Yay or Nay? [2011–2018]

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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by felipesnark »

shimobaatar wrote: 27 Jul 2018 00:04 Didn't see Option 4 before. I'd go with that.
Heh, I did edit.

I think I will go with Option 4, with two verb classes. Some using Option 2 (a(h)- prefix), and some using 3 (partial reduplication). I think for most verbs the verb class will be arbitrary, but stative verbs will tend to be in the first group and verbs of motion will tend to be in the second group.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by k1234567890y »

should I make a thread for my conlang ideas in general?
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by shimobaatar »

If you'd like to, sure. Other people have done it in the past.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by k1234567890y »

ok thank you 霜勇士 (:
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Ælfwine »

Yay or nay:

Pelsodian my romlang builds the pluperfect like Slovene or Croatian, taking the past form of the word "to be," and adding the participle of a verb. This seems to be an areal feature.

This differs from French, which builds it with "to have," and Romanian/Portuguese, which still build it synthetically.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by shimobaatar »

I'd say go for it.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Dormouse559 »

French does use “to be” for some verbs, e.g. J’étais allé au marché “I had gone to the store”. However, it would be difficult for French to use “to be” for all verbs because most of the time it would be identical to a past passive-voice. Does Pelsodian have a different passivization strategy?
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Ælfwine »

Dormouse559 wrote: 29 Jul 2018 05:20 French does use “to be” for some verbs, e.g. J’étais allé au marché “I had gone to the store”. However, it would be difficult for French to use “to be” for all verbs because most of the time it would be identical to a past passive-voice. Does Pelsodian have a different passivization strategy?
I admit I haven't thought this out entirely.

Croatian seems to prefer the auxiliary word "to be" and a past participle. Slovene the present tense and the "l-participle" of a verb. Hungarian lacks a passive voice entirely.

Latin did away with the synthetic passive. Were there any other ways to build the passive in VL?
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Dormouse559 »

Ælfwine wrote: 29 Jul 2018 05:31Latin did away with the synthetic passive. Were there any other ways to build the passive in VL?
I don’t know about Vulgar Latin, but French has a couple other ways. There’s “se faire [infinitive]”. It also uses “on” plus an active clause in some cases that would be translated in English with a passive.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Ahzoh »

yay or nay

Should Onschen also have palatolabialization so that the phoneme inventory is something like this?:

/a e ẽː o õː i u/
/ai̯ ei̯ ẽi̯ oi̯ õi̯/

/m n nʲ nᶣ/
/p b t tʲ tᶣ d dʲ dᶣ k kʲ kᶣ g gʲ gᶣ/
/t͡s t͡sʲ t͡sᶣ d͡z d͡zʲ d͡zᶣ/
/f s sʲ sᶣ x xʲ xᶣ/
/l lʲ lᶣ r rʲ rᶣ j ɥ/
/ǀ ǁ ǂ/

noixatee paleasou
нүихатіе паліасүу
[nᶣixatʲe palʲasᶣu]
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Zekoslav
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Zekoslav »

Ælfwine wrote: 29 Jul 2018 02:44 Yay or nay:

Pelsodian my romlang builds the pluperfect like Slovene or Croatian, taking the past form of the word "to be," and adding the participle of a verb. This seems to be an areal feature.

This differs from French, which builds it with "to have," and Romanian/Portuguese, which still build it synthetically.
The reason for the different choice of the auxiliary verb is that the Slovene and Croatian l-participle is an active past (more precisely, perfect) participle, while french participle is a passive past participle. In fact, Latin had no active past participles at all, and as far as I know no Romance language has developed one of their own.

The auxiliary verb is used to give the participle person-number agreement so it can be used as a verb. Whether it agrees with the subject or the object depends on the voice of the participle. If french used only the verb "to be" as its auxiliary verb, then all tenses which use the past participle would be passive by default, as Dormouse559 said. This is not an implausible development (in fact, this is how Hindi developed split-ergativity), but Romance languages remodeled these tenses as active using the auxilliary verb "to have" - it has a subject in the Nominative case, and an object which agrees with the participle.

Eg. In French you say: J'e l'ai vu "I saw him." and Je l'ai vue "I saw her.", while in Croatian the aggreement is with the subject: Vidio sam to. "I (m.) saw that." and Vidjela sam to. "I (f.) saw that."


The fact that some intransitive verbs (in particular, verbs of movement) still use the verb "to be" is explained by the fact that they don't distinguish between active and passive voices and that they have only one argument - the past participle can only agree with the experiencer, so the intransitive auxilliary verb "to be" is a good choice of a copula. Some verbs of movement, actually, use both auxiliaries depending on whether they are used intransitively or transitively.

Eg. Je suis sorti du garage. "I went out of the garage" and J'ai sorti mon velo du garage. "I took my bike out of the garage."


In conclusion, I'd say it would be hard to develop an exact analogue of the Slavic construction in a Romance language - if there is enough contact, then maybe "to be" could be generalized with transitive verbs as well, but probably not by itself - judging from other Romance and Germanic languages, the tendency seems to be the generalization of the verb "to have".

Concerning passives, while Croatian does have a passive voice, it overwhelmingly prefers to use the reflexive pronoun in an impersonal-passive sense. The syntax of the construction is weird (the only other language I've seen that has something similar is, of all languages, Irish Gaelic!) and doesn't quite match what Hungarian does, but the absence of a designated passive voice does seem to be an areal feature.
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k1234567890y
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by k1234567890y »

Ahzoh wrote: 30 Jul 2018 02:32 yay or nay

Should Onschen also have palatolabialization so that the phoneme inventory is something like this?:

/a e ẽː o õː i u/
/ai̯ ei̯ ẽi̯ oi̯ õi̯/

/m n nʲ nᶣ/
/p b t tʲ tᶣ d dʲ dᶣ k kʲ kᶣ g gʲ gᶣ/
/t͡s t͡sʲ t͡sᶣ d͡z d͡zʲ d͡zᶣ/
/f s sʲ sᶣ x xʲ xᶣ/
/l lʲ lᶣ r rʲ rᶣ j ɥ/
/ǀ ǁ ǂ/

noixatee paleasou
нүихатіе паліасүу
[nᶣixatʲe palʲasᶣu]
just do it...if you are happy with that...although I feel labialization is more common than palatolabialization.
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Dormouse559 »

Zekoslav wrote: 30 Jul 2018 11:17
Ælfwine wrote: 29 Jul 2018 02:44 Yay or nay:

Pelsodian my romlang builds the pluperfect like Slovene or Croatian, taking the past form of the word "to be," and adding the participle of a verb. This seems to be an areal feature.

This differs from French, which builds it with "to have," and Romanian/Portuguese, which still build it synthetically.
The reason for the different choice of the auxiliary verb is that the Slovene and Croatian l-participle is an active past (more precisely, perfect) participle, while french participle is a passive past participle. In fact, Latin had no active past participles at all, and as far as I know no Romance language has developed one of their own.
I was thinking about what a Romance active past participle might look like. Using the synthetic future/conditional as a model, I could imagine something based on the past participle of the content verb followed by the gerund of “to have” (likely truncated). So alternate-timeline Italian might say something like *Stavo mangiatendo for “I had eaten”.

Gotta go right now, but I wanted to put that out there.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Zekoslav »

Dormouse559 wrote: 30 Jul 2018 18:56
Zekoslav wrote: 30 Jul 2018 11:17
Ælfwine wrote: 29 Jul 2018 02:44 Yay or nay:

Pelsodian my romlang builds the pluperfect like Slovene or Croatian, taking the past form of the word "to be," and adding the participle of a verb. This seems to be an areal feature.

This differs from French, which builds it with "to have," and Romanian/Portuguese, which still build it synthetically.
The reason for the different choice of the auxiliary verb is that the Slovene and Croatian l-participle is an active past (more precisely, perfect) participle, while french participle is a passive past participle. In fact, Latin had no active past participles at all, and as far as I know no Romance language has developed one of their own.
I was thinking about what a Romance active past participle might look like. Using the synthetic future/conditional as a model, I could imagine something based on the past participle of the content verb followed by the gerund of “to have” (likely truncated). So alternate-timeline Italian might say something like *Stavo mangiatendo for “I had eaten”.

Gotta go right now, but I wanted to put that out there.
Well, that's completely plausible, in fact there's a parallel to this in Indo-Iranian as well: Sanskrit can "activize" it's participles by the addition of the suffix -vat-, which rougly means "having", and is usually added to nouns and adjectives. And, according to this paper (which I can barely understand with my bad knowledge of German), Khotan Saka uses it exactly the way you proposed: to make all it's past participle based tenses active and still being able to use the verb "to be". So, a Romance language could do it to! [B)]
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Ælfwine »

Zekoslav wrote: 30 Jul 2018 11:17
Ælfwine wrote: 29 Jul 2018 02:44 Yay or nay:

Pelsodian my romlang builds the pluperfect like Slovene or Croatian, taking the past form of the word "to be," and adding the participle of a verb. This seems to be an areal feature.

This differs from French, which builds it with "to have," and Romanian/Portuguese, which still build it synthetically.
The reason for the different choice of the auxiliary verb is that the Slovene and Croatian l-participle is an active past (more precisely, perfect) participle, while french participle is a passive past participle. In fact, Latin had no active past participles at all, and as far as I know no Romance language has developed one of their own.

The auxiliary verb is used to give the participle person-number agreement so it can be used as a verb. Whether it agrees with the subject or the object depends on the voice of the participle. If french used only the verb "to be" as its auxiliary verb, then all tenses which use the past participle would be passive by default, as Dormouse559 said. This is not an implausible development (in fact, this is how Hindi developed split-ergativity), but Romance languages remodeled these tenses as active using the auxilliary verb "to have" - it has a subject in the Nominative case, and an object which agrees with the participle.

Eg. In French you say: J'e l'ai vu "I saw him." and Je l'ai vue "I saw her.", while in Croatian the aggreement is with the subject: Vidio sam to. "I (m.) saw that." and Vidjela sam to. "I (f.) saw that."


The fact that some intransitive verbs (in particular, verbs of movement) still use the verb "to be" is explained by the fact that they don't distinguish between active and passive voices and that they have only one argument - the past participle can only agree with the experiencer, so the intransitive auxilliary verb "to be" is a good choice of a copula. Some verbs of movement, actually, use both auxiliaries depending on whether they are used intransitively or transitively.

Eg. Je suis sorti du garage. "I went out of the garage" and J'ai sorti mon velo du garage. "I took my bike out of the garage."


In conclusion, I'd say it would be hard to develop an exact analogue of the Slavic construction in a Romance language - if there is enough contact, then maybe "to be" could be generalized with transitive verbs as well, but probably not by itself - judging from other Romance and Germanic languages, the tendency seems to be the generalization of the verb "to have".

Concerning passives, while Croatian does have a passive voice, it overwhelmingly prefers to use the reflexive pronoun in an impersonal-passive sense. The syntax of the construction is weird (the only other language I've seen that has something similar is, of all languages, Irish Gaelic!) and doesn't quite match what Hungarian does, but the absence of a designated passive voice does seem to be an areal feature.
Thanks for the explanation, Aero. It seems like "to have" is fairly well ingrained within Romance, though it is worth pointing out that both Rhetoromance and Romanian use a different auxiliary (not for passives, though!) Perhaps the lack of a passive will show up in more subtle ways. I need to think this out.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by shimobaatar »

Ælfwine wrote: 01 Aug 2018 04:35 Thanks for the explanation, Aero.
Not really relevant, but I thought Aero was Click?
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by gestaltist »

shimobaatar wrote: 01 Aug 2018 06:41
Ælfwine wrote: 01 Aug 2018 04:35 Thanks for the explanation, Aero.
Not really relevant, but I thought Aero was Click?
Yep. He got the wrong person.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Salmoneus »

Zekoslav wrote: 30 Jul 2018 11:17 judging from other Romance and Germanic languages, the tendency seems to be the generalization of the verb "to have".
Just to add to this: this is a recognised ongoing trend throughout the Romance/Germanic sprachbund. "Be" was 'originally' used with all intransitives in both families, but almost all languages have been reducing its use, even in recent times.

You can see this very clearly in English by comparing secular to religious English. The KJV, many old hymns, and so on, prefer "He is risen", "I am come to [purpose]", while contemporary secular English overwhelmingly prefers "he has risen", "I have come to [purpose]" and the the like.

I wonder whether, particularly given that both 'is' and 'has' are commonly reduced to /z/, this trend will continue and we'll eventually see people expanding "he's dead" to "he has dead"...


Indeed, English even used to use 'be' with passives, where it's been replaced with 'have been'. For lo, "they are brought low" is become "they have been brought low"! ...I don't know if this likewise has a parallel in romance or not.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Ælfwine »

gestaltist wrote: 01 Aug 2018 09:36
shimobaatar wrote: 01 Aug 2018 06:41
Ælfwine wrote: 01 Aug 2018 04:35 Thanks for the explanation, Aero.
Not really relevant, but I thought Aero was Click?
Yep. He got the wrong person.
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Re: Yay or Nay?

Post by Zekoslav »

Salmoneus wrote: 01 Aug 2018 19:03
Zekoslav wrote: 30 Jul 2018 11:17 judging from other Romance and Germanic languages, the tendency seems to be the generalization of the verb "to have".
Just to add to this: this is a recognised ongoing trend throughout the Romance/Germanic sprachbund. "Be" was 'originally' used with all intransitives in both families, but almost all languages have been reducing its use, even in recent times.

You can see this very clearly in English by comparing secular to religious English. The KJV, many old hymns, and so on, prefer "He is risen", "I am come to [purpose]", while contemporary secular English overwhelmingly prefers "he has risen", "I have come to [purpose]" and the the like.

I wonder whether, particularly given that both 'is' and 'has' are commonly reduced to /z/, this trend will continue and we'll eventually see people expanding "he's dead" to "he has dead"...


Indeed, English even used to use 'be' with passives, where it's been replaced with 'have been'. For lo, "they are brought low" is become "they have been brought low"! ...I don't know if this likewise has a parallel in romance or not.
Do you think it is likely that a romance language belonging to a different sprachbund would be able to instead oust the verb "to have" in favour of the verb "to be", as Ælfwine's original idea seems to be? That didn't happen to German and Yiddish (two languages that use the former "have-perfect" as their regular past tense), according to the paper he posted. As I've already said, I think that calquing the Slavic construction would require an innovative active past participle (speaking of which, I really like Dormouse559's suggestion).

There is also the fact that Croatian seems likely to begin abandoning it's active past participle and replacing it with the passive past participle (which becomes a Romance-Germanic style "absolutive participle", used for the subject of intransitive and the object of transitive verbs). The active participle is rarely used outside of tense forms, and I recall myself having used an innovative intransitive passive participle instead of the active one, even though I've forgotten what the exact word was.

Then again, maybe I'm not the best judge of what is likely to happen in Croatian since I'm influenced by French and English a lot.
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