Backup: Conlanging Notes

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