The Dailies. September 3, 2022
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?
0
5 thoughts on “The Dailies. September 3, 2022”
Reading
So apparently, participles glomp verb infinitives with adjectival particles, usually before the verbal paradigms reabsorb them into verbal expressions. That definitely gives me a new take on how to build out verbs.
Okay, I did a ton more reading than that, but that was particularly salient, right along with the fact that everything is language specific, so stop worrying so hard if what I’m doing is natlangy enough.
Courtly
New developments today specifically, omitting things skipped from previous days:
It’s still totally optional to include an antigenitive marker at all, and Yailo vaadi would be the normal way to say it. But in short, gender agreement if the genitive argument is omitted is aligned with the missing argument. If the genitive argument is included, the marker aligns with the possessee’s gender.
The marked nominal is definitionally specific, but the antigenitive loses gender and is just -d when added to a common noun definite, e.g. ayitid, or “my/your/their child.”
May I ask which natural languages you have been looking at specifically lately in your reading?
I confess I hadn’t heard the term antigenitive till now, so I looked it up. It reminds me of Finnish possessive suffixes, but I believe they’re only used with pronominal possessors, not with regular nouns as possessors.
If I understand correctly, Courtly does have genitive cases, but if you put an antigentive suffix on the possessed noun, you can (must?) skip the genitive form of the possessor noun? (Samples welcome!)
My conlang Nahul has possessive suffixes, but they work much the same as in Finnish (although without being marked as belonging to the formal register, as I think is the case in Finnish).
So mostly the papers I’ve been reading have been doing lots of crosslinguistic analysis, because mostly I’ve been hunting down particular linguistic phenomena relevant to current efforts. But there’s been a lot of mention of Afroasiatic and North American language families besides the usual obligatory inclusion of indoeuropean families.
So oddly enough, nope, genitive arguments are always in the nominative unless you count the specifically possessive pronouns: vaadi, vaada, hawaadi, hawaada, etc.
So what’s been happening is that the possessed item has been picking up the -di, -da off the pronouns, which seems to be how things get generalized a lot in this language. Grabbing the front of pronouns or sex nouns tends to get prefixed to genderfy other nouns and grabbing the end off a grammaticalized thing to extend it also happens a lot.
So you have three ways of saying “my garden flower,” to use the above example (where glossing rules aren’t my best skill and sa/ar represent gender):
1. yailo vaadi
garden flower 1S.GEN.sa
2. yailo-da vaadi
garden flower-ANTG.ar 1S.GEN.sa
3. yailo-di
garden flower-ANTG.sa
If the genitive argument is included, it’s going to match the gender of the possessee. If the genitive argument is excluded, it matches the gender of the possessor. This is a fairly new development but becomes grammaticized fairly quickly.
Intricate but very cool!!!
I hadn’t thought of something like that for Nahul at all, although Nahul does have three grammatical genders. I guess I tend to stick to fairly European-ish views on how cases work, after all.
The Nahul word for ‘flower’ is mamí, and to express ‘my flower’ in the nominative, you would invariably say ‘maminai‘, which retains the Class III gender that mamí has. Nahul doesn’t have possessive pronouns. (Another difference from Finnish.) It does have genitive cases for other nouns: a flowery phrase like ‘flower of the city’, you’d say, khosotet mamí, with -et as the genitive suffix for Class II gender that khosot, ‘city’, belongs to.
How pretty! I like the word for flower and the various constructions around genitives!