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New conlang :D - Cases - Request critique

 
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Aert



Joined: 03 Jul 2008
Posts: 354

PostPosted: Sat Apr 18, 2009 6:54 am    Post subject: New conlang :D - Cases - Request critique Reply with quote

Hey,

Well I decided to work on a newish polysynthetic language, complete with cases! (My previous conlang was specifically designed without cases, although there are technically a few, like possessives.)

At the moment, there are 9 basic cases (nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, comitative, possessive, instrumental, (time-indicative, I don't know the term), (motion-indicative, ditto), and locative.
Some of these are subdivided into a total of 35 specific cases (and 13 negative cases - for the locatives)

The cases are slightly different depending on if it's the indefinite article, or definite/demonstrative. The difference between a short and long vowel (eg. bet vs. beat).

I finished the pronoun sets, which turns out to have 273 specific pronouns (in nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, and possessive) with the same tier structure as in Aert.

I decided it won't be a truly new conlang, because I don't want to have to remake all the vocab. So this one will use the same vocabulary, but have a different grammar. Maybe I'll call it Bwaer - a pun on the number 2 Wink

Here are examples of the difference:

"I gave my cat to your sister's friend Doug."

Vé'sleђ Vét'adtël wó'Źólt'Śért'Śif Doug
I-past-give I.poss'cat to'you.poss-sister.poss-friend Doug

Vé'sleђ adtëlvéstëm Śérźórstëll Śifedt Doug
I.nom-past-give cat-I.poss.acc sister-you.poss.gen friend.dat Doug

"The spirit of the dead is ushered on to the higher horizon at the Transition Ceremony."

Eð’Ýásc lær’Værigaor gesdwentz wær’Ýágær lẃao’Fléńgan-Dwenzinj.
The-spirit of-the-dead be-past-usher-on to-the-Higher_Horizon at-the-Transition Ceremony

Ýáscáë Værgaorëll gesdwentz Ýágærrem Fléńgan-Dwenzinjégc.
Spirit.nom.def dead.gen be-past-usher-on Higher_Horizon.all.def Transition-Ceremony.loc_at.def

I hope I got the cases right, I haven't been working with them very long Confused

I look forward to comments/critiques!
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eldin raigmore
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 20, 2009 9:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If it's polysynthetic, this probably means that, among other things, patients (objects) can be incorporated into the verb, even when they are specific/referential (that is, the speaker actually has a particular one in mind, or some particular ones in mind).

Perhaps that can't be done when the object is definite (that is, not only is it specific, but the speaker reasonably, and probably correctly, assumes that the addressee also knows which one the speaker has in mind.) Or perhaps it can, depending on your language.

Certainly when the object/patient is not specific, and you don't want to indicate its grammatical number, you can incorporate it into the verb.

Therefore you may not need an accusative case, wherein the noun or pronoun or what-have-you actually inflects for accusativity; instead, have a means of incorporating it into the verb.

The same goes for datives and instrumentals; possible you don't need to inflect the noun, instead you need a different way of incorporating the noun into the verb, to distinguish datives from accusatives and instrumentals from accusatives (and, I suppose, instrumentals from datives).

I'm assuming all objects can be incorporated if they don't happen to be specific. If they can be incorporated even when definite, you don't need cases (as nominal morphology) for your objects. If definite objects can't be incorporated, I guess you will.

As for nominatives, and pronouns, for most polysynthetic languages every participant is incorporated into the verb as a pronoun, if not as a noun; that is, the verb itself tells everything about each participant that a pronoun would tell, unless it actually incorporates a noun for that participant instead. So you will need nominative nouns, but you won't need nominative pronouns. In fact, if all of your participants happen to be pronouns, your entire sentence will be just one word -- the verb. And if all of the objects are either pronouns or non-specific nouns, again the entire sentence will consist of just the verb, which will incorporate some of the objects -- those that are nonspecific/nonreferential nouns.

Look at WALS.info and cross-reference the "degree of synthesis on the verb" feature with the "number of cases" feature. That's be features 49 through 52 with feature 22.
http://wals.info/feature/combined?id1=49&id2=49&text=22&hidden= e.g.
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Aert



Joined: 03 Jul 2008
Posts: 354

PostPosted: Mon Apr 20, 2009 11:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for your suggestions and info!

I'll take a look at that site and see what I can glean/scam/use from it Wink
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eldin raigmore
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Joined: 03 May 2007
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 21, 2009 8:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You might want to look at http://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/fieldtools/linguaQ.html and search for anything to do with cases.
And also look especially at 2.1.1 "Noun Inflection" in http://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/fieldtools/linguaQ.html#morphology.
In http://wals.info/feature look at features
28 "Case Syncretism",
49 "Number of Cases",
50 "Asymmetrical Case-Marking",
51 "Position of Case Affixes",
98 "Alignment of Case Marking of Full Noun Phrases",
99 "Alignment of Case Marking of Pronouns",
and read the chapter texts to find out which of those features you actually want to consider.

You already know to look at feature 22 "Inflectional Synthesis of the Verb".

Also, look at features
20 "Fusion of Selected Inflectional Formatives",
21 "Exponence of Selected Inflectional Formatives",
26 "Prefixing vs Suffixing in Inflectional Morphology",
40 "Inclusive/Exclusive Distinction in Verbal Inflection",
58 "Obligatory Possessive Inflection",
and read their chapter texts to find out which of them you want to actually consider.

Consider also features
23 "Locus of Marking in the Clause" (because polysynthetic languages are likely to mark the verb, but cases are marked on the noun),
24 "Locus of Marking in Possessive Noun Phrases",
25 "Locus of Marking: Whole-language Typology",
29 "Syncretism in Verbal Person/Number Marking",
100 "Alignment of Verbal Person Marking",
101 "Expression of Pronominal Subjects",
102 "Verbal Person Marking",
104 "Order of Person Markers on the Verb",
and read their chapter texts to find out which of them you want to actually consider.

Then, of each two chapters you've decided to consider, decide whether or not you want to look at them in combination.

Basically that's features 20-29, 49-51, and 98-104.
You probably want to consider feature 22 in combination with each of the others.

For feature 104, the values in which Agent and Patient are both person-marked on the verb (that is, all of the values except the white, first value), could be compared with the polysynthesis feature 22. All languages with 12 or more categories-per-word and the majority with 4-11 categories-per-word have two-person-marking on the verb (polypersonal agreement); few with 2-3 categories per word and none with 0-1 categories per word (of course) have polypersonal agreement. So polypersonal agreement is highly correlated with verbs being polysynthetic.

On the other hand comparing feature 104 with feature 49, we find that most languages with 5 or more cases don't have polypersonal agreement, and few languages with polypersonal agreement have 8 or more cases. In other words, polypersonal agreement doesn't go with a lot of cases and a lot of cases doesn't go with polypersonal agreement.

But most languages without polypersonal agreement have 4 or more cases.

The same kind of information may be found using feature 102. It's first four values are about languages that mark at most one participant; neither, or only the A, or only the P, or either the A or the P but not both. It's last value is for languages with polypersonal agreement. We get the same conclusion as before comparing it with feature 22; languages with 4 or more categories marked on the verb tend to have polypersonal agreement and vice-versa, whereas languages with 3 or fewer categories marked on the verb tend not to have polypersonal agreement and languages without polypersonal agreement tend to have 5 or fewer categories marked on the verb.

Comparing feature 102 with feature 49 we see again that polypersonal-agreement languages don't tend to have a lot of cases and languages with a lot of cases tend not to have polypersonal agreement.

I'm sure you get the picture.

The languages in the WALS.info sample database which they have noted with a lot of synthesis on the verb and a lot of cases seem to be:
Ingush
Koasati
Alamblak
and maybe some others, for instance
Burushaski, Nivkh, Quechua (Imbabura).
And if you can find nothing, or not enough, on enough of those, you might like some of Aymara, Georgian, Maricopa, Trumai, Imonda, Awa Pit.

Good luck. I hope some of that helps. Let us know how it turns out.
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Aert



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PostPosted: Wed Apr 22, 2009 6:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Shocked Perfect! It will take me a couple days to go through it all, I'm making notes on the features website, and I have a pretty good idea about how it's going to work.

Regarding the agreement, one of the main ideas of Aert is to have minimum change/exceptions of a single topic, and agreement is one of them: there are no 'genders' except when referring to [gender] [noun], and even then it's optional; agreement wouldn't mean much except for vowel harmony, and I don't think I'm going to use that (although unstrssed vowels will still tend towards /\).

I've also got a thread going on wordreference forums, and am getting a learn Latin book for the specifics of some cases, how they work and could work in the structure of Aert, possible derivations, etc.
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