The Dailies. May 30, 2023

The Dailies. May 30, 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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4 thoughts on “The Dailies. May 30, 2023

  1. So in previous conversations re: Kofnea-Kolos, verbs and how they work has come up. Which basically boiled down to, I didn’t really know yet.

    But now!

    Behold, clitics. In short, we’ve got some verb phrases that have generated a tidy heap of contractions for various TAM and semantic conditions, which cliticize onto the end of the verb. BUT they were confusing me because just like in English you can say, “I will” or “I’ll”, so too this lang is perfectly fine saying the whole verb out without cliticizing and letting you shuffle the words into various orders for aesthetic or discourse reasons.

    That said:

    1. yuptachm-noikh, “by my (fem.) will”
    2. haanchm-nokh, “by my (masc.) hand”
    3. ikhachm-nokhs, “by my (div.) strength” – used narratively ascribed to divine characters; despite this being acceptable to use of other people to refer to someone within the context of their sworn duty, using it of yourself is considered pretty inappropriately self-aggrandizing in most circles, though I suspect this is changing as it’s getting used more in 3rd person for people whose names are in the divine/natural gender instead of male or female

     

    So all of these can be subbed in for the usual haenn or yitsonn or any of the other tense contracted versions.

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    1. I love the nuance of when it’s appropriate to use ikhachm-nokhs and when it’s not!

      Grammatically I’m still confused – aren’t these more like adverbs than verbs? Or is the verb grammar question separate from these two new expressions?

      Could you please remind me how the usual haenn and yitsonn work? Or if you can provide me the link to an old post, I could go back and reread.

       

      1. I’ve delayed putting together a full picture of verbs because I didn’t really have time to sit down and do a more complete picture yet, but the short of it is that intentionality is part of TAM, but since I’m highly interested in diachrony in this language family, I also went back as far as figuring out where the suckers came from.

        -haenn indicates intentionality and came from the word for “hand”, just as the ergative -hn did. -yitsonn indicates that something just happened to have happened or was by accident or passive and comes from an old expression “as the river runs,” meaning it’s not personal, that’s just how it goes. But you don’t have mandatory doubling yet on present tense. You can still uncontract the thing to a proper adverbial phrase. What you can’t do grammatically is just omit all mention of whether a verb was intentional. If you want to do that, rephrase to omit having a verb.

        I wasn’t sure where to make those little markers stick in the verb phrase until I glommed past and future tense with them, then it became obvious they’re suffixing, just like most grammatical things in this language.

        I’m hoping to do some test / sample sentences and really nail down verbs this weekend or thereabouts.

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