Difference between revisions of "Backup: Conlanging Notes"

Revision as of 12:11, 8 September 2017

September 2017

September 8

Akachenti

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.

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

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 (undocumented notes)

Akachenti

1. avidanlanguedo • a thousand years ago, numeral verb with incorporated (subject?) and a past subjunctive
2. two verb stems: baga: + baga:sha, likely a future or subjunctive stem and an indicative, but it can't be a present stem
3. -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

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

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.