Difference between revisions of "Backup: Conlanging Notes"

From Series Bible
Jump to: navigation, search
(9/16/17)
Line 9: Line 9:
 
So discovered that not all verb stem differences are simply an affix. They are actual inflection paradigms that I’ve yet to fully document.
 
So discovered that not all verb stem differences are simply an affix. They are actual inflection paradigms that I’ve yet to fully document.
  
avidanlanguedo means “a thousand years ago” and avidanlangueto means “a thousand years from now”. vi is the nonpresent affix that makes this past or future tense, da is the locative which supplies a when meaning, nla means years but only when incorporated, and the verb stem is actually anguedo, which means 1000. When I first came up with this expression though, I had angueto and I thought I’d just typoed it, but nope, that’s the future meaning, which makes these the parallel stems like baga: and baga:sha for “to love”.
+
''avidanlanguedo'' means “a thousand years ago” and ''avidanlangueto'' means “a thousand years from now”. ''vi'' is the nonpresent affix that makes this past or future tense, ''da'' is the locative which supplies a when meaning, ''nla'' means years but only when incorporated, and the verb stem is actually ''anguedo'', which means 1000. When I first came up with this expression though, I had ''angueto'' and I thought I’d just typoed it, but nope, that’s the future meaning, which makes these the parallel stems like ''baga:'' and ''baga:sha'' for “to love”.
  
 
==== Multiple Copulas ====
 
==== Multiple Copulas ====
  
Then I got Ingda:shat ise: as a sentence today and what makes it important is a question I’ve had going a while: why does the copula sometimes come out as a pure verb root -s-, and sometimes it comes out as se:? In this case, the sentence literally means, “Lover of mine, they are.” or properly translated, “He’s my lover.” Take that versus Isi gancha:nta, which means “They’re beautiful” with technically a copula before a verb, which ostensibly shouldn’t require the additional copula, but can/does for reasons. But the first example sentence has a predicate noun and the second has a predicate adjective (in verb form), and I suspect that’s part of the reason it uses a different copula.
+
Then I got ''Ingda:shat ise:'' as a sentence today and what makes it important is a question I’ve had going a while: why does the copula sometimes come out as a pure verb root ''-s-'', and sometimes it comes out as ''se:?'' In this case, the sentence literally means, “Lover of mine, they are.” or properly translated, “He’s my lover.” Take that versus ''Isi gancha:nta'', which means “They’re beautiful” with technically a copula before a verb, which ostensibly shouldn’t require the additional copula, but can/does for reasons. But the first example sentence has a predicate noun and the second has a predicate adjective (in verb form), and I suspect that’s part of the reason it uses a different copula.
  
 
==== -n Nominalization ====
 
==== -n Nominalization ====
  
There are a couple of forms of nominalization and the -n nominalizer always seemed more animate/person based than the -t nominalizer which clearly grew out of the relative affix. I think that -n emerged from a personal affix, like English’s -body in somebody, nobody, etc.
+
There are a couple of forms of nominalization and the ''-n'' nominalizer always seemed more animate/person based than the ''-t'' nominalizer which clearly grew out of the relative affix. I think that ''-n'' emerged from a personal affix, like English’s ''-body'' in ''somebody, nobody'', etc.
  
I have Ogunn, the name of the major group of peoples who speak Kachan / Akachenti. There’s Saekunn, which is what they call another people group in the area I suspect used to be related to them. There’s aemene, which probably emerged from ae + mu: + n with mu: being a plural and ae- indicating the inclusive first person. Then I’ve got the Baganechi, a related people group that live by raiding in war bands called bagan. They call their individual members nechi, which is shortened as the affix doesn’t really stand alone and usually has a modifier in front and…
+
I have ''Ogunn'', the name of the major group of peoples who speak Kachan / Akachenti. There’s ''Saekunn'', which is what they call another people group in the area I suspect used to be related to them. There’s ''aemene'', which probably emerged from ae + mu: + n with ''mu:'' being a plural and ''ae-'' indicating the inclusive first person. Then I’ve got the Baganechi, a related people group that live by raiding in war bands called ''bagan''. They call their individual members ''nechi'', which is shortened as the affix doesn’t really stand alone and usually has a modifier in front and…
  
Begins with n and is followed immediately by an e. I knew that the -n nominalizer did not come from nenga, which means “one” despite it being a potentially likely candidate, but it does feel like it came from whatever nechi came from and that the word clearly means something like “body” or at least used to.
+
Begins with n and is followed immediately by an e. I knew that the -n nominalizer did not come from ''nenga'', which means “one” despite it being a potentially likely candidate, but it does feel like it came from whatever ''nechi'' came from and that the word clearly means something like “body” or at least used to.
  
 
==== Summary ====
 
==== Summary ====

Revision as of 09:08, 19 September 2017


September 2017

9/16/17

Inflected Verb Bases

So discovered that not all verb stem differences are simply an affix. They are actual inflection paradigms that I’ve yet to fully document.

avidanlanguedo means “a thousand years ago” and avidanlangueto means “a thousand years from now”. vi is the nonpresent affix that makes this past or future tense, da is the locative which supplies a when meaning, nla means years but only when incorporated, and the verb stem is actually anguedo, which means 1000. When I first came up with this expression though, I had angueto and I thought I’d just typoed it, but nope, that’s the future meaning, which makes these the parallel stems like baga: and baga:sha for “to love”.

Multiple Copulas

Then I got Ingda:shat ise: as a sentence today and what makes it important is a question I’ve had going a while: why does the copula sometimes come out as a pure verb root -s-, and sometimes it comes out as se:? In this case, the sentence literally means, “Lover of mine, they are.” or properly translated, “He’s my lover.” Take that versus Isi gancha:nta, which means “They’re beautiful” with technically a copula before a verb, which ostensibly shouldn’t require the additional copula, but can/does for reasons. But the first example sentence has a predicate noun and the second has a predicate adjective (in verb form), and I suspect that’s part of the reason it uses a different copula.

-n Nominalization

There are a couple of forms of nominalization and the -n nominalizer always seemed more animate/person based than the -t nominalizer which clearly grew out of the relative affix. I think that -n emerged from a personal affix, like English’s -body in somebody, nobody, etc.

I have Ogunn, the name of the major group of peoples who speak Kachan / Akachenti. There’s Saekunn, which is what they call another people group in the area I suspect used to be related to them. There’s aemene, which probably emerged from ae + mu: + n with mu: being a plural and ae- indicating the inclusive first person. Then I’ve got the Baganechi, a related people group that live by raiding in war bands called bagan. They call their individual members nechi, which is shortened as the affix doesn’t really stand alone and usually has a modifier in front and…

Begins with n and is followed immediately by an e. I knew that the -n nominalizer did not come from nenga, which means “one” despite it being a potentially likely candidate, but it does feel like it came from whatever nechi came from and that the word clearly means something like “body” or at least used to.

Summary

In short, I’m actually pretty happy with this progress. I’m finally beginning to fully grok the shape of a polysynthetic language and Akachenti is falling into shape around that.

9/15/17

Akachenti Pronominal Markers

Noticed that only the agentive/patientive markers in Akachenti promote animate, proximate persons to the next up, e.g. a third person in listening range is referred to as “you” despite not being addressed. But the dative markers do not participate in this process. You can’t use u to refer to a third person or e to refer to a second person without it being first person inclusive.

I still can’t find some sort of description of this process that will let me search for it in natlang environments.

9/14/17

Akachenti Adjectives

Yesterday, I figured out that adjectives aren’t really their own thing in Akachenti. They’re a variation on a noun and can be incorporated into verbs to make distinctions between type of trait, quality or quantity, etc.

9/13/17

Akachenti Cliches/Aphorisms

I was thinking “When it rains, it pours,” and suddenly wondered what my Ogunn culture—the ones that speak Akachenti—would say instead. That got me started on cliches. I only have one properly translated but I’ve got a couple to translate later.

ibeki tiake • “The foolish clamor.”

“When the drought, the raiders.”

“Better the naati than the stranger/foreigner.” (Naati is a fierce desert spirit associated with caprcious vengeance, fury, and protectiveness.)

“After the drought, the fire/burning.”

“Tea makes a sister of contentment.”

Yes, so this region used to be the land trade route, think Silk/Spice Road type thing, bridge of a couple continents. There’s a rather large raiding nation/group/ethnicity or whatever called the Baganechi. They love raiding caravans, even modern ones.

So the phrase references the fact that a major family or business could face ruin when first their fields died in drought, then their trade goods were set upon by raiders.

9/11/17

Akachenti affixation/serial verbs

Mostly just reading today and puzzling my way through whether Akachenti evening constructions (for the most part, suffixes, but with some caveats) used to be verbs that incorporated other verbs, straightforward compound verbs (similar to serial verbs with light verbs, etc.), or they’re grammaticized verbs with regular noun incorporation.

I feel like I understand the language better but make little daily progress.

September 8

To Be Read

  1. http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.ling.d7/files/sitefiles/research/papers/18/Goertz.et_.al_._vol18.pdf
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ket_language
  3. http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:1539389/component/escidoc:1949889/Kelly_etal_2014.pdf

Akachenti

Case Agreement Markers
Agentive Patientive Dative-
Benefactive
Glottalic Low
1st Excl. a á e e
1st Incl. ae é e e
2nd Anim. Prox. a á u u
2nd Obv. o ó u u
3rd Anim. Prox. o ó i i
3rd Obv. i í i i
  1. Looking at the Kartvelian languages, Akachenti could very well be using pronominal agreement with straight up nominative/accusative/dative, though these terms might not be correct and if the dative does pre-exist the erosion of the markers and the rule against high tone + low tone adjacent syllables, then it could have been from dative paradigms that the alternate vowel markers for direct objects were extrapolated.
  2. two verb stems: baga: + baga:sha, likely a future or subjunctive stem and an indicative, but it can't be a present stem and both stems in the present are imperfective
    1. It could be the two present tenses are both continuative, with present continuative (I'm still loving you) and future continuative (I'll still be loving you) with them collapsing down to their current state
    2. On further research, the unmarked present is 'Continuative Perfect (past situations continuing into present): "I have always guided him"'
    3. The marked present would be the present inceptive/inchoative (dynamic/stative)
    4. The past discontinuous uses the same verb stem as the present continuative perfect, implying it's the perfect stem and is negated by the vi- prefix.
    5. The simple future/narrative tense uses the inceptive/inchoative stem.
    6. The stems appear to be aspectual. Now, if I can just figure out whether you call it inceptive or inchoative when it's both.
Verb Stems
Aspect
Perfect Inchoative
Tense Present present continuative perfect present inchoative/inceptive
Non-Present past discontinuous future or narrative tense

Kartvelian Version Markers

"By means of special markers Kartvelian verbs can indicate four kinds of action intentionality ("version"):
  • subjective—shows that the action is intended for oneself,
  • objective—the action is intended for another person,
  • objective-passive—the action is intended for another person and at the same time indicating the passiveness of subject,
  • neutral—neutral with respect to intention."

Verb Personality Table

Verb personality table
Unipersonal Bipersonal Tripersonal
intransitive transitive intransitive ditransitive
Subject + + + +
Direct object + +
Indirect object + +

A Brief History of the Italian Language: How did language contact affect morphology and syntax?

"Georgian is a highly agglutinative language-one of the most agglutinative on earth. Because of this characteristic, it is hard to create a dictionary for the language only because it would be a dictionary of roots instead of complete vocabulary words! Other Caucasian languages exhibit this high amount of agglutination in the verb systems. It is likely that the Turkic speaking peoples which surrounded them had some influence on this matter (as they are also highly agglutinative.) Although the Indo-European verb is very different, the Indo-European noun is very similar. The Georgian noun declines much like the Armenian noun (the ending for the Armenian Genitive case is virtually the same). Georgian also has a vocative case which occurs in many Slavic languages-it in fact is identical to the vocative case that exists in Czech. Most likely this passage occurred by the means of the Old Church Slavonic language which would have come in contact with the mediaeval Georgians.
"Syntax in Georgian is also similar to the Indo-European languages which surround it. It has a "free" word order structure which exists in both Russian and Armenian (because of their agglutination), but has the additional component of having the subjects and objects built into the verb structure (Harris, 7). From this example it is apparent that Georgian adopted some aspects of the surrounding languages while, other aspects of the language remained unique. It is also apparent that Indo-European languages affected its appositive sentence construction (Harris, 12). An example of this would be the word order in the phrase 'this is my book' or 'es aris chemi tsigni'. The word order of Georgian and English is the same. Thus, it is evidence that there has been Indo-European influence on Georgian syntax."

September 6

Question: What do I call this verb stem?

I have a verb stem in Akachenti that gets used by itself for a variation on present indicative which indicates that this situation/action will continue in the future, e.g. I love you now and expect to keep on doing so.

With a non-present marker, the stem is used to indicate simple future tense, e.g. I will come to love you.

The normal present is the unmarked stem and indicates the action began previously and also occurs now. You could call it a present perfect or a present continuative, e.g. I’ve been loving you, I still love you, etc.

With a non-present marker, the unmarked stem is used to indicate past discontinuous, e.g. I loved you, but now I don’t. To me, the unmarked stem is clearly indicative.

That said, I’ve tried calling this future stem optative, subjunctive, and irrealis, but none of them quite fit. What do I call this thing???

September (undocumented notes)

Akachenti

General Notes
  1. avidanlanguedo • a thousand years ago, numeral verb (-anguedo) with incorporated subject (-nla-) and a past (vi-) locative (da-); this is an uninflected construction with a stem of -vidanlangued-.
  2. -ar/-er could not be former accusative case endings. It doesn't quite work with the current possessive case endings or the way things tend to play out when they show up. They are former somethings but not sure what. They tend to coincide with -(F)dar/-(S)ter. Why would there be dissimilation here? e.g. kishdar and ementer
Constructions

Are they light verbs or proper affixes or what?

  1. Fixed Constructions
    1. -enti
    2. -a:sh
    3. -a:ch
    4. -chiet
    5. -eb
    6. -ebet/-ebos
    7. -ste
    8. -dahe
  2. Inflectional Constructions
    1. -a:nta
    2. -a:sha
    3. -at
    4. -ar/-er
  3. Mutable Constructions
    1. -anta
  4. Prefixed Constructions
    1. bo-
    2. da-
    3. ri-
    4. shi-
    5. vi-
    6. su-
Particles
  1. Prefixed Particles
    1. hu-
    2. he-
  2. Suffixed Particles
    1. -k(V)
  3. Independent Particles
    1. (i)eh

Eileci

  1. Eileci and Ananti are both proper nouns, which implies both definite and specific
  2. adjectives Eileci/Ananti are nonspecific, but Eilecea/Anantea agree with specific forms

August 2017

August 3

Proto-Kachan Word Order

Proto-Kachan used a topic, comment sentence style with an initial topic word fully inflected to agree with its referent. Word order was OVS. The initial person-marking slot on a Modern Akachenti verb really is patient and only began to have a reversal option due to the patient/topic slots collapsing in many cases. As topic can be inflected as agent, which referent was marked in which slot became malleable.

Furthermore, the alternate vowel person markers appear to be related to the inflection of the nouns for their case, with the stressed person markers appearing in agreement on the verbs.

I’m so happy right now.

August 2

Phonology

So I get to update Akachenti phonology and all of my IPA pronunciations everywhere. :headdesk:

I made an executive decision re: the pronunciation of h in the language, that the reason following it with a close vowel ends up with lateral airflow is probably more due to my exceptionally narrow palate than the allophone actually being lateral. So it’s all going to be shifted to a palatal fricative with a breathy-voiced glottal allophone in word-initial positions or when followed by a lax vowel, in Akachenti, ae, e, or u. Oddly enough, the others are all tense. Not that I could tell you what makes it tense/lax, but that’s the only contrast that describes it at all.

Person

Additionally, I’ve worked out something new regarding person. When I really thought about English, we have a “generic” in first, second, and third person, though we only seem to acknowledge the one in second. So I really looked at my four person marker sets and my three personal pronoun pairs, and ignored proximate, animate person promotion, and concluded that Akachenti has an underlying system of first person unmarked, first person inclusive, second person, and third person.

I decided this also based on the fact that when the first person unmarked is used to indicate a clusive relationship with the addressee, though a first person marker is used, a different one is used for each referent, both speaker and addressee. In the case of the actual clusive first person, only one marker is required to say “we”, which means the other is much more like “you and I” with that proximate, animate promotion thing I mentioned earlier.

Every person indicator will generally promote the addressee to first or the referent to addressee/second if proximate and animate, so I don’t know what that is, but it sure made this whole mess confusing for a while. It essentially created two types of clusivity with subtle distinctions in which is used when.

But still, coming at it from this base should make it much simpler now to flesh out the different uses of Akachenti person, now that it’s separating core definition from that usage.

Accusative?

Makes no sense. Good member of starting vocabulary.

Ushar ebé. 2-ACC 1-INCL-to do-1-INCL-ACC.

Diachronic Vowel Phonemes

compare actual allophones of vowels

familiar singular -> inclusive plural (ae/é/e) polite singular -> exclusive plural (a/á/e) second + polite third (o/ó/u) third (i/í/i)

singular inclusive, indicates emotional involvement in Samoan

Cheyenne Pronominals

Paper on Cheyenne Pronominals

  1. verbs: independent, conjunct, imperative
  2. agreement or person-indexing for "verbal affixation of pronominal categories"
  3. most referents tracked with pronominals, independent pronouns serve functions other than pure tracking of reference
  4. pronominals: first, second, third person prefixes
  5. person hierarchy determines prefixal person marking when a verb has two or more arguments
  6. Jelinek would classify Cheyenne as a Pronominal Argument (PA) language, as opposed to a Lexical Argument (LA) language, such as English. Cheyenne verbs , like those of other PA languages, only has pronominal, specifically pronominal affix, arguments.
  7. impersonal verbs take third person prefix
  8. unspecified subject is treated differently in Cheyenne and can act like an agentless passive
  9. unspecified subject cannot be indicated by a freestanding noun
  10. object pronominal prefixed, verb shaped built from transitive stem for object animacy, then detransitived by using intransitive inflection
  11. has possessor prefix on possessed noun similar to pronominal prefixes, also has unspecified possessor for non-freestanding words
  12. there are alternates with different pitch levels
  13. Cheyenne freestanding pronouns are inflectionally verbs, potentially derived from a copular expression

August 1

Wiki

Doing some serious rearranging on my wiki stuff for Akachenti. Also, new word technically with IPA this time:

Vocabulary

tlangenti • [ ǃaŋ.ɛn.ti ] • bell-chiming, ringing — nominal


No new words for Conweek Day 1, but thinking on Conweek Day 2. I know I want to describe the tea needles, just got to yank together enough good grammar for it.


Itlasidit bangleste ih, ribreki. Skylight, she’s stoic, not quiet.

IPA: i.ǃa.si.dit ban.ᶢǁɛ.ste iʎ̥˔ ɹi.bɹɛ.ki

April 2017

April 25

Pitch Accent

So apparently, Akachenti has post-lexical pitch accent and considering that stress is almost entirely qualitative and not durative, I'm guessing it's no-stress post-lexical pitch accent. Which I'd kind of figured but didn't want to pin down until I understood enough about its prosody to be certain.

April 13

Vocabulary

  1. i:ku • eye
  2. ihaeb • hand
  3. vaseshi • catastrophic fire, lit. water-eater

Monophthongization

  1. oi → o:
  2. ei → e:

Grammaticalization

  1. -sut → -s.s, -sə → -s

April 12

  1. Reading: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.540.8796&rep=rep1&type=pdf
  2. Writing about Akachenti prosody

April 10

  1. Reading: http://www.revel.inf.br/files/artigos/revel_special_4_active_stative_agreement.pdf
  2. So Akachenti is an active language, which I knew, but I'm finding stuff at last that allows patient-marking in particular.
  3. Reading: http://depts.washington.edu/wll2/files/davidson_02_diss.pdf

April 5

Possessive Affix

-har-, in modern verb citation form aharo, is now the tentative origin of the original possessive case affix -ar, which can inflect to -er, but never seemed as mutable as it ought to be. Which makes sense if it came from a fixed or inflecting vowel verb. And the word meant, "to purchase" then "to possess." The concept of buying and ownership is why it overtook the genitive only in certain contexts. There's a distinction that may eventually make it an alienable possessive if the genitive turns too lexically derivative and ends up only useful for inalienable possessions and personal relationships. Right now, there's a difference between the genitive and the possessive, but it's not really based on alienability. It could go there though.

That said, it still doesn't entirely explain to me how in the world the old accusative (or patientive) case is identical to the possessive case or why. My original thought on seeing how the verb for "to want" was viewed as happening to you rather than something you did (the wanter was marked as patient), made me think it could just be a parallel grammatical view that possession was something that happened to you. But I don't know. It feels too solid to try and segregate the concepts in Akachenti, but I don't really understand it.

Person Markers

split-intransitive with a marked preference for patient = subject

a / ae / o / i -ar / -er e / u / i -ar / -et / -ot / -it
agentive genitive-accusative oblique genitive
agent patient patient genitive
instrument/causee possessor benefactive ablative ( re: )
posssessee comitative
dative
causer

April 2

Related Kachan Languages

I know next to nothing about Merchan, so it's tweakable as needed. Baganechi, I know that it has grammatical number, the N nominalizer but prefixed rather than suffixed, and that it uses prefixed person markers as a lexical relational affix, similar to the suffixed -at, -ot, -et1 of Akachenti. Interestingly though, Baganechi uses the accusative forms e-, u-, and i-. Which makes Baganechi prefixing where Akachenti is suffixing, though compounding would seem to work the same, which isn't entirely surprising as I'd take compounding and incorporation as the oldest forms of word formation, but is slightly surprising because those relational affixes and person markers are clearly also pretty old or they wouldn't be so tightly bound, inflectional, and grammaticized in usage.

1 instead of the expected -it)

Nominalization

Also of note, is that there are two primary nominalizers in Akachenti, the -(ii)n and the -t nominalizers. I need to sort out of the rules of which does which, but I might have actually found the eroded form of the original one or singular affix. I bascially read a word-final n as meaning "thing", and it's possible it did reduce down from a numeral one or pronoun meaning. I suspect grammatical number was original, though it's possible simple numeral marking was used instead in Proto-Kachan. Right now, either theory is still good.

So "thing (that is)" or "thing (related to)" seem to be the original origins of the nominalizers. Though I could be wrong. Will actually have to go peek through the current vocab to be sure.