Yay or Nay? [2011–2018]

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holbuzvala
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by holbuzvala »

@ All4Ɇn

Borrowing the 'an' dual ending from Arabic is groovy. You might be interested to know too that in Arabic all parts of the body that occur in pairs (eyes, hands, feet; not heart, liver, stomach) are ALL feminine, regardless of what they look like morphologically. Might be an interesting thing to take across in your romlang (or not).
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by WeepingElf »

holbuzvala wrote:@ All4Ɇn

Borrowing the 'an' dual ending from Arabic is groovy. You might be interested to know too that in Arabic all parts of the body that occur in pairs (eyes, hands, feet; not heart, liver, stomach) are ALL feminine, regardless of what they look like morphologically. Might be an interesting thing to take across in your romlang (or not).
Borrowings of such markers are rare, especially between unrelated languages. (We all know that English borrowed them from Old Norse, but Old English and Old Norse were hardly more than dialects of the same language back then.) I'd rather expect some kind of calque using Romance's own means.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Frislander »

WeepingElf wrote:
holbuzvala wrote:@ All4Ɇn

Borrowing the 'an' dual ending from Arabic is groovy. You might be interested to know too that in Arabic all parts of the body that occur in pairs (eyes, hands, feet; not heart, liver, stomach) are ALL feminine, regardless of what they look like morphologically. Might be an interesting thing to take across in your romlang (or not).
Borrowings of such markers are rare, especially between unrelated languages. (We all know that English borrowed them from Old Norse, but Old English and Old Norse were hardly more than dialects of the same language back then.) I'd rather expect some kind of calque using Romance's own means.
Well it has occurred, but for inflectional affixes it's generally only in situations of intense contact, which in the case of this language would be upon its impending obsolescence due to its replacement by Arabic. However, that's not necessarily going to happen even then: I can't think of a single variety of modern spoken Arabic that actually preserves the dual, and it'd be the spoken variety which is important here.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by qwed117 »

Frislander wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:
holbuzvala wrote:@ All4Ɇn

Borrowing the 'an' dual ending from Arabic is groovy. You might be interested to know too that in Arabic all parts of the body that occur in pairs (eyes, hands, feet; not heart, liver, stomach) are ALL feminine, regardless of what they look like morphologically. Might be an interesting thing to take across in your romlang (or not).
Borrowings of such markers are rare, especially between unrelated languages. (We all know that English borrowed them from Old Norse, but Old English and Old Norse were hardly more than dialects of the same language back then.) I'd rather expect some kind of calque using Romance's own means.
Well it has occurred, but for inflectional affixes it's generally only in situations of intense contact, which in the case of this language would be upon its impending obsolescence due to its replacement by Arabic. However, that's not necessarily going to happen even then: I can't think of a single variety of modern spoken Arabic that actually preserves the dual, and it'd be the spoken variety which is important here.
Only thing I have to add is that "manus" is feminine, exceptionally so. I have trouble imagining a -i plural over the -a plural.
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All4Ɇn
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by All4Ɇn »

holbuzvala wrote:You might be interested to know too that in Arabic all parts of the body that occur in pairs (eyes, hands, feet; not heart, liver, stomach) are ALL feminine, regardless of what they look like morphologically. Might be an interesting thing to take across in your romlang (or not).
Ooh I like this idea! It'd be cool to spread it to masculine nouns
WeepingElf wrote:I'd rather expect some kind of calque using Romance's own means.
How do you think I could go about doing that with inflections?
Frislander wrote:Well it has occurred, but for inflectional affixes it's generally only in situations of intense contact, which in the case of this language would be upon its impending obsolescence due to its replacement by Arabic. However, that's not necessarily going to happen even then: I can't think of a single variety of modern spoken Arabic that actually preserves the dual, and it'd be the spoken variety which is important here.
From my understanding in many modern dialects the dual form still exists for nouns but those nouns are treated as plural with regards to adjectives, verbs etc. which is also what I was planning on doing with the remnants of it in the romance language. Also considering how long the relationship between Arabic and the romance language would be, is it possible for it to predate dialectal dropping of the dual?
qwed117 wrote:Only thing I have to add is that "manus" is feminine, exceptionally so. I have trouble imagining a -i plural over the -a plural.
I think it's easy to imagine it being declined as a regular masculine noun complete with the -i ending but is just simply a masculine noun noun.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by qwed117 »

All4Ɇn wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:I'd rather expect some kind of calque using Romance's own means.
How do you think I could go about doing that with inflections?
If you chose to develop suffixing determiners like Romanian, you could potentially just suffix some declension of duo onto the noun.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Davush »

Frislander wrote:
Well it has occurred, but for inflectional affixes it's generally only in situations of intense contact, which in the case of this language would be upon its impending obsolescence due to its replacement by Arabic. However, that's not necessarily going to happen even then: I can't think of a single variety of modern spoken Arabic that actually preserves the dual, and it'd be the spoken variety which is important here.
Iraqi, Gulf and Saudi dialects certainly all have a dual number for nouns, however the ending is -een /e:n/, the nom. form -aan isn't used. In fact it would be weird to say something like 'ithneen buyuut' instead of 'beeteen' for 'two houses'.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by eldin raigmore »

holbuzvala wrote: ....
This brings me to another point. 'Langs should be constructed and looked at holistically, so in Ozvlo I have noun classes (human, animate, inanimate, abstract, places) whose interaction I am now considering with the C-UC verb forms. Should un-volitional things be able to ever use the volitional form of verbs? Or should there be an animacy division?
....
I remember actually reading an article about such things in various languages.
As I recall, the marker that, when the agent was animate, distinguished the volitional from the non-volitional;
was used with inanimate "agents" to distinguish the unexpected from the expected.

So "the door vol-opened itself" would mean "but I and everyone else had expected the damned thing to stay shut until someone opened it!",
while "the door invol-stayed-open" would mean "no, your honor, the door had already been opened, and it just sat there being open because no-one closed it".
Or something.

"the cloud vol-hovered over the fair" could implicate that "everyone expected the light breeze to eventually move the cloud away and let the sun shine through",
while "the cloud invol-hovered over the fair" could implicate that "the air was so still and windless on the Fourth that all the clouds stayed where they were pretty much from morning to evening".

Or something.

I don't exactly remember what the article said.
But it did discuss the difference between how voluntary-vs-involuntary markers interacted with animate agents vs how they interacted with inanimate agents.

Consciousness and volition are not exactly the same thing.
I can actually do something on purpose to make something happen and remain unaware whether it actually happens or not.
I can also do something by accident and immediately be acutely aware of the consequences of what I have done. For instance, I can deliberately throw a rock, but not intend that it hit and break a window: yet be immediately aware that it did indeed break the window.

Also; note that the SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms once defined "Recipient" as "Entity conscious of being affected". So sometimes the syntax of some clauses in some languages, does interact with the consciousness, or lack of consciousness, of some participant other than the agent.

I seem to remember having read that those Slavic aspect-toggling affixes each change the aspect from perfective to imperfective or vice versa.
So if a verb starts out perfective and has an even number of affixes applied, it's still perfective; but if it has one or some other odd number of affixes applied, it is now imperfective.
Similarly if a verb starts out imperfective and has an even number of affixes applied, it's still imperfective; but if it has one or some other odd number of affixes applied, it is now perfective.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's at best an oversimplification and at worst flat wrong.
But I'd be pleased if it were mostly true!
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by holbuzvala »

@Eldin Raigmore

That's super interesting about the volitional/nonvol markers with inanimate agents. I think I will copy that paradigm into mine :)
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by eldin raigmore »

holbuzvala wrote:That's super interesting about the volitional/nonvol markers with inanimate agents.
I'm glad you think so! Thanks for saying so! [:)]

holbuzvala wrote:I think I will copy that paradigm into mine :)
If you care to make it like natlangs, I'd advise finding and reading the original article first.
Unfortunately, to quote Thomas Dolby's She Blinded Me With Science, "She's tidied up, and I can't find anything!".
I'll bet you could search around and find, if not that same article, at least some article covering the same subject.
It might take a couple hours but I doubt it would take half a day to find it.
Having found it, it might be online, or you might need to ask a library; in the latter case it might take a business day (or two, or a few), I guess.

I wish you well!
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by holbuzvala »

Thinking back to the stone-throwing, window-breaking example, the distinction of expectedness adds a nice juicey hank of nuance to it.

".... stone break-VOL window" = I threw the stone and it accidentally broke the window [unexpected]
".... stome break-NONVOL window" = I threw the stone (with the intention of breaking the window) and it broke the window. [expected]

I would scrounge for the article, but I'm hopping on a plane, and as much as I like to have my langs as natlangs, I usually fetter them on forums and get the fore(um)runners to tell me when and if they're a bit wonky. But one day, perhaps.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Nachtuil »

Sorry for the delay in response. I enjoy the posts that have come out of my question but have been busy, and still am but I want to respond.

Thanks for elaborating on a possible volition and awareness system, Eldin. That actually cleared it up pretty well. That is an interesting extra level of detail. It provides some interesting possibilities. I do find the idea of falling in love with something on purpose hard to visualise, though I don't imagine it would be contradictive that a grammatical system might allow it strictly speaking. Use of such a construction may have allow for quite some interesting intention.

You first post makes me wonder if volition could be conveyed with morphosyntactic alignment itself. Nom-acc for transitive intentional action and erg-abs for transitive erg-abs unintentional action. Maybe that would need to be a tripartite language. I have not examined it deeply at this point to see how it would work.


holbuzvala:
Apropos Nachtuil's lang:
1. I would agree with Raigmore and say instead of having a zero-prefix and two prefix forms, have the zero-form be the value of volitional or unvolitional with a single prefix for the opposite. And if this changes depending on the verb, that's fine.
2. Do you have noun classes? If so, is there an animacy division in them? If doubly yes, I thought you might find it interesting to use a 'trigger prefix.' Let me example first, and then explain.
I think I agree too. I'll have to do the verbs in volition pairs. Something that actually would be in a way more interesting, and certainly more plausible to have occurred naturally than verbs with 3 forms based on two prefixes. Maybe I can follow the Slavic route and vary the prefixes used for certain words. Maybe have 2 or 3 each. I wouldn't want to do more than that. Maybe having them assimilate with the words at the boundary with predictable rules would be suitable too.
Ex:
Neh- (stem starting with vowel)
Nes-(stem starting with plosive consonant)
Ne-(stem starting with non plosive consonant)

As it happens, yes! I do happen to have noun classes that do are divided by semantic animacy!
Gender 1: People, higher sentients, celestial objects, fire.
Gender 2: Animals, weather, moving water, machines, some body parts and concepts (heart, soul, stomach etc)
Gender 3: Bodies of water, all inanimate objects, insects, other abstractions.

They are arranged in a type of split ergativity system where the first gender nouns have nominative-accusative alignment and plurality marked on pronouns, and the other two genders take eragative absolutive alignment with the absolutive endings insinuating a connection to the accusative endings and no plurality marked on pronouns or nouns.

For transitive verbs from gender 1 to the others, the absolutive marking is treated like an accusative. If gender 2 or 3 nouns act on gender 1, my current thinking is that the agent will be ergative and the patient accusative, possibly with a special verb conjugation indicating an unspecified actor. As if it was a full phrase where the ergative marking was an instrument and the nominative actor is missing from the sentence.

In fact, the first gender employs the ergative marking of second and third gender as an instrumental. I am not sure it is attested (though I imagine it probably is since it makes sense to me) Second gender on second or third uses ergative absolute . As does third gender on third.
This all really deserves some example sentences with glossing!

Anyway, I like what you've explained there. Painfully, I am out of time at the moment but I will post again when I can.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Dormouse559 »

All4Ɇn wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:I'd rather expect some kind of calque using Romance's own means.
How do you think I could go about doing that with inflections?
If you're allowing some of the Latin case system to survive for awhile and then collapse à la French, you could have the plural of the case that is otherwise dropped be reanalyzed as a dual. Based on mani-, it looks like the plural comes from the nominative, so maybe the dual would come from the accusative. If you want to go the suffixing route, like qwed suggested, ambo is another choice.
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All4Ɇn
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by All4Ɇn »

Dormouse559 wrote:If you're allowing some of the Latin case system to survive for awhile and then collapse à la French, you could have the plural of the case that is otherwise dropped be reanalyzed as a dual. Based on mani-, it looks like the plural comes from the nominative, so maybe the dual would come from the accusative.
The problem with this is that the accusative case is maintained as an oblique case.
Dormouse559 wrote:If you want to go the suffixing route, like qwed suggested, ambo is another choice.
Ooh! This gives me a good idea. The suffix could still be -an but instead comes from a simplification of ambo that was further inspired by Arabic's dual. What do you think?
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Ælfwine »

I'm sketching up a pidgin/creole. Specifically, a creole between Old Norse and West Greenlandic that was used as a contact language and possibly even a native one. The lexifer is mostly Greenlandic, the grammar is mixed, and the phonology is largely Norse.

I want genitive constructions to be formed with the suffix "-mik," as it is both the instrumental case ending in Kalaallisut and the word for "me" in Old Norse. Because West Greenlandic does not easily tolerate large consonant clusters, an /i/ is inserted before the suffix:

hestimik “my horse” (literally: with a horse)
konimik “my woman”
kjakkimik “my kayak”

When the subject becomes plural, this epenthetic vowel becomes an /a/. (This is norse influence, where most genitive plural endings are -a)

hestamik “my horses”
konamik “my women”
kjakkamik “my kayaks”

Yay or nay?
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All4Ɇn
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by All4Ɇn »

Ælfwine wrote:Yay or nay?
Big yay for me. Hope to see more on this in future [:)]
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DesEsseintes
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by DesEsseintes »

Oh yes, Ælfwine. Do it!

I'd love to see the phonology drift towards Kalaallisut a bit more as well.

hestimik hestamik → hettsimik hettamik

etc.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Ælfwine »

All4Ɇn wrote:
Ælfwine wrote:Yay or nay?
Big yay for me. Hope to see more on this in future [:)]
Certainly! Once I draw up more ideas I'll compile them in a thread. Any ideas on what to name the creole?
DesEsseintes wrote:Oh yes, Ælfwine. Do it!

I'd love to see the phonology drift towards Kalaallisut a bit more as well.

hestimik hestamik → hettsimik hettamik

etc.
I wanted to keep the phonology more Norse than naught, however those changes are fairly intuitive as similar assimilations are found in Western Norse (mp nt ŋk > pp tt kk in generic OWN, lk > kk in Setesdal, ft > tt in other dialects, etc.). So why not, I guess.
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All4Ɇn
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by All4Ɇn »

Ælfwine wrote:Any ideas on what to name the creole?
Maybe the word for green could be Greenlandic based and the name could derive from a portmanteau of the word Greenlandic?
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Ælfwine »

All4Ɇn wrote:
Ælfwine wrote:Any ideas on what to name the creole?
Maybe the word for green could be Greenlandic based and the name could derive from a portmanteau of the word Greenlandic?
One of the words the Inuit called themselves when talking to foreigners was "kalaaleq" (older: karaaleq) from the Old Norse word "skrælingr." So, I am thinking of basing it something around that. Alternatively, I could use a word referring to a person of mixed ancestry.
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