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I Like It! I'll Take It!

So, I've been reading my new book, Introduction to Typology: The Unity and Diversity of Language. I've just encountered something I like a lot, and plan to use it in Caia. Let me attempt to give a very brief amount of background and explanation.

Not all languages have tense. And some languages on both sides have something called aspect. Aspect indicates some facet of time about a verb in ways that are more complicated than tense. For example, some languages conjugate the same verb (without a helper verb, which English uses) differently depending on whether the subject is starting to do something (e.g. "began to eat"), finishing something (e.g. "finished eating"), etc.

One very common class of aspect (although usually this aspect in intrinsic to the verb, and does not have multiple conjugations for the same verb) is the distinction between state, achievement, activity, and accomplishment. The state aspect indicates that the subject is maintaining some preexisting state. The achievement aspect indicates a change in state. The activity aspect indicates some act that is self-contained and does not include a change in state. Finally, the accomplishment aspect indicates that the subject has caused an action with regard to some other object.

Some examples in English, using the verb 'break' (note that English cannot perfectly distinguish these four aspects for individual verbs, so try not to get confused by the ambiguity). The state aspect: "the window is broken" (this is a little ambiguous; specifically what that says is that the window was broken before the present time, and continues to be broken). The achievement aspect: "the window broke" (also "the window was broken", but that could also indicate the state aspect). The activity aspect: "I ran to the window". The accomplishment aspect: "the ball broke the window".

As this very elegantly accounts for the active and passive voices, as well as both transitive and intransitive verbs, I'm gonna definitely use those as some of the mandatory aspects of Caia (some aspects - the most useful and common ones - and possibly tense are included in the basic conjugation of the verb, while other aspects are formed, as in English, either through phrases or extra words such as adverbs). Though I may combine the achievement and activity aspects, as I'm hard-pressed to find a verb for which activity and achievement are not mutually exclusive (note how 'break', by its very definition, could not display the activity aspect, so I had to use a different verb). And for anyone who's curious: the jury is still out on whether Caia will use tense.

Awesome!

Blizzard negotiating with researchers for virtual epidemic study

Around this time last year, a strange phenomenon struck the virtual inhabitants of World of Warcraft. A disease designed to be limited to areas accessed by high-level characters managed to make it back to the cities of that virtual world, where it devastated their populations. At the time, Ars' Jeremy Reimer noted, "it would be even more interesting if epidemiologists in the real world found that this event was worthy of studying as a kind of controlled experiment in disease propagation." The epidemiologists have noticed, and there may be more of these events on the way for WoW players
...
On balance, the analysis in Epidemiology felt that virtual worlds might provide a useful supplement to traditional models of disease spread, and suggested working with game programmers to test a variety of disease conditions. "Multiplayer online role-playing games may even be useful as a testing ground for hypotheses about infectious disease dissemination," the author said, "Game programmers could allow characters to be inflicted by various infectious diseases, some of which may not be visible to the player, and track the dissemination patterns of the disease in specific subpopulations." It looks like something of the sort is in the works. A report from the Agence France-Presse indicates that Nina Fefferman, a researcher from Tufts University, is currently negotiating with Blizzard about running epidemiological tests in WoW.

Maybe I should go apply at Blizzard, now :P

Super Shiny!

Well, Q has a new shiny thing to show off, and this one's a whopper (at least if you're a linguist): http://www.prayer.su/. It's a database of the Lord's Prayer in what looks like a couple hundred different languages. Some interesting samples for those not that interested in linguistics:
Classical Arabic (font required); also Arabic in Roman alphabet
Classical Armenian (font required)
Greek (font required); also Greek in Roman alphabet
Latin
Classical Chinese (font required)
Georgian (font required)
German
Hindi (font required)
Japanese (font required); also Japanese in Roman alphabet
Korean (font required)
Telugu (someone at our company speaks this; font required)
Klingon (different site)
Quenya in Roman alphabet
Sindarin in Roman alphabet
ce1000 AD Old English (not sure about font)
1384 AD Middle English
1559 AD Early Modern English

I don't really see a version of the prayer in Modern English that sounds exactly like how we actually talk. The 1963 version seems the best of the ones on that site. I'd probably write it like this:
Our Father in heaven
May Your name be honored
May Your kingdom be established
May Your will be done
On Earth as in heaven
Give us what we need for now
And forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us
Do not test our faith, but protect us from evil
For the kingdom, and the power, and the glory are Yours (this line was actually not present in the original version of the prayer; it was added later on)

I'm working on getting a Trique version from my grandpa, and I should be able to write a Tengwar (elven alphabet) version of the Quenya and Sindarin language versions on the site. Does anyone know Finnish? :P