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There are 7 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: A Self-segregating morphology (was: Guinea pigs invited)
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: A Self-segregating morphology (was: Guinea pigs invited)
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: A Self-segregating morphology (was: Guinea pigs invited)
From: Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Glottalic Geminate Stops
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: Transitivity marking on verbs.
From: Thomas Hart Chappell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: Arabic and BACK TO Self-segregating morphology
From: Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. Re: A Self-segregating morphology (was: Guinea pigs invited)
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 15:35:58 +0100
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: A Self-segregating morphology (was: Guinea pigs invited)
Hi!
Isaac Penzev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Sala:m,
>
> katab Henrik Theiling
>
> > _kitab_ (pl. _kutub_) 'book'. (e.g. in Turkish, Suahili, ...).
>
> To be more precise, _kita:b_ and _kutu:b_. The latter pattern CuCu:C is
> pretty popular in forming plurals (that are, strictly speaking,
> collectives), e.g. _dars_ > _duru:s_ 'lesson'.
Ah, thanks for the correction!
> ObConlang: I used these ready lexemes in my now abandoned Arabo-Romance
> project "Ajami" in a Persian way, when the plural/collective gets additional
> meaning:
> _ketabo_ 'book' > _ketabos_ 'books' / _kotubo_ 'collection (of books)'
> _darso_ 'lesson' > _darsos_ 'lessons' / _doruso_ 'classes'.
> An interesting A.-R. hybrid _darseriya_ 'classroom'.
Wow, that's quite cool! And 'ketaberiya' = 'book shop'? :-)
Very, very nice!
(BTW, I think Turkish has pl. 'kitablar' and Suahili sg.'kitabu' /
pl. 'vitabu'.)
**Henrik
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Message: 2
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 11:10:44 -0500
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: A Self-segregating morphology (was: Guinea pigs invited)
Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Isaac Penzev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >...
> > They do use them extensively! _kataba_ 'he wrote', _yuktubu_ 'he
> > writes',
> > _ka:tibu_ 'he who writes', _kati:bu_ 'written', _maktabu_ '(place) of
> > writing' that is 'school' (with prefix m-) etc.
>
> One more famous one: the word that made it into many, many other langs
> as a loan and seems to be a prototype in such lists:
> _kitab_ (pl. _kutub_) 'book'. (e.g. in Turkish, Suahili, ...).
>
And one that's in the news a bit these days:
jihad ~ mujahedin (pl., the sing. is probably mujah(ie)d-- I recall
encountering a Turkish name, "Mucahit")
Related words--- if I'm not mistaken-- sala:m 'peace' and islam usu. glossed
'surrender' (Muslim ~Moslem? and the proper name Salim?)
In the Indo./Arab. expression 'alhamdulillah' (approx. "God bless you") I
assume h-m-d means 'bless(ed)'-- thus the proper names Muhammad and Hamid ?
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Message: 3
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 08:51:07 -0800
From: Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: A Self-segregating morphology (was: Guinea pigs invited)
--- Isaac Penzev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Gary Shannon wrote:
>
> > "Binyamin",
<snip>
> Sorry to interfere, the thing you are talking about,
> is called "binyaNIM
Yes, of course. My typing is terrible. I almost always
get all the right letters in a word, but I seldom get
them in the right order (that last word was typed
"rodre" before I went back and corrected it).
>
> > But it was my understanding that the Arabic
> alphabet
> > didn't include vowels.
>
> It does not. But certain consonants are used to
> indicate presence of long
> vowels. They are called "matres lectionis" (mothers
> of reading) in this
> function.
My intention was to use vowels in the writing system.
<snip>
> > Anyway, I didn't
> > think Arabic used vowels to alter the meaning of
> > roots.
>
> They do use them extensively! _kataba_ 'he wrote',
> _yuktubu_ 'he writes',
> _ka:tibu_ 'he who writes', _kati:bu_ 'written',
> _maktabu_ '(place) of
> writing' that is 'school' (with prefix m-) etc.
>
> -- Yitzik
Yes, that's it. Except for the inflections. My
intention was to create an isolating language where
the parts of speech and basic meaning of the word were
changed by switching the vowels, but there would be no
inflections for tense, person, case, etc. These would
be handled, where absolutely necessary, by particles.
--gary
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Message: 4
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 16:46:49 +0000
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Glottalic Geminate Stops
I posted this on the ZBB, but no one so far has been able to answer, so
I'm asking here too:
"I've seen a number of examples of languages that allow long or geminate
stops which have pulmonic egressive air stream mechanism, but before
today I hadn't seen any examples of languages which had long ejective or
implosive stops (ie ones with glottalic airstream mechanism). So I've
just been looking it up and Bole (a language in the same family as
Hausa, or maybe a dialect of Hausa?) seems to have at least some
examples of long implosive stops:
dó́ɓɓó ‘small pot for sauce’
However, what I've read suggests that Hausa glottalic stops like ɓ can
be realized as [b?] as well as [b_<] so I guess the ɓɓ could be [b:?] in
the above example. Since I'm not an expert on Hausa or Bole, I'm not
positive that this word is most commonly pronounced with a [b_<:] or not.
I still, though, haven't seen even any possible examples of long
ejective stops. So this is my question for the day: do you know any
languages that have geminate or long glottalic stops, either implosive
or ejective, and how common are they? And if you know Bole (or Hausa),
is the above a true example of a long implosive, and do the ejectives in
the same series also have long variants?"
Next Message:
"Continued googling has uncovered another possible example, from Endegen
(Semitic):
k’ɨrəkk’ərə
the paper seems to suggest that the medial kk' is a long ejective stop."
So anyone who knows anything about a language that definitely has long
ejective or implosive stops that contrast with short versions of the
same stop, please post it, with examples?
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Message: 5
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 12:04:20 -0500
From: Thomas Hart Chappell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Transitivity marking on verbs.
--- In [email protected], Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> I'm musing on whether it would be out of character
> for a natlang to mark the or n-transitivity of a
> verb. This is of course related to my question on
> the arising of prepositions.
> --
>
> /BP 8^)>
> --
> Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
According to Thomas E. Payne's "Describing Morphology", and also to Joan L.
Bybee's "Morphology: A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form"
(Typological Studies in Language #9; John Benjamins Publishing Company,
P241.B9 1985), "valence" is the commonest morphology on verbs. 84% of
languages in Bybee's 50-language, one-language-per-"phylum" sample had
valence derivation, and 6% had valence inflection. (Consult her book for
the difference between derivation and inflection, as she used those terms
in her book.)
She considered valence, voice, aspect (not including "perfect"*
or "retrospective"), tense (including "perfect"* or "retrospective"), mood
(including evidentials), number agreement with any one or more argument(s),
person agreement with any one or more argument(s), and gender agreement
with any one or more argument(s). (Bybee used a somewhat restricted
definition of "mood", yet it was still the semantically-broadest of all of
these categories. Consult her book for the definition of "mood" she used
in it.)
*(BTW I would have included "perfect" as a mood, rather than a tense; but
at any rate Bybee agrees with me that it is not an aspect.)
In order by fraction of sampled languages which marked them either by
inflection or derivation, either an affix or a stem-change, the categories
were;
90% valence
74% aspect
68% mood
66% number
56% voice (tied with person)
56% person (tied with voice)
50% tense
28% person of a second participant (e.g. object)
16% gender
In order by fraction of sampled languages which marked them by inflection,
the categories were;
68% mood
56% person
54% number
52% aspect
48% tense
28% person of a second participant (e.g. object)
26% voice
16% gender
6% valence
This next table doesn't come from Bybee; I got these values by subtracting
the values in the table above. In order by fraction of sampled languages
which marked them by derivation only (not by inflection), the categories
were;
84% valence
30% voice
22% aspect
12% number
2% tense
0% mood
0% person
0% person of a second participant (e.g. object)
0% gender
Bybee says the most frequent type of valence morpheme was causatives.
If you are going to mark valence on _every_ verb, then, in your conlang,
valence will be an _inflectional_, rather than a _derivational_, category,
as far as Bybee's use of those terms would go. (The biggest difference
between "derivation" and "inflection" is that an "inflectional" feature is
obligatory and productive -- there is a way to mark every value of that
feature on any new word in the open class (verbs, in this case) --
while "derivation" is optional and not completely productive -- not every
word in the class (in this case, verbs) has to be marked for the feature,
and some values of the feature cannot be marked on some words in the
class.) As you can see from above, Bybee found that, while valence-marking
is "nearly universal", _inflection_ for valence is rather rare.
(BTW The semantics expressed by voice-marking the verb may also be
expressed by case-marking the nominals, or by re-ordering the constituents
(a syntactic marking that is not a morphological marking); that, says
Bybee, is why voice-marking of verbs isn't more common than it is.)
Bybee also investigates, for each pair of markings, which one tends to be
closer to the stem in case they occur on the same side of the stem. She
also investigates which markings tend to be fused with the stem. This
involved investigating both which features tended to be marked by stem-
changes instead of affixes, and which affixes tended to get changed
depending upon which stem they were being applied to.
In every language derivational markers tend to be closer to the stem than
inflectional markers; and whichever marker is closest to the stem is most
likely to be fused with it. Within those restrictions, the hierarchy
tended to be valence, voice, aspect, tense, mood, person-and-number.
Person-and-number agreement were often combined in one morpheme. Person-
agreement is never derivational, it is only inflectional.
(BTW many languages either inflect or derive the verb for number-of-
patient.)
---
Tom H.C. in MI
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Message: 6
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 09:12:08 -0800
From: Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Arabic and BACK TO Self-segregating morphology
--- Wesley Parish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
<snip>
> All Semitic languages to the best of my knowledge,
> use a triconsonantal with
> two vowels to express basic verbal ideas, adding
> complexity and additional
> consonants and vowels to express more complex ideas.
My plan was for three consonants, each followed by a
vowel or dipthong (possibly modified by "-n"), and an
optional initial vowel or dipthong. Thus: "pkt" could
be no shorter than "pokatu" nor longer than
"ainpuinkiantiun" (although in practice none would
really be THAT long). But in every case the vowels
would be fully written out.
There would be no inflections, and any change of vowel
would mean a change in the meaning, not in case,
tense, plurality, etc. Those would be marked by
particles.
The vowel changes would be uniform and and consistent.
Thus if -a-i-a was the primary noun and a-a-in-a was
the negative of the primary noun the with "nlj" we
have "nalija" = knowledge and "analinja" = ignorance;
with "wlt" we have "walita" = wealth and "awalinta" =
poverty. Thus knowing the roots and patterns one can
coin a new word or recognize a word not encountered
before. So if we know that "sakisa" is success then
even if we have never seen the word "asakinsa" we
would know what it meant. And we would also know how
to form "to succeed", "successful", successfully",
"successful-person", "to fail", "unsuccessful", etc.
Also, since every base word is three consonants long
when we encountered a four-consonant word we would
know that a prefix or suffix had been added, and by
the vowel patterns we would know which. And likewise,
five-consonant and longer words would, by their vowel
patterns be easily broken down into their roots and
affixes according to vowel patterns, thus retaining
the self-segregating property.
--gary
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Message: 7
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 17:59:39 +0100
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: A Self-segregating morphology (was: Guinea pigs invited)
Hi!
Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>...
> Yes, that's it. Except for the inflections. My
> intention was to create an isolating language where
> the parts of speech and basic meaning of the word were
> changed by switching the vowels, but there would be no
> inflections for tense, person, case, etc. These would
> be handled, where absolutely necessary, by particles.
Yeah, sounds nice. I once thought about using tone to do it, but
never really made a conlang of that kind (this is often the case, I
guess).
**Henrik
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