There are 9 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Chat: LSA Linguistic Institute
From: Roger Mills
1b. Re: Chat: LSA Linguistic Institute
From: Scar Cvxni
2a. Re: Arbitrarily long and complex compounds
From: Herman Miller
2b. Re: Arbitrarily long and complex compounds
From: Eugene Oh
3a. Re: languedoc historical grammars
From: Jonathan Beagley
3b. Re: languedoc historical grammars
From: BPJ
4a. Re: Online Translator for Conlangs
From: Andrej ©uc
5a. Re: Spanish s as h
From: Sapthan
6a. Re: Hello, and language sketch.
From: Alex Fink
Messages
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1a. Re: Chat: LSA Linguistic Institute
Posted by: "Roger Mills" romi...@yahoo.com
Date: Sat Jun 29, 2013 9:02 am ((PDT))
Oh wow, how I envy you. I got my start at an LSA Inst. in AA way back in
1964....intro.ling. with H.A. Gleason of all people. Chomsky was there too, and
still very controversial; also even more controversial Sidney Lamb of Yale
(proponent of "Stratificational Grammar" which died a much-needed death....)--
the two of them had a nice spat at one of the evening lectures....
Will your conlang talk be recorded in any way? At least, please, give us a full
report on how it goes.
________________________________
From: Darin Arrick <darin.arr...@gmail.com>
To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu
Sent: Friday, June 28, 2013 11:56 AM
Subject: Chat: LSA Linguistic Institute
I'm at the Linguistic Society of America's Linguistic Institute in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, until July 19. Is anyone else here? I'd love to get together and chat
about conlangs and linguistics.
Also, I'll be giving a presentation about conlangs on Monday, July 1, at
5:30PM, at the University of Michigan. It should be fun to talk about this to a
room full of linguists from all over the world. :)
--
Darin Arrick - darin.arr...@gmail.com
Graduate Student, MA in Linguistic Theory and Typology
University of Kentucky - Department of English - Linguistics Program
https://linguistics.as.uky.edu/users/dar224
http://uky.academia.edu/DarinArrick
Messages in this topic (3)
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1b. Re: Chat: LSA Linguistic Institute
Posted by: "Scar Cvxni" jeviscac...@gmail.com
Date: Sat Jun 29, 2013 9:04 am ((PDT))
...better still, tape it and send it to us!
On 29 June 2013 17:02, Roger Mills <romi...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Oh wow, how I envy you. I got my start at an LSA Inst. in AA way back in
> 1964....intro.ling. with H.A. Gleason of all people. Chomsky was there too,
> and still very controversial; also even more controversial Sidney Lamb of
> Yale (proponent of "Stratificational Grammar" which died a much-needed
> death....)-- the two of them had a nice spat at one of the evening
> lectures....
>
> Will your conlang talk be recorded in any way? At least, please, give us a
> full report on how it goes.
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Darin Arrick <darin.arr...@gmail.com>
> To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu
> Sent: Friday, June 28, 2013 11:56 AM
> Subject: Chat: LSA Linguistic Institute
>
>
> I'm at the Linguistic Society of America's Linguistic Institute in Ann
> Arbor, Michigan, until July 19. Is anyone else here? I'd love to get
> together and chat about conlangs and linguistics.
>
> Also, I'll be giving a presentation about conlangs on Monday, July 1, at
> 5:30PM, at the University of Michigan. It should be fun to talk about this
> to a room full of linguists from all over the world. :)
>
> --
> Darin Arrick - darin.arr...@gmail.com
> Graduate Student, MA in Linguistic Theory and Typology
> University of Kentucky - Department of English - Linguistics Program
> https://linguistics.as.uky.edu/users/dar224
> http://uky.academia.edu/DarinArrick
>
Messages in this topic (3)
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2a. Re: Arbitrarily long and complex compounds
Posted by: "Herman Miller" hmil...@prismnet.com
Date: Sat Jun 29, 2013 9:04 am ((PDT))
On 6/29/2013 1:32 AM, Alex Fink wrote:
> But it's not _completely_ head-final: the categories N and D are
> head-final, but the categories A and C are head-initial. It's only
> the choice of N as the top-level category that makes it head-final!
> If you had chosen A or C as the top-level category, you'd get exactly
> the same system left-right reflected with the names of the categories
> changed; if you had chosen D, you'd get the same system unreflected
> with the names of the categories changed. So really it's quite
> symmetric until you pick out N for special treatment.
I guess that's a simpler way of looking at what I called "descriptive
phrases" ... instead of being a modified kind of noun phrase with the D
as what would have been the head, it's just an adjective phrase, with
the D as a modifier to the adjective. So "red-winged" is a kind of
"red", with "winged" describing where the red is, instead of a modified
version of the noun phrase "red wing".
I wonder how this would work if you're starting with a simple (A N)
compound and using it to modify another N. Say that you've got a
compound "black-A bird-N" meaning "blackbird" and you want to describe a
"blackbird nest". The way I was thinking, you'd change the N part of a
compound to D in order to make the whole compound take the A role:
"black-A bird-D nest-N". But if the head of an (A D) phrase is the A,
you'd need to reverse "blackbird" and end up with "bird-A black-D nest-N".
So if it's a red-winged blackbird,
(red-A wing-D) (black-A bird-N)
convert the N part to D: (black-C bird-D)
(red-A wing-D) (black-C bird-D) nest-N
or:
(red-A wing-D) (black-A bird-N)
convert N to A, A to D, and swap places
(bird-A black-D) (wing-C red-D) nest-N
Well, maybe you could just leave "red-A wing-D black-A bird-N" unchanged
and add "nest" as the head of a C phrase, if there's nothing special
about N.
nest-C (red-A wing-D) (black-A bird-N)
But then if the C part is more complex, it will need to be converted to
fit into the C slot. Say, "red-winged blackbird migration route"
(route-C migration-N) (red-A wing-D) (black-A bird-N)
where my scheme would have:
(red-A wing-D) (black-C bird-D) (migration-A route-N)
Messages in this topic (6)
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2b. Re: Arbitrarily long and complex compounds
Posted by: "Eugene Oh" un.do...@gmail.com
Date: Sat Jun 29, 2013 9:13 am ((PDT))
I just learnt this word at Turkish class:
AvrupalılaÅtıramadıklarımızdansınız. "You are one of those whom we
could not Europeanise".
I think this qualifies for some in-depth analysis.
Eugene
Sent from my iPhone
On 29 Jun 2013, at 17:03, Herman Miller <hmil...@prismnet.com> wrote:
> On 6/29/2013 1:32 AM, Alex Fink wrote:
>
>> But it's not _completely_ head-final: the categories N and D are
>> head-final, but the categories A and C are head-initial. It's only
>> the choice of N as the top-level category that makes it head-final!
>> If you had chosen A or C as the top-level category, you'd get exactly
>> the same system left-right reflected with the names of the categories
>> changed; if you had chosen D, you'd get the same system unreflected
>> with the names of the categories changed. So really it's quite
>> symmetric until you pick out N for special treatment.
>
> I guess that's a simpler way of looking at what I called "descriptive
> phrases" ... instead of being a modified kind of noun phrase with the D as
> what would have been the head, it's just an adjective phrase, with the D as a
> modifier to the adjective. So "red-winged" is a kind of "red", with "winged"
> describing where the red is, instead of a modified version of the noun phrase
> "red wing".
>
> I wonder how this would work if you're starting with a simple (A N) compound
> and using it to modify another N. Say that you've got a compound "black-A
> bird-N" meaning "blackbird" and you want to describe a "blackbird nest". The
> way I was thinking, you'd change the N part of a compound to D in order to
> make the whole compound take the A role: "black-A bird-D nest-N". But if the
> head of an (A D) phrase is the A, you'd need to reverse "blackbird" and end
> up with "bird-A black-D nest-N".
>
> So if it's a red-winged blackbird,
>
> (red-A wing-D) (black-A bird-N)
> convert the N part to D: (black-C bird-D)
> (red-A wing-D) (black-C bird-D) nest-N
>
> or:
> (red-A wing-D) (black-A bird-N)
> convert N to A, A to D, and swap places
> (bird-A black-D) (wing-C red-D) nest-N
>
> Well, maybe you could just leave "red-A wing-D black-A bird-N" unchanged and
> add "nest" as the head of a C phrase, if there's nothing special about N.
>
> nest-C (red-A wing-D) (black-A bird-N)
>
> But then if the C part is more complex, it will need to be converted to fit
> into the C slot. Say, "red-winged blackbird migration route"
>
> (route-C migration-N) (red-A wing-D) (black-A bird-N)
>
> where my scheme would have:
>
> (red-A wing-D) (black-C bird-D) (migration-A route-N)
Messages in this topic (6)
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3a. Re: languedoc historical grammars
Posted by: "Jonathan Beagley" jonathan.beag...@gmail.com
Date: Sat Jun 29, 2013 9:27 am ((PDT))
Wow, it's been ages since I've posted here, but when I saw Languedoc, I
knew I had to join in.
As for Occitan grammars, I have this personally: Dictionnaire grammatical
de l'occitan moderne: selon les parlers languedociens by Florian Vernet
In Aquitaine, there are actually a few different dialects. Closer towards
the Toulouse (Midi-Pyrénées) area, they do indeed speak Languedocien.
However, the vast majority of the region is Gascon speaking. The major
varieties of Langue d'Oc are Provençal, Languedocien, Limousin, Gascon and
Auvergnat. Each of these varieties also has sub-varieties, notably for
Gascon, Béarnais and Aranais (spoken in Andorra and parts of Catalonia,
mainly). One of the mostly readily noticeable differences between Gascon
and Languedocien is the /f/ - /h/ sound change, leading to words such as
hèsta in Gascon where Languedocien would have fèsta. Gascon also uses the
feminine article ua instead of una. Languedocien generally keeps the -al
suffix as /al/, contrary to Provençal (pronounced /pruvensau/ and usually
written Provençau by the natives), but even within the Languedocien dialect
area, speakers will vocalize the /l/.
If you can get a hold of it, there's also a great textbook called Ben òc
that actually covers all of the major dialect areas, so you actually have
dialogues reproduced in each dialect. There's also an audio CD set
available, so you can listen to the dialogues.
If you want to get a feel for the sound of the language, some bands that
sing in Occitan are Mauresca Fracas Dub (Languedocien but they're from Sète
and don't use the "standard Languedocien") and Massilia Sound System
(Provençal).
That's about all I have for now.
Jonathan
2013/6/29 Wesley Parish <wes.par...@paradise.net.nz>
> Thanks. I did a bit of searching and discovered another title:
>
> An Old Provencal Primer
>
> I'm intending to pester my local independent bookshop this coming week
> over that and An introduction
> to Old Occitan.
>
> By the way, does anyone know the general differences over the Occitan
> dialect field? (I was surprised to
> find that Acquitainian was a languedoc. I'd always thought it was
> langued'oil.)
>
> Thanks
>
> Wesley Parish
>
>
> Quoting Padraic Brown <elemti...@yahoo.com>:
>
> > A couple other books you can look into:
> >
> > http://c.barret3.free.fr/gram/Gram.htm
> >
> >
> http://www.amazon.com/Grammaire-languedocienne-dialecte-P%C3%A9z%C3%A9nas-French/dp/
>
> B0036THD7K/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372504366&sr=1-1&keywords=Grammaire
> +Languedocienne
> >
> >
> > http://www.lingweenie.org/occitan/
> >
> >
> http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Old-Occitan-William-Paden/dp/1603290540/ref=sr_1_1?
> s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372503992&sr=1-1&keywords=1603290540
> >
> >
> http://www.amazon.com/Grammaire-lancien-proven%C3%A7al-ancienne-Collection/dp/
> 2252019530/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372504088&sr=1-2-
> fkmr0&keywords=Grammaire+L%27ancien+Proven%C3%83%C2%A7al
> >
> >
> http://www.amazon.com/Grammaire-Limousine-Phon%C3%A9tique-Parties-Discours/dp/
>
> 1113153245/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372504184&sr=1-1&keywords=1113153245
> >
> > I have the Grandgent that Christophe recommended, and found it useful.
> >
> > Padraic
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > > From: Wesley Parish <wes.par...@paradise.net.nz>
> > > To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu
> > > Cc:
> > > Sent: Friday, 28 June 2013, 5:46
> > > Subject: [CONLANG] languedoc historical grammars
> > >
> > > Hi
> > >
> > > I've begun thinking about a Romance conlang for a story I'm writing.
> > It
> > > is a Languedoc development,
> > > heavily influenced by another conlang, a Sarmatian-Gothic creole
> > spoken by a
> > > majority population
> > > formed by migrating Sarmatians and Visigoths. I've got some Gothic
> > > textbooks, and some Avestan,
> > > Pahlavi, Sogdian and modern Persian textbooks, so I can work something
> > out for
> > > the Sarmatian-Goths
> > > to cry into their beers. I just don't have much stuff on
> > > Provencal/Occitan/Languedoc - a modern
> > > grammar, a TY Catalan which will do for some of the comparative
> > grammar work -
> > > but no Old Occitan/
> > > Provencal/Languedoc grammars that I can recall, and no historical
> > grammars.
> > >
> > > Does anyone have any suggestions?
> > >
> > > Thanks
> > >
> > > Wesley Parish
> > >
> > > "Sharpened hands are happy hands.
> > > "Brim the tinfall with mirthful bands"
> > > - A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
> > >
> > > "I me. Shape middled me. I would come out into hot!"
> > > I from the spicy that day was overcasked mockingly - it's a symbol of
> > the
> > > other horizon. - emacs : meta x dissociated-press
> > >
> >
>
>
>
> "Sharpened hands are happy hands.
> "Brim the tinfall with mirthful bands"
> - A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
>
> "I me. Shape middled me. I would come out into hot!"
> I from the spicy that day was overcasked mockingly - it's a symbol of the
> other horizon. - emacs : meta x dissociated-press
>
Messages in this topic (8)
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3b. Re: languedoc historical grammars
Posted by: "BPJ" b...@melroch.se
Date: Sat Jun 29, 2013 11:09 am ((PDT))
2013-06-29 14:06, Wesley Parish skrev:
> Thanks. I did a bit of searching and discovered another title:
>
> An Old Provencal Primer
>
> I'm intending to pester my local independent bookshop this coming week over
> that and An introduction
> to Old Occitan.
If you read the language of the northern invaders there is this:
<http://archive.org/details/grammairedelanci00angl>
Check out the other titles by this guy, BTW.
>
> By the way, does anyone know the general differences over the Occitan dialect
> field? (I was surprised to
> find that Acquitainian was a languedoc. I'd always thought it was
> langued'oil.)
There is som stuff on the Occitan Wikipedia -- not much
bibliography though...
<http://oc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan#Dial.C3.A8ctes>
>
> Thanks
>
> Wesley Parish
>
>
> Quoting Padraic Brown <elemti...@yahoo.com>:
>
>> A couple other books you can look into:
>>
>> http://c.barret3.free.fr/gram/Gram.htm
>>
>> http://www.amazon.com/Grammaire-languedocienne-dialecte-P%C3%A9z%C3%A9nas-French/dp/
> B0036THD7K/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372504366&sr=1-1&keywords=Grammaire
> +Languedocienne
>>
>>
>> http://www.lingweenie.org/occitan/
>>
>> http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Old-Occitan-William-Paden/dp/1603290540/ref=sr_1_1?
> s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372503992&sr=1-1&keywords=1603290540
>>
>> http://www.amazon.com/Grammaire-lancien-proven%C3%A7al-ancienne-Collection/dp/
> 2252019530/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372504088&sr=1-2-
> fkmr0&keywords=Grammaire+L%27ancien+Proven%C3%83%C2%A7al
>>
>> http://www.amazon.com/Grammaire-Limousine-Phon%C3%A9tique-Parties-Discours/dp/
> 1113153245/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372504184&sr=1-1&keywords=1113153245
>>
>> I have the Grandgent that Christophe recommended, and found it useful.
>>
>> Padraic
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: Wesley Parish <wes.par...@paradise.net.nz>
>>> To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu
>>> Cc:
>>> Sent: Friday, 28 June 2013, 5:46
>>> Subject: [CONLANG] languedoc historical grammars
>>>
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> I've begun thinking about a Romance conlang for a story I'm writing.
>> It
>>> is a Languedoc development,
>>> heavily influenced by another conlang, a Sarmatian-Gothic creole
>> spoken by a
>>> majority population
>>> formed by migrating Sarmatians and Visigoths. I've got some Gothic
>>> textbooks, and some Avestan,
>>> Pahlavi, Sogdian and modern Persian textbooks, so I can work something
>> out for
>>> the Sarmatian-Goths
>>> to cry into their beers. I just don't have much stuff on
>>> Provencal/Occitan/Languedoc - a modern
>>> grammar, a TY Catalan which will do for some of the comparative
>> grammar work -
>>> but no Old Occitan/
>>> Provencal/Languedoc grammars that I can recall, and no historical
>> grammars.
>>>
>>> Does anyone have any suggestions?
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>>
>>> Wesley Parish
>>>
>>> "Sharpened hands are happy hands.
>>> "Brim the tinfall with mirthful bands"
>>> - A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
>>>
>>> "I me. Shape middled me. I would come out into hot!"
>>> I from the spicy that day was overcasked mockingly - it's a symbol of
>> the
>>> other horizon. - emacs : meta x dissociated-press
>>>
>>
>
>
>
> "Sharpened hands are happy hands.
> "Brim the tinfall with mirthful bands"
> - A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
>
> "I me. Shape middled me. I would come out into hot!"
> I from the spicy that day was overcasked mockingly - it's a symbol of the
> other horizon. - emacs : meta x dissociated-press
>
Messages in this topic (8)
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4a. Re: Online Translator for Conlangs
Posted by: "Andrej ©uc" ashu...@gmail.com
Date: Sat Jun 29, 2013 4:39 pm ((PDT))
I've tried it and for now, it's just a word-for-word (or phrase-for-phrase)
translator. It's really basic but at least it gives you a string of words
and then you can apply grammar to them. :) I've also spoken to Joe about
some improvements, namely about declensions and conjugations (so that when
entering a transitive verb, the translator would automatically pick the
form of the following noun in the correct case (translating from English to
a conlang)).
I'd say it's definitely worth a try. :)
2013/6/29 H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx>
> On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 01:26:39PM -0700, David Peterson wrote:
> > Joe Rocca has created a tool that allows you to create an online
> > translator. It gives you options for specifying two different
> > languages that can be used for translation without limits to the type
> > of language. Once you've saved it, it gives you a link for a
> > public-facing online translator (so, for example, you could create an
> > English-Your Conlang translator and send the link to others). Right
> > now it's in its testing phase and is buggy, so Joe is looking for
> > people to test it and give him feedback. If you're interested, the
> > website is below:
> >
> > http://lingojam.com/
> [...]
>
> Is it just a word-for-word / phrase-for-phrase translator? Does it
> handle any syntactical transformations? Any context-sensitive
> transformations? Word-order changes?
>
>
> T
>
> --
> Who told you to swim in Crocodile Lake without life insurance??
>
--
The future is predetermined by the character of those who shape it.
Prihodnost vnaprej doloèajo karakterji tistih, ki jo oblikujejo.
Messages in this topic (3)
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5a. Re: Spanish s as h
Posted by: "Sapthan" sapt...@gmail.com
Date: Sat Jun 29, 2013 10:05 pm ((PDT))
On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 8:53 AM, J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_w...@shared-files.de
> wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 22:06:52 -0300, Njenfalgar wrote:
>
> >Outside of Spain I think the lenition of the syllable-final /s/ is quite
> >common. All Latin Americans I can remember having spoken with did it at
> >least in not-all-to-careful speech. Some would delete the /s/ entirely,
> >leaving Murcian-style extra vowels (the Cuban I was in the office with for
> >a while pronounced /e/ and /o/ as [E] and [O] in checked syllables,
> leaving
> >a height difference behind whenever underlying /s/ disappeared).
>
> From what I have learnt, the Latin American regions syllable-final [s]
> lenition or elision are not necessarily contiguous. There is a broad
> tendency for mountain regions to keep the [s] and for coastal regions to
> drop it, though I darkly remember that this was a contentious issue without
> any consensus on the possible reasons (substrates, waves of immigration,
> openness to transportation, climate). One theory is that all of Latin
> America used to have an archaic Southern Spain Spanish, but then, a more
> Northern and more modern Spanish spread from the colonial centers (after
> the
> Spanish court had firmly established itself in Madrid), while remote areas
> conserved the original speech with typical features such as voseo*, merger
> of syllable-final [r] and [l], or elision of syllable-final [s].
>
> * Voseo is the name for using the ancient honorific "vos". Nowadays, it is
> best known from Argentina, which used to be a very remote area until the
> 19th century, having been colonized from Peru (and not from the sea).
>
> --
> grüess
> mach
>
In my very limited experience (linguistically speaking) here in Mexico,
that change from s to h is considered a "costeño" (coastal) accent. I've
heard it from people from the states of Baja California Sur, Guerrero, and
Veracruz, mainly. Also, I think in Venezuela they have it in some regions.
Ayam.
--
Nac Mac Feegle! Wee Free Men!
Nae King! Nae Quin! Nae Laird! Nae Master!
We Willna Be Fooled Again!
Messages in this topic (12)
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6a. Re: Hello, and language sketch.
Posted by: "Alex Fink" 000...@gmail.com
Date: Sat Jun 29, 2013 10:57 pm ((PDT))
On Sun, 23 Jun 2013 23:28:43 -0500, Aodhán Aannestad
<tolkien_fr...@aannestad.com> wrote:
>Hello! I'm a longtime lurker, finally deciding to get involved a little.
>Some of you may have met me at the last LCC, I'm with UT Austin's
>conlang club and I drove some people around.
'Twas good to meet / bum rides off you there.
>Anyway, on to the language. It doesn't have a name yet, sadly - I'm
>using it for a protolang for a large project, and since said large
>project has yet to really begin, it's not really in a state where I can
>really name anything. (I suppose I could come up with an endonym for it
>- it'd be something like 'Lesuy' (/lesuj/, /person-speak/) or something,
>though that doesn't sound that great to my ears.)
Eh, I'm in no rush to give my projects endonyms; I give them codenames or
descriptive English names until then. And anyway, endonyms are often
non-transparently formed, especially in areas with lots of cross-cultural
interaction, in deriving from place names or tribal names or calqued or
borrowed exonyms or whatnot; so if you don't like /lesuj/ it's hardly forced on
you.
>Affixes have no
>shape target - anything from V to a maximal syllable is in theory
>permitted.
This is kinda odd, unless the affixing is all really new. (I suppose that what
I'm calling "really new" could actually èxternally be "well, I have to start
sòmewhere with a pre*-proto-language to have something to run diachronics
on").
What's the realisation of stress? If unstressed syllables are weakerly
articulated in whatever way, then weaker syllables could start to lose some of
the complexity of their syllable structure (especially monophthongisation, but
also cluster simplification &c), which could help set up a more canonical affix
shape down the line, and as a bonus potentially yield fun morphophonology.
>any sequences of two identical vowels
>are shrunk into one (e.g. /emnira/, 'girl', from /emni/ 'woman' + /ira/
>'child'). /i/ and /u/ become glides when adjacent to other vowels (e.g.
>/dorayra/ 'boy', from /dora /'man' + /ira/).
To ask after pedantic completeness: what happens when two different nonhigh
vowels meet? When an /i/ and a /u/ meet, which one glides?
>Word order is VSO when there's no
>overt complementiser, and SOV when there is (so /fikol le/ 'the man has
>gone', but /le/ /fikolti/ 'the fact that the man has gone').
The /-ti/ is the overt complementiser in there?
>Verbs don't care about person, number, or tense, but there are 5 or 7
>aspect markers (perfective/stative (null-marked), progressive, perfect,
>expective, intentive(?), and hortative and imperative if you count them
>- they're mutually exclusive with aspect).
Does whether the null-marked aspect is perfective or stative depend on like
Aktionsart or some kind of inherent aspect of the verb, or is there something
weirder going on here? And then, if there are verb classes, are there any
interesting semantic properties of the marked aspects? e.g. often (afaik)
inherently stative verbs automatically become inceptives or whatnot when used
in a (marked) perfective.
>The only obligatory marking on nouns is case, but there's a number of
>other potential affixes. Number is especially complex -
Does the below imply that plain old number marking of the singular vs. plural
sort, lacking specificity in the quantity and lacking a larger quantity of
which it's a part, is not found?
>specific
>quantities are marked directly on the noun (so/lemofyethon/ 'twenty
>people', it's base-8 so that breaks down as /le-mo-fye-thon/
>'person-8-2-4' for (2*8)+4 people), and there are also suffixes for
>'more than half (of a group)', 'less than half (of a group)',
Really so specifically 'more / less than half', as opposed to 'relatively many
(of a group)', 'relatively few (of a group)'? That precision seems unlikely to
me.
>'part (of
>a unit)', and 'all (of a unit)'. These can be augmented by 'all' or
>'none', and further by 'the next' or 'the previous' (allowing for very
>long sequences such as /lemofyethondawfag /'none of the last twenty
>people').
Very long single words arising from numbers seem to me to be one of those
things which conlangers are prone to do but natlangs aren't. I don't know any
direct data. But one natlang that hàs done this for two digit numbers is
Hindi, and the result is that in the modern form all kinds of sandhi goes on
and the system is kinda tricky to learn.
https://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Hindi/Numbers
But not many languages have a Hindi-type system. And effects of analogy
notwithstanding, my feeling is that this probably means that systems of
two-digit numbers mostly don't behave like single words cross-linguistically.
Information density is probably not a very good way to get at questions of
synchronic wordhood, but it is at least true that grammaticalisation, including
univerbation, is characteristic of regions of relatively lower information
density, whereas spelling out the digits of a long number in which precision is
important intrinsically has relatively high information density. Maybe a more
relevant fact is the way people reading telephone numbers and the like tend to
give them structureful and nonhomogeneous prosody.
>there's two kinds of
>genitives, possessive and categorical (for things like 'men of that
>village', 'the strength of an ox', 'a sword of bronze' and so on), both
>of which form verbs (so//'the man's cat' has to be /lenase nyawa/ with
>-/se/, not */lena nyawa/ - /lena nyawa /is grammatical, but it would be
>heard as 'the cat is the man's').
This is funny. Leaving aside the use of the label "case", what we have here
are two operations which build verbs on nouns.
Now, ttbomk, it is a strong tendency that derivational or compounding
operations tend to impose indefinite / nonspecific / nonreferential
interpretations on their bases. For example, take Mithun's hierarchy of types
of noun incorporation (e.g.
<www.stanford.edu/~tylers/notes/morphosyntax/Mithun_1984_notes.pdfâ>): the
more straightforward types I (and II?) tend to name "unitary activities", like
'birdwatching'; "as you have a unitary activity, the N loses its salience
(Mithun 1984: 849)"; the way the other types III and IV develop on this is by
running with this nonsalience.
On the other hand, possessives at least are most prototypically used with
completely definite referential nouns, like SAP pronouns and proper names and
stuff; this is totally the opposite of what derivational etc. operations tend
to do. Funny. (For the categorical, it doesn't seem so bad to me.)
Of course, if you were to have these verbs, their relativised uses for usual
noun-modifying-a-noun relations is perfectly natural.
Ah, hm, maybe this isn't a problem if these "cases" are regarded as _clitic_
verbs, which just can't occur phonologically free and have to lean on a noun to
their left for whatever reason. The copular /-si/ might then permit the same
analysis. I suppose that if you don't go with this cliticky kind of thing, the
same nonspecificity motivations might motivate a language like this to keep
/-si/ for membership in a class ('Gilbert is a farmer') and use a different
mechanism for identity ('the morning star is the evening star', 'the murderer
is the butler').
>Locative cases are the following: inessive and exessive (both used for
>general locatives, inessive for being within the boundaries of a place,
>exessive for being near but outside the boundaries of a place or
>object), superessive and subessive, proessive ('in front of') and
>postessive ('behind'), comitative, allative (also used as a dative) and
>ablative (also used as the agent of causatives and volitives), illative
>and ellative, superlative ('going over') and sublative ('going under'),
>circumlative/circumessive, and adspective ('facing') and abspective
>('facing away from').
Hm, no "general" locative then. That isn't itself weird, but what would be
weird is if the system were actually as tidy as presented here; for whatever
reason, systems of oblique cases and adpositions seem to be very fertile
grounds for subregularities and not-very-productive metaphors and other
slightly odd usages to become collocatively fixed.
What happens in your language with metaphorical uses of the locative cases --
how do the speakers apply these distinctions of whether things are inessively
or exessively etc. "in" a condition or a situation, or a time, or a language,
or so forth?
>Non-locative cases are benefactive (also used for the experiencer with a
>number of perception verbs - 'see' for example has a BEN subject when
>you would expect ERG, and giving it an ERG subject changes the meaning
>to 'look at'),
Good.
>instrumental, causative, and comparative.
Comparative for standards of comparison, or something wackier? And what does
causative case do?
>Copular constructions are formed by affixing the copular verbaliser
>/-si/ to nouns - /dorasi le/ 'the person is a man'. This allows for a
>somewhat idiosyncratic way to express motion - while it's perfectly
>grammatical to say /fyokh ne sakhtasoy /(/go-PROG 1-ABS river-ALL,
>/literally 'I am going to the river'), it's much more native-sounding to
>say /sakhtasoysi ne/ (/river-ALL-COP 1-ABS, /literally 'I am to the river').
I wonder what the pragmatic effects of using the 'go' verb are, then. (Hm,
maybe it foregrounds manner, and the verb you've glossed 'go' is instead more
like 'walk'? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_framing)
>There are also two generic verbs, meaning something like 'to do (it)'
>and 'to go (there)'. They can also be used as nominalisers (somewhat
>ironically :P), meaning 'method' and 'process', respectively.
Neat, though I'm not entìrely sure what the difference between 'method' and
'process' to you is. Zero-derivation of verbs to nouns isn't a thing that
happens in general, then, I take it?
>I've got a few ideas on where to go with it from here, but
>if anyone has any ideas I'd be happy to hear them.
Well, what are your ideas? Anyway, I find the brainstorming easier if you give
us a bit of text to chew on, so we can see what kind of structures are asking
for reduction or reinterpretation of some sort. (The interlinearised sentences
in your next message are a good start! I'll have to read them later than right
now, though, I'm already up too long.)
Alex, row row rowing
Messages in this topic (9)
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