Detail #373: The Copula vs. Habitually Becoming

One could imagine that a certain set of adjectives or nouns instead of being expressed with the regular copula, instead were expressed with an habitual form of 'to become', and this would reflect some semantic property of these nouns or adjectives – maybe they are only expressed fleetingly, or they are less intrinsic properties, or less obviously intrinsic properties. Properties which only are evident on occasion.

One could also of course have some kind of systematic distinction marked this way as well, but then again, what's the actual difference between two similar verbs like 'be' and 'become (regularly)' if not a systematic distinction? What I want to go for here is maybe something that is more un-subtle: a difference greater than that implied by the actual "usual" semantic difference - with some nouns or adjectives, maybe 'become (regularly)' marks some kind of disdain or some kind of respect or whatever? Fear? Hope? Whereas the use of a copula would just be neutral, or even +(mainly neutral) +(precluding the particular thing implied by the habitual for this set of lexemes).

Detail #372: Limited Tripartite Marking for Participles

Not only nouns in verb phrases and congruence on finite verbs can showcase alignment. Participles are a main other locus of alignment. English has a fairly limited system on its participles, with tense/aspect and voice being somewhat conflated in a peculiar way.

An alignment I have spoken very little about on this blog is tripartite marking. This one has a unique marker for each of

• intransitive subject
• transitive subject
• object

Implementing this on participles is rather easy:

• intransitive → intransitive participle
• transitive, active  → active participle 
• transitive, passive  → passive participle 

However, the topic of this post is limited tripartite marking. How would we limit it, and what would we gain by doing so?

Consider a system that is either accusative or ergative or even split. Now, certain verbs may have a different meaning depending on whether they're intransitive or transitive, such as run. When intransitive, running generally refers to motion, either concretely or in some metaphoric way. When transitive, it can sometimes refer to the same action, with the object being the distance or the path, but sometimes, it refers to being in charge of something.

We could imagine that at least some verbs with this property would have a different intransitive participle available.

What marking strategies would be nice for this? Maybe double the participle marking for the transitive version, getting, here in an accusative alignment setting:

• running: actually running, physically
• runninging: being in charge
• run: being controlled by

Unique morphemes could of course also be used, but some other type of reuse of morphology could be interesting: maybe omit congruence for the intransitive participle?

Detail #371: Quirky Coordination

I previously posted a list of quirky things beyond case suggesting a few different places to place systematic quirks. So, I acquired the help of a bunch of rabbit mining engineers, just in order to figure out how deep the hole of quirkiness in grammars could go. For now, "quirkiness" is badly defined, and I am happy to leave it at that. I am happy as long as some kind of 'mismatching' is forced or required or permitted in some way or this mismatching permits some kind of differential marking. So, here's the first out of many weird ideas this line of thinking has lead me to:

Quirky Coordination

So, maybe in some circumstances, some given type of noun will trigger a case mismatch (or some other mismatch) in the coordinated structure. Even weirder, what if certain nouns force coordination even if the level is different? Let's imagine nouns for siblings and cousins force coordination whenever a pronoun also is a sibling of that NP.

Here, we can imagine some interesting distinctions:

I and brother met.sg = I met my brother
I and brother met.pl = I and my brother met (each other)
I met.sg brother = I met the brother (of someone else that is salient)
I met.pl brother = I and (someone else's) brother met

In a language with paucal and plural in the verb morphology, we could further, of course, introduce the same difference in the plural, with paucal signifying the more transitive, and the latter the more reciprocal reading. Of course, 'meet' need not be the only verb behaving this way, we could have it happen for every verb, so

I and my brother told.sg a story = I told my brother a story

Here, we can imagine that the siblings as proper subject would let personal pronouns go to object positions instead:

sister met me = my sister met me

However, we could also imagine a situation whereby even as a proper subject, family members also force pronouns into coordinated positions:

sister and I met.sg = my sister met me
I and sister met.sg = I met my sister

Thinking up situations where neither is the subject, we can of course imagine that the same rules go there, but object congruence on the verb or whatever distinguishes the way it is to be parsed. Maybe there is a role hierarchy where e.g. the noun or pronoun is moved to whatever position is higher in the hierarchy, or maybe the pronoun always forces the other noun to go wherever it is.

However, we can also imagine that this rule only applies for some spots: subjects, maybe objects and indirect objects. In other spots, the nouns remain in their usual positions:

I told the police about (my) brother

In such spots, maybe the distinction between my brother and someone else's brother is made non-mandatory, or maybe marked by means of possessive pronouns (or possibly reflexive pronouns if possible). Of course, in the language we're designing, "telling about" maybe has the told-about thing as a direct object, so it wouldn't work like this, so you're of course supposed to substitute in anything where an oblique appears, and we're golden.

Now, how about something like

the PR office favoured my sister over me

Such a language could easily permit for this kind of construction with regular NPs in a way similar to how English does it, but handle pronouns + these particular nouns like this:

the PR office favoured sister and not me
the PR office favoured me and not sister

vs.

the PR office favoured the computer scientist over the amateur

Of course, there's a whole lot of ideas that can be turned into binary decisions about which way to go once you start developing this idea, and documenting all of the potential choices would require a huge post, I think I stop here and leave further thinking to the reader.

ALSO, yay, just passed 3/4 of the way to a thousand posts! (And still leading over badconlangingideas in total post count, despite getting comparably few contributions from elsewhere! Is the race to a thousand posts on?)

Detail #370: Defective Pronouns and Ways of Dealing with them

So, the thing we're used to seeing with regards to pronouns and case systems is pronouns having more cases than regular nouns: trivially, English has I vs. me, he vs him, she vs. her, etc. Finnish has a completely distinct accusative for most personal pronouns. However, we find exceptions: in Georgian, some personal pronouns merge the nominative, ergative and dative (which also is the accusative).

I was wondering what interesting things we could do with this.

1) Voices

An obvious solution is having the defective pronouns always have the same syntactical role, and voices are used to modulate its semantic role. This could get especially interesting if you also have voices that conserve the desired information structure - i.e. they are not used to make an argument less or more salient, they're just forced by the presence of a personal pronoun.

This could lead to interestingly distinct uses of voices depending on whether there's a pronoun present or not. For instance, emphasizing an argument might be part of the function when only normal nouns are present.

Notice how I said that the defective pronouns always have the same role. This is actually ambiguous: either it means 'there is one particular role A, and each defective pronoun always has that particular role'. The other meaning would be 'there is a set of particular roles A, and for each defective pronoun there is exactly one member of that set that it always will have'.

With that we can probably start getting into some pretty interesting wild notions, where we end up with a multitude of voices that can be combined to switch pronouns of different types simultaneously around the semantic role-space.

2) Permit case / role marking on some different entity.

This is basically sort of the idea that evolved into this post. This could be made very boring: extract the case marking onto a particle that goes somewhere else, so e.g.

I you see particle.me : you see me

In this case, the particle sort of becomes a stand-in for the personal pronoun, in effect doubling the existing personal pronoun. What I want is something more befuddling. So, let's go with this: place the case on a reflexive pronoun!

I see bear > I see the bear
I see bear self.acc > the bear sees me
I see you self.acc > I see you? you see me?

Normally, reflexives only happen with transitive verbs with no other explicit object, thus making their use in transitive clauses a reasonable approach. The only exception is when there's two pronouns present. Of course, some other rule may disambiguate there: proximity, some ranking thing (e.g. the reflexive pronoun always tells us the case of the pronoun highest in this order: 1 > 2 > 3). This may force there to be a nominative reflexive form, which obviously may well be useless in all other positions due to reflexives often not appearing as anything even remotely subject-like.

  

Further, one could bring in some coordination! Coordination often has some kind of restriction like 'one can only coordinate things of the same type', so e.g. 'I and the girl gave flowers' is not a valid reordering of 'I gave the girl flowers'. Then one could have some semantically empty element that can carry explicit case, and coordinate it with the pronoun that needs the marking. This also permits for separate case markings if needed for multiple pronouns. However, this leads to things like

I and self.nom give you and self.acc he and self.dat for a slave.

 3) Have Differential Case Marking on Other NPs

So, let's have non-subject personal pronouns force some slightly odd things going on with other NPs, like maybe making subjects go instrumental or something. So essentially begetting a split-ergative kind of thing, but with the pronouns just not marking for anything.

Ŋʒädär and Ćwarmin Phonologies and Correspondences: Vowels pt 1

This post has been under work for a very long time. Now that it is done, Ćwarmin, Ŋʒädär and even Dagurib stuff might start appearing at a steadier pace.
Ŋʒädär has a much larger vowel inventory than its relative Ćwarmin has:

Front		Back
Unrounded	Rounded	Unrounded	Rounded
i	ü	ɯ	u
e	ö	ɤ	o
	ä*		a

/ä/ is not strictly speaking rounded, but mostly patterns with the rounded vowels as far as distribution goes.

A thoroughly consistent orthography that occurred to me, but is somewhat unwieldy and has a weirdly placed <e> would be the following:

Front		Back
Unrounded	Rounded	Unrounded	Rounded
ï	ü	ı	u
ë	ö	e	o
	ä		a

I am not going to use this orthographical system,
but it is appealing in some way.

Halfway through typing this thing, I realized the best way of representing the vowel system would probably be this, and I will be editing old posts on Ŋʒädär to conform to this system. Changes are marked with bold typefaces: 

Front		Back
Unrounded	Rounded	Unrounded	Rounded
i	ü	ı	u
e	ö	ə	o
	ä		a

 /ä/ is not necessarily as rounded as ü and ö, but patterns with them.

Diphthongs currently basically exist in the following forms in Ŋʒädär:

Opening: ie, üö, öä. ıə, uo,oa
Closing: äe, äü, ei, a͜u, əı, aə

Diphthongs in Ŋ originate in several different situations in PŊƷD: long vowels under some circumstances, original diphthongs, vowels in hiatus, vowels with semivowels, vowels in combination with certain consonants, stressed vowels in open syllables.

The front unrounded and back unrounded vowels in Ŋʒädär are separate phonemes, and not allophones triggered by different vowel harmony situations. Minimal tuplets exist, like

ri - day, today (from *dzij)
rı - weak (from *rig or *rix ?)
rü? - is this so? (from *rü)

dəb - sweet (from *dɛɔb)
deb - niece (from *deib)
döb - belt (from *düǧp')
dob - plate (from *dob)

Compare this system to the much reduced Ćwarmin system:

Front (-Centre)		Back
i		u
e	ə	o
		a

Diphthongs: ie, ei, əi, eə, əe, ua, au, ou, oa. Diphthongs only appear in morpheme-initial syllables.

We find the following cognates to the Ŋʒädär words not preserving the minimal-pair:ness on account of vowel harmony, but on account of other phonemic distinctions, here, some cognate Ćwarmin vocabulary:

zi, ziti - day, today (from *dzij)
rəŋi - loose, soft (from *rig:ə or *riǧ:ə, derived from *rig or *rix by -də suffix)
-ri/-ru - suffix that marks doubtfulness (from *rü)

dəp - honey
listep - sister-in-law (*lins-deib > linstep > listep), where lins- originally signified 'by marriage', and was restricted to use with women, the corresponding male term being 'oŋx-')
dep - a strap used for carrying certain kinds of things
(no cognate to dob)

In Ćwarmin, non-initial PĆŊ diphthongs have been monopthongized, whereas some open, initial syllables have diphthongized. The system out of which these two systems originate may have looked something like this:

Front (Neutral)	Front Round	Back Round
i	ü	u
e	(ö)	o
ɛ		ɔ
	ä	a

possible reconstructed vowel system
for Proto-Ćwarmin-Ŋʒädär

PĆŊ diphthongs come in a few types with different outcomes. The first group consisted of an onset round vowel tailing toward  neutral vowels, thus

üi, äi, öi, ui, ai, oi, aɛ, uɛ, oɛ, üɛ, äɛ

If /ɔi/ and /ɔɛ/ existed, they seem to have been merged with /oi/ and /ɔɛ/ already by the time Ŋʒädär and Ćwarmin diverged. Sound-change-wise, in Ćwarmin these sometimes leave a slight change on the next consonant:

PĆŊ: üisɛ > üśɛ > iśə (wind > breeze, Ćwarmin)
PĆŊ: uik'ɛs > uć'ɛs > ućos (louse > bug)
PĆŊ: airaw > aʒaw > aʒo (high up > tall (of animate things))
PĆŊ: noɛg > noj (narrow > close)
PĆŊ: ǧoibi > fobu (dull > clumsy)

In Ŋʒädär, these diphthongs often remain in initial syllables, but tend to become uniform as far as frontness or backness goes. /i/ in the second syllable can cause back vowels to front.

PĆŊ: üisɛ > üise (wind > cold)
PĆŊ: uik'ɛs > uık'əh (louse > itch)
PĆŊ: airaw > aırau (not attested)
PĆŊ noɛg > noək (narrow > any physical constriction)
PĆŊ ǧoibi > ǧöibi > ʒöibi (dull > inferior (of the quality of things))

The second set of diphtongs would be open ones to close ones within one harmony group:

ei, ɛi, ou, au, äy, öy

In Proto-Ŋʒädär, these first become long vowels of the first type:

e:, :, o:, a:, ä:, ö:

By the time of Ŋʒädär, this length distinction had been lost.
Proto-Ćwarmin kept these intact. Ćwarmin happens to behave almost identically to Ŋʒädär in these regards, but cognate languages on both sides diverge on this. The only difference between Ŋ and Ć is that  /au/ and /a:/ become /o/.

A final type of diphtong consists of front-to-back or back-to-front movement. In Ŋʒädär, these generally moved to the backness of the latter part, and then eliminated that latter part in Ŋʒädär. In Ćwarmin, the latter part often becomes a consonant:

dɛɔb > dəɔb > dəb (Ŋʒädär)
dɛɔb > dɛwb > dəjb (Ćwarmin, unattested)

The diphtongs in PŊĆ seem more to have consisted of "point of departure + direction", and the actual end point does not seem to have made any difference. So /ɛi/ sometimes may well have come out /ɛe/, and /au/ may well have come out /ao/ in actual pronunciation.

In the Dagurib branch, most languages do not have vowel harmony. Dagurib itself, however, retains many traces of an almost nascent vowel harmony that just about caught on. The vowel system below is from the insular Dagurib language Ěvusǐb.

Front		Back
Tense	Lax	Lax	Tense
i	ǐ	ǔ	u
e	ě	ǒ	o
			a

In Dagurib, an additional (tense) /y ö/ exist, and the cognates of ǔ and ǒ are endolabial mid vowels, giving:

Front			Back
Tense		Lax	Lax	Tense
Unrounded	Rounded	Unrounded	Endolabial	Rounded
i	ü	ǐ	ǔ	u
e	ö	ě	ǒ	o
				a

In Ŋʒädär, some morphemes will have harmony that adheres to (almost) all features of the previous vowel. Most words are either fully front or fully back, but exceptions exist. This system probably evolved out of a system not entirely unlike that of Finnish, but with the back vowels causing retraction of the "neutral" vowels {i, e}. An opposite situation whereby neutral vowels {ı, ɤ} were fronted is unlikely on typological grounds. In Ćwarmin, the system went through quite a different set of changes, merging the neutral vowels with back vowels, so /i, e/ in words with back harmony became /u, o/. Meanwhile /ü/ merged with /i/, and {ö} with {e, ə} in ways where stress as well as surrounding consonants influenced the outcome.

Phonotactically, early Proto-Ŋʒädär seems to have had a restriction whereby the second syllable of a root either had an unrounded vowel, or the same vowel as the previous syllable. Diphthongs only occurred in the first syllable or in open final syllables. A variety of changes where consonants and partial harmony have interacted have led to this system changing, and now the only restriction that exists with regard to vowel distribution is the vowel harmony itself.

The Proto-[[ĆŊ]-Dagurib] vowel system probably was even more complicated, due to various changes that cannot be accounted for by an eight-vowel system with two sets of harmonizing vowels and two neutral vowels. It is, however, somewhat unlikely that Proto-ĆŊD had vowel harmony.

Tiny Unnumbered Detail:Case Spreading

In a language with case, in phrases such as 'man against man' or 'man against nature' or 'day by day', have case spread to the left, so that both nouns always are marked by the same case whenever the NP is not clearly part of a VP.