The Dailies. November 30
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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I’ve been keeping notes on my work, but since I was in the throes of it, frankly there wasn’t much good to share. That said, I have since discovered a few things. The only way Akachenti’s pronominal affixes make sense is if the original person-marking vowels were the high vowel set, which is less common and generally now indicates the dative:
Interestingly enough, it’s equally obvious that there was originally no third person agreement or pronouns, which is not uncommon crosslinguistically, but definitely makes me curious how that worked with case.
So the accusative, I’ve known for a while was indicated by a word-final rhotic flap and seemed to cause slight high tone on the preceding person-marking vowel. Due to pre-rhotic vowel lowering, it actually makes sense at this point that the accusative was actually ended in a glottal stop, so -r’ for accusative, which would generate a lowered, high tone vowel when reduced:
And í likely arose from an incorporated ih’ clitic, where the glottal indicated accusative and ih was incorporated for nominative.
The dative-benefactive-comitative would correspond to a case ending I thought was a variation on accusative but now know is separate, -dar / -ter. (No, I have no idea why one is voiced and the other isn’t, especially considering the phonemes they follow.) Using the high vowel set and in keeping with the traditional way dative agreement is marked on the verb, I think the original dative markers went like this:
Which eventually dropped the word-initial d and resulted in just plain e, i, and u, and as ih became incorporated as a third person, the inclusive first person merged with the regular first person and ih became i and the new third person agreement marker for dative. As a suffix, -di lives on as an associative plural not marked for person.
As tone emerged and tone rules blocked the use of the accusative high tone vowel markers, á, é, ó, and í, the old dative vowel set became a fallback set.