Backup: Conlanging Notes

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August 2017

August 2

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


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.