Negating Nouns

[TheFrogDaysAreOver]

My friend and I recently came up with the idea of negating nouns in my second conlang, Lentir.
So if you have a word for book, which is 'lysh' in Lentir, then you can have a word for 'not-book', which is 'lyshin'. I still have a way to negate verbs too, though. (You add 'phoem' after the conjugated verb. It's not very complicated...)
So now I'm toying with negating adverbs and adjectives. And maybe prepositions too... (Which are actually postpositions in Lentir, but that's not the point.)

So does anyone else have a conlang that negates nouns? Is this a good idea, or just unnecessary complication?

*does the 'Let's get this guild active again' dance*  

[Sano Parmandil]

I don't know of any conlangs that do this (but I also don't know that many conlangs) but negating verbs, adjectives and adverbs is quite common on natural languages, so I don't think a conlang shouldn't negate nouns.  

[Homurakitsune]

If you wanna go all-out with negation, then I say GO FOR IT! =D
It could make it more interesting. ^_^

Although, if you already have ways of negating nouns and verbs, then I think you should come up with ways to negate all the other parts of speech too.

Your idea for preposition-negatives is cool. I might experiment with that. That would be like saying 'not-in', right? Like if someone asked, "Is the dog in the house?" you could reply "The dog is not-in the house." vs. "The dog is-not in the house." The first could be saying that a dog still exists, but isn't in the house, whereas the second could imply that the existence of the dog in and of itself has also come into question. NEATO! =)

I say go for it. It's a spiffy idea.  

[Sano Parmandil]

Homurakitsune

Your idea for preposition-negatives is cool. I might experiment with that. That would be like saying 'not-in', right? Like if someone asked, "Is the dog in the house?" you could reply "The dog is not-in the house." vs. "The dog is-not in the house." The first could be saying that a dog still exists, but isn't in the house, whereas the second could imply that the existence of the dog in and of itself has also come into question. NEATO! =)

I say go for it. It's a spiffy idea.

Wow, this sound very interesting indeed, I didn't know this could me made. 3nodding  

[Homurakitsune]

Sano Parmandil

Wow, this sound very interesting indeed, I didn't know this could me made. 3nodding

I got the idea from how Japanese grammar sometimes works. ^_^
They negate adjectives in Japanese, so I saw some similarities. =)  

[Henneth Annun]

Sano Parmandil

Homurakitsune

Your idea for preposition-negatives is cool. I might experiment with that. That would be like saying 'not-in', right? Like if someone asked, "Is the dog in the house?" you could reply "The dog is not-in the house." vs. "The dog is-not in the house." The first could be saying that a dog still exists, but isn't in the house, whereas the second could imply that the existence of the dog in and of itself has also come into question. NEATO! =)

I say go for it. It's a spiffy idea.

Wow, this sound very interesting indeed, I didn't know this could me made. 3nodding

Me neither, this sounds awesome!  

[Sano Parmandil]

Homurakitsune

Sano Parmandil

Wow, this sound very interesting indeed, I didn't know this could me made. 3nodding

I got the idea from how Japanese grammar sometimes works. ^_^
They negate adjectives in Japanese, so I saw some similarities. =)

Really? How they do it? eek  

[JeSuisMustapha]

In my conlang, I can negate almost anything, I think. I don't know if I've tried nouns. But adjective for sure. So that a "good" adj. like "happy" would get a negative suffix making it "not-happy" or "sad". I think the same concept could be applied to nouns too... It will be interesting. Good luck!  

[TheFrogDaysAreOver]

@Homura: That's actually what I was thinking of doing with the preposition thing. 3nodding

--

Cool, in that case, I think we can experiment some more... I like the idea of negating everything for some reason. xD  

[Henneth Annun]

Everything could be negated!

I like that in English you can use the tone of your voice to change the meaning of the sentance by emphasizing certain words. Like: "I didn't give it to him" verses "I didn't give it to him", ect... I like how you can do that, but you don't get maximum clarity of understanding when it's written down, because the person might mean different things. But if you have a langauge where you can negate absolutley everything, there's no chance of a misunderstanding!

blaugh  

[Xeigrich]

For a lot of natural languages, negation of nouns isn't necessary because you can pretty much negate everything else. You can say, "It's not a book," but I honestly don't know of any real languages that would have you say (or even give you the option of articulately saying) "It's a not-book." The concept is pretty cool, or as we might say in this thread, "Not bad," hehe.

I did play with the negate-everything concept with one conlang project, but I did it in the sense that some of the others here have done it. "Not-good" means bad, "not-happy" means sad, etc., but I found this to be terribly ineffective once you reach a larger scale. The best way to do it is have negation be an option. Have "good" and "bad" but also allow for "not-good" and "not-bad." This only works if you're really big on technical semantics and how to interpret things, since to some people, "not-bad" means good, but to some people, it could mean "anything except bad" and could even include the middle ground, like "ennui" if you're still talking about good and bad moods, or "neutral" if you're talking about morals and ethics (but I digress, good and bad are very vague words and make for poor examples).

You don't really want to fall into the trap of having to rely on negations without having separate words (technically separate morphemes). A common problem in English is telling someone, "I don't like you" or "I dislike you." In English this is idiomatically interpreted as meaning "I hate you," but when someone who isn't perfectly fluent in English could mistakenly use the phrase to express simple disinterest, it can be confusing. "No, I don't hate you, I just don't like you all that much..." Hopefully this makes sense to you guys.

I think XWraith_LordX is on to something, I think. I like the idea of using negation for clarity. You could do it positively, too, but it might be a bit more confusing. You can write it in English as "not-something" but how would you write it positively? "definitely"? "surely"?  

[TheFrogDaysAreOver]

@Xiegrich: I didn't intend to create an only-positive vocabulary for Lentir; I just thought it would be a neat thing to be able to negate everything. 3nodding
I will have to think about how to deal with the interpretation though. That will take a lot of work...

@XWraith_LordX: Wow, I never thought of using it for clarity like that! Yet another reason to keep it! I'll have to see how I can fit that into it, too. =)  

[Henneth Annun]

Conlang Lover

@XWraith_LordX: Wow, I never thought of using it for clarity like that! Yet another reason to keep it! I'll have to see how I can fit that into it, too. =)

Xeigrich

I think XWraith_LordX is on to something, I think. I like the idea of using negation for clarity. You could do it positively, too, but it might be a bit more confusing. You can write it in English as "not-something" but how would you write it positively? "definitely"? "surely"?

@ Both of you:
Maybe it could be an optional function used for clarity when you want to make sure 100% that your message gets across or to emphasize something, so that way you wouldn't get into pointless/confusing/redundant negations of things.  

[Xeigrich]

Written or forced emphasis can be a wonderful thing, but don't saturate your language with it. It takes all the elegance and wonder out of prose and poetry. It starts making things like puns, euphamisms, and double entendres either impossible or all too obvious. A good goal for balance is to make it so that the emphasis works as closely as possible to realistic human speech, but this is the responsibility of the writer just as much as it is of the conlang creator.

My main conlang Anzer Pex has special emphasis particles that can be used for a single word (works like an adjective that describes the WORD rather than what the word itself describes, similar to raising your voice on a single word while speaking), for a phrase (beginning and end particles like quotations, or using bold/italics in writing), or for an entire sentence (like an exclamation point). The more I experimented with the emphasis, which I guess with the way Anzer Pex works you could try to negate the emphasis particles or emphasize the negative particles, you get a really strange blend of cold, emotionless language, and surprisingly accurate transcription of real speech.

I'm now wondering how to differentiate emphasis on negation, and negative emphasis, if that even makes sense at all. Would this work like "not!" and "not, or whatever"? Haha... I'm confusing myself. confused  

[Henneth Annun]

I'm not going to over saturate my conlang with it, I just thought it might be a good idea for some situations where you wanted an emphasis particle...*shrugs* I guess it's all about moderation again...

Negative emphasis? Whoah. eek That sounds pretty cool actually...Maybe you could hold certain syllables for different lengths or double vowels or something....