The Dailies. April 19, 2023

The Dailies. April 19, 2023

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. April 19, 2023

  1. In the interest of starting to figure out sentences in Kofnea-Kolos, while digging around for all my old scraps of info on when I last tackled the subject, we have officially decided that ditransitive verbs have absolutive-dative agreement, for lack of a better framework to put it in.

    Original sentences:

    1. shivimee ohuali, “Pass the breadsticks.” Now, shivimee a ohuali, since I’ve added the particles since then.
    2. shinimee, “Come here.”

     

    So this breaks down to:

    • the verb shi, to pass, to give, to bring
    • -vi- for impersonal absolutives, -ni- for people, esp. recognized people, and -hi- for explicitly unrecognized people
    • then for the direction or recipient, we have -mee for 1st, -kha or –cha for 2nd, and -tsau for 3rd

     

    Which really wasn’t where I thought I was going with these, but alas, it feels right and seems to work for their needs. The absolutive agreement predates them developing a full-blown gender system, which is why it’s based on animacy agreement instead. The recipient third person comes from the old word tsabi, which is body, and the first person from mii, which meant self once upon a time.

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    1. Looks really neat to me!

      Love the breakdown and the etymology for the recipient suffices!

      I don’t know if I would ever have thought of ‘pass’ and ‘come’ as being expressed with the same root, but with those different additions, it works and that’s awesome.

      Which really wasn’t where I thought I was going with these, but alas, it feels right and seems to work for their needs.

      Were you hoping for something different?

      1. Thank you!

        I was less hoping for something different than just thinking it would be a bit different, especially because I really hadn’t landed on whether I wanted a no-agent indicates imperative analogue to English. And I honestly did not expect those recipient markers to take the form they did. I would have posited them coming from pronouns, except -miets and -sushiet(s) from ancient conlanging history on this language as indicative of either immediate familial relationship or non-immediate familial relationship with someone who one of the conversants either knew or is still alive ended up completely changing that.

        Because I really disliked my original word for grandmother (it’s gone now), and I noticed that sushiet and miets were both very similar, just add s and there would be a common root in there. And I needed a suffix for “by, beside, the side of”, and I ended up making that -(i)ets. This came out of when I needed a word for coast and went trawling real world etymologies and figured out that I was going with “seaside” more literally.

        And that gave mi(e)- as meaning “self.” Your immediate family are those who are beside you. The meaning has totally shifted and grammaticalized by now, but that’s the origin. And that looked awfully like the -mee in “pass to me.”

        I did pull the -cha / -kha (dialect dependent) from the 2nd person pronouns but I felt that their usual way of 3rd person didn’t fit with the concept of directionality and just didn’t feel right. So tsabi went in. Jack of all trades.

        But I’ve decided for now that I’m happy with it and if I end up adding an imperative grammatical item later, so be it.

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