Talk:Akachenti

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9/25/18

Lianamir (talk) 14:00, 25 September 2018 (CDT)

Akachenti Notes (9/25)

Akachenti appears to be a register-tone language with breathy-low, glottalic-high, and plain-mid registers.

Vowel Raising (9/25)

  1. patient markers experience vowel-shift in certain environments, likely triggered by some consonant distinction loss
  2. patient markers lost their consonants, leaving behind subparadigms with vowel-shifted patient markers
  3. high tone blocking rule arose
  4. paradigms where it operated merged accented and unaccented forms
  5. vowel-shifted markers were then generalised to all positions next to low-tone vowels, to reintroduce the contrast

Compare all diphthong locations to voicing/register of onset consonants. Transitioning between registers can cause perception of a glide and break the vowel. Diphthongized vowels contrasting with pure vowels may lose the register distinction.

Something notable here:

  • a -> e = raised vowel
  • o -> u = raised vowel
  • i -> i /= raised vowel and i -> e = lowered vowel

Which is probably why it's rarely indicated and the e sounds have probably merged. In short, you can't raise higher than i.

possible template before synthesis (9/25)

[ topic / question particle ] + [ recipient (dative / benefactive) / addressee (imperative) ] + [ patient ] + [ inflected verb ] + [ agent ]

General Notes (9/25)

lost onset consonants: (9/25)

  • voiced -> low tone
  • murmured -> low tone
  • aspirated -> high tone
  • voiceless -> high tone
  • nasal -> ? tone/raised vowel

lost coda consonants: (9/25)

  • glottal stop -> high/rising
  • fricative -> low/falling
  • murmured -> high tone

It has long been recognized that only an extremely limited set of postvocalic consonants contribute directly to pitch generation, specifically the postvocalic consonants that involve a distinctive laryngeal adjustment—glottal stops and -h.

Khmer devoiced initial voiced stops and transferred the distinction to the vowels instead: tense/high and lax/low. This is a classic sound change split and there had to be something that triggered a vowel split on the patientive "affix" in Akachenti.

Degree of breathiness is variable, with bilabial and forward consonants producing more breathiness and also lower/more open vowels will tend toward more breathiness than close ones.

In diphthongization: (9/25)

  1. high lax vowels and low tense vowels tend to remain stable
  2. tenseness produces lowered onsets in high vowels
  3. laxness produces raised onset in low vowels
  4. mid vowels may participate in either pattern

vowel length (9/25)

"Not too surprisingly, when the tense-voiced vowels are shorter, the tenseness is often derived historically from a final glottal stop."

vowel quality (9/25)

"The literature documents two correlations between voice quality and vowel quality, one universally attested and the other more marginally attested. The most accurate statement of these correlations is found in Bradley (1982:120), who describes the vowels deriving from the older voiced and, as is obvious from the modern phonetics, breathy-voiced register as “higher” and“more fronted”, while describing the vowels deriving from the older creaky-voiced register as“lower” and “more backed”. The correlation between voice quality and vowel height, that is, F1 is widely attested and uncontroversial: countless scholars have observed that breathy-voiced vowels tend to be relatively higher (e.g., /i/ versus /I/), while tense-voiced vowels tend to be relatively lower (Henderson (1952, 1977), Huffman (1976), Denning (1989), Hombert (1978), Bradley (1982) and so on). The correlation of tenseness (laryngealization) with lower vowels is seen in Mpi, a language in the Lolo-Burmese branch of Tibeto-Burman; Denning (1989:29-33) examined the two-way phonation contrast between modal and tense voice in Mpi and noted that Mpi the tense-voiced vowels showed lowered vowels, that is, the tense-voiced vowels had a higher F1.

"The second correlation, between voice quality and vowel fronting, that is F2, is neither as often observed, nor as clearly designated: in Bradley’s terms (1982:120), breathy-voiced vowels tend to be more backed, while tense-voiced vowels tend to front. Henderson (1952, 1977:259) describes what seems to be the same correlation but in different terms; the breathy-voiced vowels have a “tendency to diphthongize”, while the tense-voiced vowels have a “tendency to centralize”.23 Similar tendencies observed by other authors (e.g. Huffman 1976) tend to parallel either Bradley’s or Henderson’s characterization." - https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3880/a6d440431413675afbdf2d37243e291a0f77.pdf

  1. raising in open syllables
  2. pre-rhotic lowering
  3. pre-sonorant lowering (exceptions for frequency, 1st syllables in trisyllabic words, not conditioned by affixation)

Huffman (1976), Registrogenesis (9/25)

  • Stage 1: onset distinction, same vowel
  • Stage 2: onset distinction, redundant register split
  • Stage 3: optional onset distinction, distinctive registers
  • Stage 4: full loss of onset distinction

Comments on Conlang Group (9/25)

Comment Link

So watched a vid yesterday here: David Peterson’s The Art of Language Invention, Episode 27: The Evolution of Tone.

It gave me some direction I think I can actually work with to figure out how Akachenti got it’s tonal accents and possibly enough to backtrack how those standalone pronouns reduced down to the pronominals. In short, breathiness leads to low tone and tense consonants (frequently including glottals) lead to high tone, which definitely correlates with what Akachenti has going.

Also potentially helpful was his video on vowel quality change, which should help me figure out how the high vs. low vowels figure into the tonal accent as well (because they do).

I might actually start conlanging again after a massive block on that front, so looking forward to revisiting Akachenti now.

Today's Reading/Resources (9/25)


Backreading (9/25)

Vowel Raising/Lowering in Akachenti (9/25)

Tbh, I haven't figured out whether vowel raising or lowering is involved because of stress being retracted and glottalized, which is likely to cause vowel-lowering (and i/e/a/u followed by lowering is attested in an excellent natlang example), but then i/e/a/o would let the e displace to let a rise and split and send e into the i region, which could explain ae / e / i showing weird overlaps in their histories. But I have figured out that it's one of them and that figuring out diachronic prosody is my answer to most problems pronoun.

Right now, I'm thinking those elided consonants were possibly uvular, as that's in keeping with the general phonology pattern, the k that shows up in the agentive suffix used with short-fixed-vowel-final verbs, and with vowel lowering, but if vowel-raising turns out the better analysis (in keeping with primary person markers being the lower versions, not the raised versions), then it's likely something else, like a palatal, which is also plausible with the phonology. I'm kind of stuck really digging into both possible avenues into the current vowel set because there's no way I can work with diphthongs in sister languages without nailing down the vowel shifts that led to "modern" Akachenti.

Conversation(s) with Alex Fink (9/25)

>There's the complication of the associative first person ae / é / ae seeming to be tied to the original 3rd, as evidenced by the vestigial 3rd person e's floating around everywhere and it's continuing to be used as a third person generic when the speaker is "associating" themselves with the generic group referenced. "We should always bide our time." vs. "One should always bide their time."

Hm, the semantic distinctions 1 :: 1.assoc :: 3.generic are very fine, on the grounds of your examples. I think they're easily the sort of thing that could have an ex-nihilo origin. Suppose that for some reason (to be invented) the "associative first person pronoun" used to take third-person agreement, but also that there were two allomorphs of the third-person agreement markers bopping around. One of them might just by some chance (being used in a proverb? phonetic resemblance? etc.) become fixed as the first person associative marker, leaving the other to be the third person marker.

>Third person pronouns don't decline and the associative first pronoun has taken over the regular first altogether.

i.e. free rein to invent the form of the older "regular" first person pronoun. But do try to give it some reason to have been eliminated. Pernicious homophony? A difference of politeness or social connotation?

>Which basically means, you can go from mid tone to low tone, but you can't go from high tone to a low tone. So it just switches to the alternate vowel set. Which may not have made a lot of sense if I thought too much about it, but it felt right and worked beautifully in practice, so I just have to learn to understand prosody now that I want to analyze it. And there is also that the the alternate vowel markers can be used for oblique, noncore arguments but stress is pretty much always accusative and sometimes genitive (head-marked).

Neat. So the vowel-changed versions appear only when the accented versions can't, as a surrogate. That to me says that their distribution will be recent. I.e. originally when the high tone blocking rule arose, the paradigms where it operated just merged accented and unaccented forms. But some subparadigm somewhere had these vowel-shifted patient markers (a vanished consonant could still be the culprit, etc.) and they were then generalised to all positions next to low-tone vowels, to reintroduce the contrast.

My suspect is that some other morph will be involved in the story. For example, if the patientive was marked by vowel raising, maybe the story is that there used to be a backgrounded agent suffix -C which appeared after the object morphs, which at this stage were identical with the subject morphs. Now assume a sound change that raises vowels before -C, and then lose the agent suffix.

Personal Pronominals (9/25)

Case Agreement Markers
Agentive Patientive Dative-
Benefactive
Glottalic Low
1st Excl. a á e e
1st Incl. (aemen(t)e(r)) ae é e e
2nd Anim. Prox. (usha(r)) a á u u
2nd Obv. (usha(r)) o ó u u
3rd Anim. Prox. (ih) o ó i i
3rd Obv. (ih) i í i i


9/26/18

Lianamir (talk) 11:37, 26 September 2018 (CDT)

Akachenti Notes (9/26)

Vowel Raising Possibilities (9/26)

  • raising (shortening) long vowels: a: -> e, o: -> u
  • lowering (lengthening) short vowels: i -> e, u -> o
  • a | e -> raised/fronted
  • ae | e -> raised/fronted
  • o | u -> raised
  • (i | i)
  • e | i -> raised/fronted

Order of Vowel Quality/Phonation Change (9/26)

  1. breathy register redundantly marks vowels following lenis consonants and possibly fricatives
  2. a series of raised vowels (on oblique/patientive pronominals) in breathy register, while the majority continue to be original lower vowels on modal register
  3. pronominals lose their consonants, leaving behind vowel-shifted person markers

Uncertain:

  1. patientive pronominals lose glottalic consonant and are distinguished by higher pitch

Working on the Verb Template (9/26)

immediately previous template:

topic / topic-oblique + patient + verb prefix + verb stem + verb suffix + agent

General Notes (9/26)

English low vowels are lower before voiceless obstruents. The second elements of English closing diphthongs are raised before voiceless obstruents, e.g. rice, house, relative to lower pronunciation before voiced obstruents, e.g. to rise, to house.

breathy-voiced vowels tend to be more backed, while tense-voiced vowels tend to front. tense-voiced vowels tend to be relatively lower and breathy tend to raise

Higher vowels are shorter than lower vowels.

Monophthongs are raised and diphthongs are monophthongized, because higher monophthongs and less wide diphthongs sound longer than, respectively, lower monophthongs and more diphthongal vowels.

Comments on Conlang Group (9/26)

Comment Link

So been doing a ton of reading on the interactions between tone registers, phonation, pitch, consonant sonorance, and vowel quality: (article list of yesterday and today)

This has been useful in digging into Akachenti, which has a robust and complex personal pronominal system that has been difficult to untangle, primarily I suspect because it’s obviously vestigial of a once more robust pronoun case system that mostly no longer exists. I’m almost certain the reason I’ve been unable to create a full verbal paradigm is because the paradigms have to have come down diachronically from a combination of sound change, pronominal reduction, and person-marking slots in the verbal template trying very hard to merge.

On the bright side, I’ve also learned a lot from all this reading, starting with the fact that breathy phonation is a super simple and common addition to voiced consonants that often leads to redundant breathy phonation on the vowels, which in turn can lead to vowel raising and/or a tone register split in the language (Registrogenesis in Khmer), which is likely exactly what happened to Akachenti.

The two initial registers usually created in this process (or one coming from a glottalic “tense” side instead) are tense and lax. These are relative though, so modal is whichever the other isn’t. In this case, I know I end up with a tense (glottalic), normal (modal), lax (breathy) register system, but am not sure which came first. It’ll have to shake out though because both were clearly triggered by consonant or consonant distinction loss, as they do.

Right now I’ve got:

  1. breathy register redundantly marks vowels following lenis consonants and possibly fricatives
  2. a series of raised vowels (on oblique/patientive pronominals) in breathy register, while the majority continue to be original lower vowels on modal register
  3. pronominals lose their consonants, leaving behind vowel-shifted person markers

Uncertain:

  1. patientive pronominals lose glottalic consonant and are distinguished by higher pitch

But this is theory one. Separately we have theory two, which gets at the fact that there’s this old table which points out agreement markers don’t always line up perfectly with the original freestanding morphemes they agreed with.

Case Agreement Markers
Agentive Patientive Dative-
Benefactive
Glottalic Low
1st Excl. a á e e
1st Incl. (aemen(t)e(r)) ae é e e
2nd Anim. Prox. (usha(r)) a á u u
2nd Obv. (usha(r)) o ó u u
3rd Anim. Prox. (ih) o ó i i
3rd Obv. (ih) i í i i

and also this table:

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

These two old tables led me to these notes today:

So the differences of the personal pronominals could be indicative of lost case.

If the original persons were:

  • 1st excl.
  • 1st incl.
  • 2nd prox.
  • 2nd obv.
  • 3rd prox.
  • 3rd obv.

There’s pretty much only one natlang family that has shown 2nd person obviation, but this is the only thing that makes sense to me with the pronominal markers on animate, proximate second person, even when combined with the usual freestanding pronoun as used for obviate.

And let’s posit there were three cases:

  • agentive (assoc. with a / ae / o / e)*
  • patientive (assoc. with á / e / ó / é) – caused by (glottalic?) consonant loss
  • oblique (assoc. with e / e / u / i) – caused by (breathy?) consonant loss

*likely the -k(V) suffix that surfaces on small, old, high-frequency verbs, e.g. da(ke)

Of note in here is that I listed the agentive and patientive 3rd person markers as e and é, despite the fact that in Modern Akachenti, they are i and í. This is because there is a marked pattern of vowel raising from the agentive/patientive vowel quality to the oblique. In Modern Akachenti, the third person vowels have merged, but there are traces of /e/ being used where I would expect /i/. It makes more sense that the original vowel quality was then /e/, which raised to /i/ where expected and then began merging both markers, rather than the original quality being /i/ and having unexpected and inexplicable lowering to /e/.

Additionally, there is some confusion that comes from cases shifting meaning over time. In German, there are good examples of dative being used for some functions of the accusative case. In Akachenti, this sort of case movement has definitely occurred and will have to be looked at closer later.

Today's Reading/Resources (9/26)

9/27/18

Lianamir (talk) 13:44, 27 September 2018 (CDT)

Akachenti Notes (9/27)

Sound Changes (9/27)

So somewhere along the way before we got to Modern Akachenti, there were sound changes. Right now, I've got some conditioned sound changes with no final rules as yet of what the conditions are:

  1. a2 > aɛ (unconditioned?)
  2. e2 > e1 (visible in 2nd incl pronominals)
  3. a1 > e (visible in 1st oblique pronominals and in medial syllables, i.e. "construct" form)
  4. o > u (visible in 2nd oblique pronominals)
  5. e1 > i (visible in 3rd person pronominals)

Current ongoing sound changes are:

  1. aɛ > {a,aɪ,e} (unconditioned?)

9/28/18

Lianamir (talk) 13:09, 28 September 2018 (CDT)

Akachenti Notes (9/28)

see Conlang comment below

General Notes (9/28)

Mechanisms of Syntactic Change edited by Charles N. Li

Agreement markers usually arise from forms that were independent pronouns at an earlier stage of the language, those forms later attaching as clitics or affixes to the verb.

In the Iroquoian case, if this reconstruction is correct, the aggreement markers arose instead from a reinterpretation of affixes that were already being used for other purpose. Some originated as markers of number, then extended to mark person, then subsequently to mark gender.

In the Northern languages, agreement is for number, person, case, and gender (in the third person). Number includes singular, dual, and plural (sometimes "nonsingular" dual/plural). Person is 1st, 2nd, 3rd with clusivity marked in dual/plural on 1st. Case is agentive (doers, perceivers, subjects of epistemic verbs) and patientive (experiencer, certain recipients and beneficiaries). Gender includes masculine, feminine, and nonhuman.

Iroquoian have three classes of pronominal prefixes: agent, patient, and transitive (both).

Proto-Iroquoian-Caddoan had agreement for 1st and 2nd with number and clusivity but 3rd person had only number agreement. There was however a nonspecific or indefinite prefix which agreed in case. This in Caddoan remains unspecfic, but in Iroquoian languages was extended to general third person, then restricted to human, then further to feminine. Three other third person markers seem to have arisen from number markers. ka- was began as specific third person agent, later restricted to nonhuman, then extended to feminine as well in nonsingular or everwhere. Agents picked up dual/plural first but patients still make do with nonsingular.

"The prepronominal prefixes of PI seem to have had a general preconsonantal allomorph and a general prevocalic allomorph, and at least four of the prefixes ( the partitive, distributive, cislocative, and repetitive ) seem to have had two sets of allomorphs, one of which was associated with independent verb forms, the other with dependent forms."

Comment on Conlang Group (9/28)

Started rereading this baby: A HISTORY OF THE IROQUOIAN LANGUAGES. In the process, am looking at the verbal template for Modern Akachenti with an eye to deciphering how Pre-Modern Akachenti's pronominals and agreement markers and the verbal template itself might have been different. Some of the mess the current version looks like has to be from elision, reduction, merging, etc.

Agreement markers currently agree with case and person, but only arguably hit topicality (covered by order) and don't seem to handle number. It feels odd that number would be such a non-thing in Akachenti. For now I have:

  1. Topical or Interrogative Pronominal Prefix (obligatory)
  2. Prepronominal Prefix(es) (optional)
  3. Pronominal Prefix (optional, usually patientive)
  4. Incorporated Light Verb (optional)
  5. Incorporated Noun Stem (optional)
  6. Verb Base (obligatory)
  7. Verb Suffix (optional)
  8. Pronominal Suffix (obligatory if verb is topical, usually agentive)

In Iroquoian, number is included as a separate prefix where person markers do not indicate number. Could be a start on grammatical number being lost in Akachenti rather than originally absent.

On a separate note, negation is messy and while it may be indicated as its own prefix, usually isn't. It's more common that a prepronominal prefix, light verb, or verb base will be rendered in a negative form via negative particle infixing. I have no good way to indicate this as yet on my template, but am not going to sweat that.

Suffixes are ridiculously numerous in this language, but it may be a valuable exercise to assess prefixes more closely as this seems to be somewhat more of a closed set than suffixes.

Resources for Today (9/28)

10/2/18

Notes (10/2)

Lianamir (talk) 13:56, 2 October 2018 (CDT)

Akachenti Notes (10/2)

Breaking can be caused by an attempt to shorten a long vowel via a glide.

High tone/tense register causes fronting, vowel lowering (of close vowels), and breaking with lowered onsets (in close vowels). In Akachenti, vowels shorten compared to modal.

Low tone/lax register causes backing, vowel raising (of open vowels), and monophthongization or breaking with raised onsets (of open vowels). In Akachenti, vowels lengthen compared to modal.

Registers develop in stages by adding redundant marking to strengthen the emphasis created by a register phonation or tone (pitch), then losing a contrast.

Should probably make sure there are pre-vocalic and pre-consonantal allomorphs of pre-Modern Akachenti prefixes and post-vocalic/consonantal allomorphs in suffixes.

Akachenti tense register: (10/2)

Likely triggered by the loss of glottal stop in patientive pronominals, imprecatives (which are still indicated and therefore were probably explicit longer), and imperatives. The imperative forms are merging with topic-fronted patientives where both verbs reduced to the same form, but all three forms had some sort of actual glottal stop infixes or codas on the original morphemes.

  • glottalic: implosive or ejective obstruents / devoiced obstruents and fricatives / vowel clipping by glottal stop / preglottalization of clicks
  • retracted vowels and some obstruents
  • high tone
  • grammatically associated with patientive case, imperative verbs, imprecative speech
  • when high tone blocked, vowels tend to raise; grammatically falls back on oblique
Akachenti modal register: (10/2)

This is less a register and more a purely unmarked state, but it still counts as pitch register distinction.

  • modal voice
  • oral vowels
  • fricated clicks
  • mid tone
  • grammatical association with unmarked and oblique case agreement
Akachenti lax register: (10/2)

As it's vowel-triggered, there probably first arose a series of breathy vowels. These seem lexically determined, and therefore may predate any register system. They are still noted particularly as long vowels, which may indicate that length became phonologically significant before breathiness did.

  • breathy voice: lenited or breathy obstruents and fricatives / breathy sonorants and vowels
  • triggered by long vowels
  • low tone
  • grammatically permits unmarked and oblique case agreement, blocks high tone / patientive markers

General Notes (10/2)

Verb Bases / Modal Suffixes (10/2)

4 verb bases in one parent language turned into the principal verb bases not appearing in radical form but with 8 regular, fully productive modal suffixes, each with dependent and independent forms:

  • indicative [ind; dep] (w/present, perfect bases)
  • habitual [ind; dep] (w/imperfective, perfect bases)
  • reportative [ind; dep] (w/imperfective, perfect bases)
  • assertive [ind] (w/imperfective, perfect bases)
  • positive gerund [dep] (w/imperfective, perfect bases)
  • negative gerund [dep] (w/imperfective, perfect bases)
  • future [ind; dep] (w/imperfective, perfect bases)
  • infinitive [ind; dep] (w/infinitive base)

Modal bases were not added to states, only actions. This led to adjectives using dependent verb form pronominal prefixes but lack modality suffixes. These go on the copula.

An irrealis prefix means if on dependent verb forms, but not with the negative particle in independent verb forms. Also added a negative prepronominal prefix replacing the initial vowels of roots and means "not since". This follows the cislocative/repetitive prefixes. It seems to have picked up a lot of TAM prefixes of uncertain origin used with appropriate verb bases, adding to the dative-benefactive, causative-instrumental, and reversive.

Derivational morphemes on verbs (TAM) (10/2)

"Derivational morphemes that can be reconstructed at the level of PI include

  • a causative-instrumental morpheme that had the basic form * { -t- } ⁰⁸² or * { -hst- } ⁰⁸³ and the meaning 'make X, cause to X, use to X';
  • a reversive morpheme that had the basic form * { -kʷ- } ⁰⁸⁵ and carried the meaning 'un-X', 'de-X'; and
  • a dative-benefactive morpheme that had the basic form * { -ts- } ⁰⁸⁸ and carried the meaning 'X to, X for, X on behalf of'.

No demonstrably cognate pairs can be given to illustrate these morphemes, but their meanings and their placement at some point after the constant form of the verb root is identical in both branches of Iroquoian."

"To the causative-instrumental ( Ch. { -t- } ⁰⁸² / { -hst-} ⁰⁸³ ), reversive ( Ch. { -kìː- } ⁰⁸⁵ ), and dative-benefactive ( Ch. { -Ɂsìː- } ⁰⁸⁷ ) derivational suffixes, which have cognates in PNI, Cherokee seems to have added

  • ambulative { -ìːt- },
  • andative { -ùːk- },
  • ventive { -hìːk- },
  • reiterative { -hìɁs- },
  • repetitive { -hìlòːts- },
  • completive { -òhn- },
  • facilitative { -àth- },
  • future { -ìː- }, and
  • preinceptive { -ìːtìː- }

suffixes, the last three of which occur only in punctual and perfect verb bases. The etymological origin of these derivational morphemes is unclear. The forms presented here are punctual base allomorphs; remaining allomorphs can be found in Feeling & Pulte (1975:282-289) and Cook (1979:137-143)."

morphonemic rules / allomorphs (10/2)

So a morphonemic rule is one where allomorphs have regular phonological alternations for a particular morpheme, e.g. /in-/ in English has allomorphs [il] and [ir], but this is not a regular pattern for prefixes /un-/ and /non-/, so it's not a phonological rule.

PNI Pronominal Prefixes have morphonemic alternations, e.g. ati- and oti- appear in different phonological environments.

A common cause of these alternations appears to be reduction at the prefix and verb base boundaries, e.g. / uwiː / and * / uwẽ / were reduced to * / o / in PNI.

Register Tone Languages (10/2)

"Khmer is sometimes considered to be a register language. It has also been called a "restructured register language" because both its pitch and phonation can be considered allophonic. If they are ignored, the phonemic distinctions that they carry remain as differences in diphthongs and vowel length." Wikipedia


10/3/18

Notes

Lianamir (talk) 11:17, 3 October 2018 (CDT)

Akachenti (10/3)

Derivative Affixes (10/3)

So oddly enough, causative-instrumental and dative-benefactive are two categories that popped up right away in Akachenti as merged concepts and these are also that way in Iroquoian languages. They also have a reversive, which looks potentially useful for Akachenti. I may incorporate it.

So the helping verb -b-, -br- (independent form, bo, "to do") can be considered merged into being allomorphs of pronominal and negative prefixes. (It's not that linear or simple.) I think at some point, there was a straightforward negative prefix but it turned into an infix as prefixes reduced and merged.

Pre-Modern Affixes (10/3)
  • -ru-, -r- is my reconstructed negative prefix (should nix any instances of using it as a suffix)
  • -ka, -ko, -ke is my tentative reconstructed post-vocalic suffixes for agentive agreeement (not sure yet on post-consonantal)
  • ʔa-, ʔo-, ʔe- is my tentative reconstructed imperative modal prefix
  • aʔ-, oʔ-, eʔ- is my tentative series of reconstructed pronominal patientive prefixes
Modern Affixes (10/3)
  • -da would be the desiderative modal suffix, from independent form "to want (to do, be, or have)"
  • -he would be the factual modal suffix
Vocabulary Discussion (10/3)
  • ukibaga:he would mean "I love you again/too (in truth)" - emphatic, but it's also no agent "love to you" is a use of the dative-benefactive that makes sense with or without considering it as a fallback patientive

With that in mind, try using the dative-benefactive as the primary choice whenever it's a person and patientive as the inanimate object by default unless using all three. This might not work as an experiment.

Origin of Tense Register (10/3)

I've verified the only thing that makes sense for Akachenti is that since the imperative and imprecative speech and forms are both marked by infixing of a glottal stop orthographically and primary patientive forms are marked by glottalic high tone, that imperative, imprecative, and patientive agreement markers and affixes all included a glottal stop and trigger the same tense register.

Also imprecative has not yet fully lost the consonant distinctions, as it's still in the orthography, whereas imperative verbs and patientive agreement pronominals have both moved to merely marking the vowel as tense. The pronominal sound change happened earlier and is being generalized to imprecative as glottalic tone is not always realized where the glottal stop is indicated. It's essentially becoming a tone pattern and trying to regularize to other tone patterns in the language.

In short, the language is in a long, slow process of losing the glottal stop as a consonant and turning it into a pitch register.

Possible reconstructions:

  • aʔ > á
  • ʔa > á

And so forth through the vowels. I'm not actually sure which order, but my suspicion is that VʔC is the imprecative and ʔV might be the patientive. I'm not sure though. It could be VʔC and Vʔ(V).

Origin of Lax Register (10/3)

The likely origin of breathy voiced vowels is the breathy glottal fricative /ɦ/ merging with adjacent vowels and its duration being added to the length of the vowel. This would fit with the overall move from consonant clusters to clicks or glottalic accent demonstrated elsewhere and possibly explain why long vowels in particular trigger breathy voice. In contrast to tense register, which is associated with particular grammatical concepts, lax register is entirely lexically determined. While it constrains grammatical forms, it does not have any grammatical properties of its own.

This also fits with the small number of consonants that allow a cluster with /n/ or /ɹ/ and variations between dialects (some allow even fewer than others). Clusters all seem to be moving in the direction of simultaneous pronunciation, then reinterpretation as either a tone or a single consonant, e.g. kl has become the tenuis lateral click.

Some possible reconstructions:

  • -ahsh > -a:sh
  • ahvhi > a:vi:
  • bagha > baga:
As far as the progress of sound change (10/3)

Things that predate the written language, tongchan, can be determined from orthographic artifacts:

  • ɦ_V or V_ɦ > V:ʱ happened before tongchan's adoption
  • V_ʔ > ˥V happened before tongchan's adoption
  • l, dl, tl, hl, gl, kl, khl > non-pulmonic clicks happened after tongchan's adoption
  • aʔtʃ, aʔ.tʃiet > ˥atʃ, a.˥tʃiət happened after tongchan's adoption
Revisiting the issue of diphthongization (10/3)

High tone/tense register causes fronting, vowel lowering (of close vowels), and breaking with lowered onsets (in close or mid vowels) or offglides (in fronted vowels). In Akachenti, vowels shorten compared to modal.

Low tone/lax register causes backing, vowel raising (of open vowels), and monophthongization or breaking with raised onsets (of open or mid vowels) or centralized onglides (in backed vowels). In Akachenti, vowels lengthen compared to modal.

Registers develop in stages by adding redundant marking to strengthen the emphasis created by a register phonation or tone (pitch), then losing a contrast.

Now, when it comes to Khmer:

  1. long i (front) split to tense əi and lax ii - might have happened in Akachenti (i:, i, ii)
  2. long ɨ (central) split to tense əɨ and lax ɨɨ
  3. long u (back) split to tense uo and lax ou
  4. long e (front) split to tense ɛe and lax ee
  5. long ə (central) split to tense eə and lax əə
  6. long o (back) split to tense ao and lax oo
  7. long ɛ (front) split to tense aɛ and lax ɛɛ - might have happened in Akachenti (ae, e:, e)
  8. long a (back) split to tense aa and lax ia - might have happened in Akachenti (a:, a, ia)
  9. long ɔ (back) split to tense ɔɔ and lax əɔ

Modern Akachenti's current diphthongs are:

  1. aɛ or ai
  2. ia
  3. ie
  4. iɪ or ij
  5. ua
  6. ue
  7. ui

All of these are spoken modally at this time. If tense register hits on a diphthong, the first vowel is permitted to carry tense register, and the second is treated as a hiatus, but the second is not allowed to carry register. I'd say, diphthongization may have occurred at some point, but it doesn't seem to me long vowels came from breathy phonation, but rather the reverse.

General (10/3)

Verb Bases (10/3)

The final component of the PI verb was the verb base, which had four lexically-determined aspectual forms ( present, punctual, imperfective, and perfect ) and could also contain one or more lexically-determined derivational elements. Sequence: verb base* + derivational suffix + aspectual suffix*

Punctual was any single point in time except present, also reflexes in imperatives. Imperfective was incomplete and ongoing. Perfect/stative was complete or state exists

Nouns / Deverbalized Nouns - 3rd Person Pronominal Agreement (10/3)

"Many PI nouns were probably dependent verb forms that functioned as noun phrases – e.g. 'they hunt' (independent verb form) > 'they who hunt; hunters' (dependent verb form/deverbalized noun); 'they are hunting again' (independent verb form) > 'those who are hunting again; re-hunters' (dependent verb form/deverbalized noun); 'one uses it to hunt' (independent verb form) > 'that which one uses to hunt; hunting place' (dependent verb form/deverbalized noun). Deverbalized nouns had the same form and morphological structure as verbs except that word-initial glides were lost from pronominal prefixes...

"In addition to deverbalized nouns, PI had simple nouns, which consisted of a noun stem optionally preceded by a noun prefix and optionally followed by a noun suffix. The two basic forms of the noun prefix were based on the 3SG:3 pronominal prefix ( both * / ka / ⁰⁵¹ and * / wa / ⁰⁵² ) and the 3:3SG pronominal prefix ( * / juː / ⁰⁵⁴ ). These were lexically conditioned: some nouns took the former while others took the latter. As in deverbalized nouns, word-initial glides were lost in simplex noun prefixes..."

So nouns were marked as third person (like Akachenti). Inalienable possession was marked with possessive pronominals with possessor as agent and possessee as patient. Alienable possession reversed with the object as agent and possessor as patient. (Take a look at the difference between which gets marked in Akachenti; there is variation.) Relationships were marked as states in Iroquois but are a variation on possession / genitive in Akachenti.

Today's Resources (10/3)

Comment on Conlang Comm (10/3)

Comment Link

See Akachenti section above

10/4/18

Lianamir (talk) 11:11, 4 October 2018 (CDT)

Akachenti Notes

Likely path of imprecative (10/4)

  1. imprecative -ʔj-, e.g. dagash'(je)
  2. metathesis -ʔCj-, e.g. daga'sh(je)
  3. palatalization -ʔCʲ, e.g. daga'ch
  4. grammaticization, -˥VʔCʲ, e.g. dagách

So the first three steps are clear from reconstruction and orthography. The gaining of high tone (tense register) and dropping explicit glottal stop marking in favor of a generally glottalized syllable is how the word is currently pronounced, but it's not reflected in the orthography.

Verb Bases (10/4)

And about the verb base, there's a basic concept of baga: vs. baga:sha and an extrapolated addition of parallel anguno vs. angunavo. Are these the verb bases? And should vi- really be a prefix? I like it as a suffix, even it does mess with the parallel work I did, e.g. ubaga:v(ika) and ubaga:shav(ika).

  • ashia:sha, ashiv((ik)a)
  • baga:sha, baga:v(ika)
  • anguna:sha, angunavi(ka)
  • abekita:sha, abekitavi(ka)

I think we can work with making them all take -sha, not just stuff ending in a long vowel, but might be worth visiting whether it's really -a:sha or -sha. Would give a grammatical association with lax register as well.

Sound Change (10/4)

Updating the tentative reconstructed sound change rules for Pre-Modern Akachenti to reflect more accurate notation, I hope.

  1. ɦV > V:ʱ / C_
  2. Vɦ > V:ʱ / #_C
  3. Vʔ > ˥V (There were some corresponding changes to the surrounding consonants as well, but that I'll pin down later.)
  4. Cʔ > ʔC / V__{jV,#} --> VʔCj > ˥VʔCʲ

This is a real life rule from index diachronica: "({C,#}V[-long])ʔ → ({C,#}Vː[+falling tone])∅ / _C". Clearly, I have much to learn.

There's also some evidence in the lexicon I have that long vowels came from VhV sequences reducing to V:ʱ where the vowel is the same, rather than a simpler hV or Vh sequence.

Pronominals Work (10/4)

PERSON:

  1. first person inclusive
  2. first person exclusive
  3. second person proximate animate
  4. second person obviative
  5. third person proximate animate
  6. third person obviative

CASE:

  1. agentive (suffixing)
  2. patientive (prefixing)
  3. dative-benefactive (prefixing)

So I went digging through a lot of stuff about vowel raising in Polish, Arabic, and several African languages to figure out which consonants probably triggered the dative-benefactive raising that subsequently spread to patientive and figured out that post-vocalic labials are the most obvious triggers of raising in Akachenti word-initial syllables, most of which resist patientive tense register vowels, even when it seems those would be permissible and appropriate. There's also some inconsistent post-rhotic raising to be looked at.

Today's Reading

10/9/18

Lianamir (talk) 13:18, 9 October 2018 (CDT)

Akachenti Notes (10/9)

Pronominal Marker Types (10/9)

dative-patient - verb stem - agent causer-patient - verb stem - causee

Problem: In the causative of a transitive verb, the new causer always becomes the new A of the sentence. What happens to the causee and the original object depend on the language. Causative, emphasis added

Agreement Phoneme Associations (10/9)

a/ae/o/i agrees with noun cases:

  1. agent
  2. instrument/causee
  3. possessee

potentially related consonants: ʔ, k

a/ae/o/i agrees with nouns:

  1. patient/comitative/dative*

e/u/i agrees with noun cases:

  1. dative
  2. benefactive
  3. comitative (accompaniment: "with")
  4. patient*
  5. causer*

potentially related consonants: b, sh, ~v, ~m

-at/-et/-ot/-it (ablative) agrees with nouns:

  1. possessor (inalienable, e.g. relations; "-ous")

-ar/-er agrees with nouns:

  1. possessor

potentially related words: -har-

-ar/-er agrees with noun cases:

  1. patient

potentially related words: -har-

Vowel Movement (10/9)

  1. pre-sonorant (r, n, m, l) mid-vowel (e, ø) lowering in Turkish (after a period of raising in open syllables, with the exception of high-frequency items and word-initial syllables in trisyllabic+ roots) - Sonorant-conditioned mid vowel lowering in Turkish
    1. /e/ → [æ]
    2. /ø/ → [œ]
  2. Yurok mid-vowel lowering (fronting pre-coronal, backing pre-h or ʔ) "The occurrence of a:, a?a and absence of e:, e?e combined with near-complementary distribution of short e and a suggest context-free sound changes *e: > a: and *e?e > a?a, and conditioned changes of *e > a before certain consonants." ONE CASE OF CONTRAST EVOLUTION IN THE YUROK VOWEL SYSTEM
    1. started from a system of i, e, o, u
    2. e: → a: (unconditioned first long vowel lowering)
    3. /e~ɛ/ → /a/ (before h, ʔ > r > w > fricatives)

So a few potential implications, there might have been open vowel raising from from e > i, o > u, and maybe a > e before pre-sonorant lowering. But there is a case for open vowel raising in particular.

There's a cross-linguistic case for lowering before fricatives and glottals that doesn't seem applicable here because /u/ appearing for /o/ pre-coronal fricatives. There was not raising before h or ʔ though, so maybe it just prevented some raising that was otherwise occuring across the board before tense/lax register emerged?

-er might have lowered to -ar and there was no person agreement on that case marker.

Vowel Analysis (10/9)

1. ae (closing)
{e}
2. a, a:
e, e:
3. {e}
i, i:
4. o, o:
u, u:
Falling (long)* Rising (short)*
iɪ - ij ia, ie (ie:)
ui ua, ue (ue:)

* "In phonological representation, long vowels and falling diphthongs have two timing slots; short vowels and rising diphthongs have one." Diphthongization in Particle Phonology

Close vowels began as addition of an off-glide to /i/ and /u/. Mid and open vowels /e/ and /a/ gained an on-glide but are typically stressed on the on-glide with disfavored but not forbidden stress on the vowel nuclei, potentially indicating that they were or are viewed as vowels in hiatus. (I'm inclined to think the rising diphthongs were in fact vowels in hiatus, as either vowel is capable of receiving suprasegmental stress, but that ii and ui likely broke from monophthongs.) As /o/ does not participate in the diphthongs at all, but particularly in the rising dipthongs, I posit the original 4-vowel system that predated the 6-vowel system we ended up with is /a/, /e/, /i/, and /u/ with the acknowledgement that it may have been a 6-vowel system if the falling diphthongs indeed arose from /i/ and /u/.

Possibly /a/ > /aj/ > /ai/ > aɛ > /e/ with conservative dialects retaining /a/ or /ai/ and progressive dialects being further along the latter end of the spectrum. Rural varieties tend to be more conservative.


Off-glides can appear with /i/ pre-palatal, e.g. ç and /u/ pre-velar, e.g. x.

Current in-language examples of falling diphthongs:

  • ii (has reflexes of ie and e, contrasts with i and i:)
    • _#: avii
    • _#: shivii
    • _s: aviiso, likely derived
    • _s: viis, viiste
    • _t: igliit
    • _t: -liit-, (also -let- or -lit-), from ilet
    • _t: kiit
    • _t: siit
    • _n: letiin
    • _n: -liin
    • _tʃ: liichen, from -liit- + chen
  • ui (contrasts with u and u: both)
    • _s: duis, duiste
    • _s: nuis
    • _t: duit
    • _x: mivuikh
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