Vreleksá

Kiri · Joined: 13 Jun 2009 Posts: 471 Location: Latvia/Italy

Thank you SO much, Eldin!

eldin raigmore · Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2011 8:12 pm Post subject:

Kiri · Joined: 13 Jun 2009 Posts: 471 Location: Latvia/Italy

I'm still looking for a somewhat intuitive way to write the sounds /Q Q: & &: 9 9:/
Now I have <ao āo ae āe oe ōe> but I'm not really happy with the digraphs, especially for the long versions. Maybe diacritics would be better. Does anyone have any ideas that could be of help?

Tolkien_Freak · Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2011 10:27 pm Post subject:

(You should disable HTML in your post so <> shows up right ^_^)

You could do <ò òò à àà ő őő> or something. It'd be better if there was a o-double-grave symbol you could use in place of à, but I don't know if that exists.

Kiri · Joined: 13 Jun 2009 Posts: 471 Location: Latvia/Italy

This is so frustrating! There are never enough diacritics for conlangers Very Happy

Tolkien_Freak · Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2011 12:04 pm Post subject:

So much truth.

Kiri · Joined: 13 Jun 2009 Posts: 471 Location: Latvia/Italy

eldin raigmore · Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2012 1:08 am Post subject:

(1a) What, precisely, is the formal definition of "a pitch-accent language"?

(1b) Is there only one formal definition, or do "professional linguists" disagree on the meaning of that term?

(1c) I thought a "pitch-accent" language was one in which stress was pretty synonymous with pitch.

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(2)
I remember reading about a natlang somewhere that has both weight-sensitive stress and tones.

Level tones can occur on any syllable.

Glide tones (rising and falling) can occur on any heavy syllable (even if it's unstressed) and also on any stressed syllable (even if it's light); but glide tones cannot occur on unstressed light syllables.

Contour tones (peaking (rise-fall) and dipping (fall-rise)) can occur only on stressed heavy syllables.

To put it differently:

Stressed heavy syllables can have any tone.

Stressed light syllables and unstressed heavy syllables cannot have contour tones; but they can have any glide tone and any level tone.

Unstressed light syllables can only have level tones.
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"We're the healthiest horse in the glue factory" - Erskine Bowles, Co-Chairman of the deficit reduction commission

Kiri · Joined: 13 Jun 2009 Posts: 471 Location: Latvia/Italy

The problem I have with TŠL right now is the fact that it doesn't really have infinitive on verbs.

When I have a phrase with two verbs (like modals and other stuff), the main verb gets nominalized with the suffix

E.g.
Sōmamb Ďonu ōes.
1S–see John-ABS BEN
I see John (to my advantage).
vs.
Sōpāoral Ďonūgi mambťo ōes.
1S-be.able John–GEN see–NOMINAL.ABS BEN
I can see John (to my advantage).

but I can't really find an elegant way to add another verb to the phrase.

Does anyone have an idea how to do this or an example of how other languages do this?

EDIT:
I found a variant in which even two verbs are not possible in the same clause:
Tàsšāegi Hōgi mambťōgi torúf, Alhimāgi oëmflet Ťepit ent gārbe ik.
give-land-SG.GEN* royalty-SG.GEN seeing–SG.GEN about, Alhima-GEN embassador-ERG Chepu-ERG have honor–ABS BEN
The Alhiman ambassador Chepu has the honor of seeing the Queen of Tashay.

*The name Tàsšæ literally means "The Given Land"

Kiri · Joined: 13 Jun 2009 Posts: 471 Location: Latvia/Italy

no one?

Aert · Joined: 03 Jul 2008 Posts: 354

This might not help too much due to the different nature of our conlangs, but what I've done with the oligosynthetic one (still working on a name...) is included several modal verb root/cases, which result in a complex verb (all arguments come after, since it's a VSO lang).

Example:

"I see John (to my advantage)"
see-BEN 1SG.NOM John.ACC

"I can see John (to my advantage)"
POT-see-BEN 1SG.NOM John.ACC

"I can start to speak to John (to my advantage)..."
POT-INCHO-see-BEN 1SG.NOM John.ACC ...

This could be carried quite a ways due to the agglutinative nature of my lang, and I often us an "attributive marker" to link two things that are related in the sentence.

But in your case, it looks like you're using noun incorporation (you have "John.GEN-seeing" vs. "seeing John." If this is so, I'd suggest you check out Mark Baker's work:

Baker, Mark C. (1988) Incorporation: a theory of grammatical function changing. Chicago:. University of Chicago Press
Baker, Mark C. (1996). The Polysynthesis Parameter. New York [etc.]: Oxford University Press.

He's been highly recommended to me when I came to my prof with a question about incorporation, and you should find tons of great examples there.

Unfortunately I haven't seriously read his work, but if you want to use multiple verbs in a sentence via noun incorporation, you could sequentially incorporate the objects, such that you get:

1S-be.able John-GEN ask-NOMINAL.ABS BEN for dinner-GEN pay-NOMINAL.ABS
"I can ask John (to my advantage) to pay for dinner"

Or you could also consider a structure such that every new sentence-level projection (CP, in syntax, where you need to express time or infinitive marking on the verb), you can go back to the standard sentence, such that you get:

[Subject Mod-Verb Obj Verb2-NOM (Goal)](n)
(the (n) should be subscript: you can repeat this structure recursively for a simple/elegant way of extending the sentence paradigm you already have in place)

Hope this helps some!

eldin raigmore · Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2012 7:16 pm Post subject:

Kiri · Joined: 13 Jun 2009 Posts: 471 Location: Latvia/Italy

Thank you both! Smile

I now have something to think about Smile