The Dailies. October 13
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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4 thoughts on “The Dailies. October 13”
I’ve felt a bit stuck with Orklang lately, not knowing which end to start in. But yesterday I decided to just start building nouns (a bit less daunting than polysynthetic verbs, heh), and began researching cases. I’ve decided to use a bunch of cases, particularly motional ones but also others.
So far I’m settled on the following:
I’m pondering adding a bunch more Locational ones to make a big set like for Motional. The divide between nomadic and sedentary life is very important to Ork culture and I added the motional ones because of that so I thought maybe I’d add some more locational ones too.
Today I’m finishing reading up on Locative to figure out whether I want that as well as Adessive, and then moving on to reading about Relation cases on the big wikipedia list, heh. I’m having such fun with this.
I’m a bit late seeing this, but that’s a good set of cases. (ERG/ABS for the win!) I do wonder how things which aren’t S/A/P or a location/direction (in space or time) are expressed, though. I saw that you mentioned maybe adding a vocative on today‘s daily post, but I’m curious as to how, for example, a dative argument would be expressed. Are there adpositions? Or is this part of the relational cases research you haven’t done yet?
Seeing any conlang with >5 cases reminds me of Firen, because I’m terribly egotistical, so I thought I’d post the list of Firen’s cases for comparison. The groupings here are as they are in my own notes.
Firen has no temporal cases, instead it has a particle which communicates that the next noun refers to time rather than space. It also doesn’t have a real genitive, rather it has a possessive particle, and nonparticipant above is marked as genitive because it’s usually what is used for the possessor, but it doesn’t convey that meaning itself. Notably, Firen has no role-marking adpositions at all aside from the above two particles, so the list above is really the whole story. Being more specific requires adjectives or verbs.
The common cases (at least in name) we have are Ergative, Absolutive, Ablative, Lative, Elative, and Inessive, (and mabe Illative), which is a shorter list than I thought it would be. Though, I’m not sure if in some of these we are referring to practically the same concept with different words—for instance, can you tell me what Traversal means? Is that mostly similar or dissimilar to Vialis? Also, Orklang has even more cases than does Firen, which is impressive.
† Interesting note about this: I learned not long after selecting my list of cases that the conflation of instrumentive and comitative (think English “with”) is actually to some extent a European thing, and is fairly uncommon outside of PIE-descended languages. The perception that it’s widespread is because of eurocentrism in linguistics, which has fortunately lessened a bit over time. Firen does conflate them, but it’s un-European enough (and certainly un-Englishy enough) that I don’t mind. This has nothing to do with what we were actually talking about though.
I don’t know about dative yet – haven’t gotten that far, hah. And for all I know, once I start actually making these maybe a few will merge together, or at least end up expressed in the same way. And yes, Traversal is basically Vialis from what I understand. I just liked the word better.
That’s interesting about instrumentive/comitative. I should keep that in mind.
I love both of your case work!
I didn’t know about the instrumental/comitative either, but at least in Akachenti, comitative goes with dative-benefactive. Instrumental is its own thing altogether, generally a suffix or a construction.