The Dailies. September 28
Did you work on your language today? Create any new rules of grammar or syntax? New progress on a script? New words in your lexicon?
On the other hand, do any excavating or reading or enjoying stuff you’ve already created? Do you have any favorites to share?
How did you conlang today?
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3 thoughts on “The Dailies. September 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:
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.
So there’s lots of optional morphology? I hadn’t realized…
Beldreeni doesn’t do much with plural either, but it doesn’t have person agreement either, and case is only indicated by particles (apart for genitive case for pronouns).
If you think of the fact that the minimal well-formed sentence in English is supposed to have a subject and a verb, that’s like saying at the minimum, an Akachenti verb is supposed to have a topical pronominal prefix or pronominal suffix and the verb base. Usually, there will be more, but that’s the absolute minimum requirements for a well-formed verb.
Particles is good! Number is the hardest thing for me to remember to deal with in conlangs. My default inclination is always to not grammaticalize it, but that doesn’t make much sense for Akachenti.