and I take the ‘C’ to be a alveolar or palatal fricative — not simply another letter for the same sound as ‘K’.  The phonetics of ‘L’ seem somehow possessive–ish to me, and ‘C’ is not too different in its phonetics.
  My proposal has both ‘kral’ and ‘krac’, but other people can use either interchangeably and I shall personally — in my “headcanon”, if you will — see that as unfamiliarity with the Kran–Lemur language.  I will have each of my characters, those who speak Kranic–Lemurian well, know and use my proposal regardless.

since they're inarguable points  , I'll nevertheless argue about them.

Personally, doing something the same way as other languages is a bit dull, ofcourse there's a limit to the distinct features a language should have however.
And as you've mentioned kra  is already used as an objective pronoun so personally I would be a fan of keeping it. Another alternative is that instead of inflection they used grammatical markers(see japanese for example), which would fit why both the subjective and objective 'pronoun' is 'kra'. We would need to explain why it was dropped however considering that it's stated that Common is the kran and lemur language and not a mishmash of it and the other languages, so that isn't a likely option.

As to the second point if it's a voiceless alveolar fricative then 's' would seem a somewhat close representation,
likewise if it's a voiced alveolar fricative then 'z' might be closest,
Voiceless palatal fricative: 'j'
Voiced palatal fricative is a bit harder but 'sh', 'ch' or 'sj' or something else depending on how the pronunciation is exactly?
even if in Yliakum they use c, k, l or any other letter for it, then it might still be preferable to use one of the aforementioned letters to more closely resemble the sound in a way similar to english, that way there's less 'confusion' about how things are pronounced. Personally I'm just really not a fan of using c to represent an s sound within english writing(even though I tend to use it for 's' like sounds in my conlangs)

I figured that they had no pronouns, exactly, but a form of inflecting nouns which indicated case in the same way that pronouns do in English.

The consequence of that however is that all/a subset of nouns would follow an inflection scheme, which is fine but personally I would rather have Common be closely tied to English except for some vocab(for obvious reasons). Because that way there's no translation that would happen between us and our characters(save for when they speak a different language).

The absence of the ‘S’ in my latest revision is indicative of the fact that I've never seen it in a Kranic name.  It occurs in Lemurian names, but I figure that any difference is accounted as an accent, rather than a dialect, and is a difference of phonemes which do not cause collision.

Supposedly the two races have lived together long enough(and only very shortly separate beforehand) that there wasn't any difference in language between the two, hence if 's' occurs in lemurian names and not in kranic names then that must be a difference in subculture or simply preference. However living closely kran would have the phoneme in their repertoire, alternatively most kra might not physically be able to speak the 's' of lemurs correctly. In that case it is quite likely that the lemur population might have dropped the phoneme(which they seemingly haven't) or simply as you say there is a difference in accent in which case it would be likely that the other races might actually be using the 's' phoneme where kran would use their variant. Leading non-kran to possibly say kras where as a kran would say krac. Which imo is fine in and of itself since it adds a distinction between the races.

I personally like the ‘ln’ combination, and I use it in a few of my own conlangs.  It could be ‘lg’ if that seems more kranish.

Personally, I too like both, just not mixed in english. If you were writing a language that's completely separate from english then I really wouldn't have any problems with any of your proposals as all seems well and nice, however because it's essentially, by necessity, english with added vocab I find it preferably to not add more phonemes or letter combinations where it can be avoided.

edit:
Something of note btw is that, according to the wiki, the Lemur/Xacha(obsolete merged into Lemur) 'alphabet' contains 149 glyphs although that includes '>' and the like. Some glyphs represent a single letter while others seem to represent more than one. That said it's probably safe to assume it's not canon.

[Can-ned Food]

Note that I formatted text throughout in bold.  Don't take this as an offensive tactic; I was attempting to make certain key statements stand out from the surrounding text for ease of reading and reference.

English, which has some homonyms in its pronouns, already has at least that difference:
he + she | him + her.
Using a new objective pronoun would not be that difficult for people to learn.  [If you want to pretend that Kranic–Lemurian grammar conveniently does not differ from English, then it could have that at least.

There are many situations where English could make due with only ‘he’ and ‘she’, with no ‘him’ and ‘her’, where the result is intelligible but seemingly inept, like a pidgin or yokel-ish.
Here's one example of a sentence which doesn't use grammatical markers or context:  “the disease injures (him|he) with pain.”  It could be saying that the disease uses pain or that it only afflicts those who already have pain.  There are ways to structure that statement which do not rely on the pronoun — but now we're getting into poetic formations and the like.
By having only one form of the pronoun, you will need to rephrase and complicate that statement so as to make it unambiguous.  English can do that, but it is optional.
This is a little off–topic, but I'll bring it up so that I am clear:  Were you suggesting that a kran dialect, or the whole of the Kranic–Lemurian language, lacks the distinction between objective and subjective pronouns — thus handling them syntactically the same as English does its nouns?  E.g. ‘the dog’ and ‘the other dog’.

I argued that having two forms of nominative pronouns was similar to other languages only to show people that it really isn't too big of a change.  A few new words to learn — nothing more.
I agree that doing something the “same way as other languages” simply because you are remapping a vocabulary is rather unsatisfying in terms of constructing a language.  However, because Kranic–Lemurian is constrained within a convenient similarity to English, I attempted to minimize the obvious differences.

I was actually thinking of this one for the ‘C’:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palatal_fricative
I don't know how many people will make that an alveolar sibilant ‘S’, an alveolar fricative ‘SH’, or a palatal plosive ‘K’.
Yes, a kran could pronounce it differently than do other species.  Having a different, but recognizable letter, does suggest a difference but not so much as to cause casual readers to stumble.

Anyway.  I'll do just what I said; any character other than a Kran or a Lemur might speak it as a second language.  I'll only press the issue with Kran and Lemur characters until I decide to either make all my characters loners who never interact with other human players or to simply not play at all.
There are other MMOGs out there which don't require any emphasis on worldbuilding.

Until I hear back from Luca or anyone else in Atomic Blue, I'll not know exactly what their reasons were for using ‘kra’ as a pronoun.  I probably would've used ‘kre’ and ‘kren’.

[gonger]

You guys have too much spare time!!!