The Dailies. February 25, 2020
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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12 thoughts on “The Dailies. February 25, 2020”
kaeset • cold
Nice!
That’s always a great word to have!
How would you say, “The tea has gotten cold”?
Or, “I don’t like cold tea”?
Inu:s ikaeset. The tea is cold. (indicating this has happened to it)
Ikaes gahít inu:s. The tea has been cooled. (indicating this was intentionally done to it)
I’m sure I can figure out a don’t like phrase, but I’d have to poke around the unorganized parts of my notes.
ETA: Looking at all your lexical notes, I think I’m going to try to actually get at some of what these phrases actually mean and why. So nu:s is tea, any kind of tea, though most Ogunn would actually indicate which kind of tea it was.
So first off, if you said, Nu:s ikaeset, it would actually imply the tea makes you cold, so like it’s chilly, indicating the tea is an actor. Instead, it’s inu:s and places the tea in the passive role in relation to an adjective. There’s no verb in the sentence, which is funny because Akachenti is essentially a polysynthetic language, so you’d think it’d be all verbal, but alas, no. I ordered it like that to make tea topical, because it felt like the English inherently placed the subject as topic in this sentence.
In the second phrase, it starts with a verb, though I probably should have swapped inu:s and ikaes for topicality, but ikaes first felt right, so I went with it. In this one, ikaes is a verb, which essentially means “it’s cold” or “it’s made cold”, and then there’s gahít, which is a tough one to explain. Gah means good, but is also used as a grammatical helper, though I’m not sure if it’s adjectival or verbal, tbh, I’ll figure it out eventually and right now it’s saying that “yes, [third person object] is”. Then there’s the tea again, placed in a passive role.
I really love hearing about your language like this. I’ve never come close to constructing any similar one, but when you explain it, it makes such good sense. I just wish my memory was better…
So “gah” would have a different form than “gahít” if it was used grammatically for something else than a third person object?
Right, I totally found Hushi gahót?, which means “Have you eaten?” because I was trying to figure out how they form a perfect, and this would appear to be it.
So those little pronominals are á for first person patientive, ó for second person patientive, and í for third person patientive. And there are variations (like seriously, what is with the dative-benefactive just floating everywhere), but that’s the basics.
Would “Nu:s gahát ikaeset” mean “the tea has [definitely] made me cold” ?
Or would you never insert a form of gah into that type of sentence?
Nu:s gahát akaeset.
Yes. It would be like, The tea has made me cold.
Whereas, Ákaeset gahát nu:s, would be like, The tea has made me cold.
Interestingly, the a would be unmarked in the first sentence because it’s following a marked pronominal already, but in the second, it’d be marked because there’s an actual actor causing it, it comes first in the sentence, and because the gah pronominal marking is not optional. So it gets double marked. It’s different with a verb than an adjective, because verbs mark with position if allowable by topic. (I hope that makes any sense.)
ETA: Separately, if you just want to say, “I’m cold,” it’d probably be “Kaeset gahi.” Where the object marking has fallen off this particular no-subject personal adjective construction. The dummy agent is still there in the form of the -i on the end of gah, which is a verbal way of saying third person agent, because of its position at the end of the verb without explicit object marking.
I’m afraid I’m already lost again! You said Nu:s ikaeset means “the tea makes me cold”. But if the gah pronominal marking is added, then the adjective changes from akaeset to ikaeset?
By the way, is kaeset a three-syllable or a two-syllable word – i.e, is /ae/ a dipthong or two distinct vowels?
So yes, because i- on kaeset is a pronominal and has to agree. So if the person is third, it’s in third. If it’s first, then it’s in first. Pronominals everywhere!
ae is a fun one. It varies. It could be pronounced as e, aɛ, or aɪ, depending on the speaker. Native speakers consider it the 6th pure vowel, but in practice for most dialects, it’s a diphthong. In no case is it two separate vowels. There are no vowels in hiatus in Akachenti, and they’ll kill a pronominal or add an epenthetic consonant (via helper verb really) if it doesn’t fall into an acceptable diphthong.
Ooh, I see! I didn’t even think about /æ/, weirdly, even though it’s a phoneme in Swedish.
Can you say, “The tea is turning cold”? Maybe “Your tea is turning cold”?
So I meant /e/ or one of two diphthongs. I only use /æ/ in one of my conlangs, and that’s the language for Misarha.
Turning… Not sure, I’ll have to go build out some more of the verb structures for that I think. That’ll be my goal for this week then.