Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Dairwueh: Personal Names and Cases

An Indo-European-like trait that Dairwueh and Sargaĺk share (but that Bryatesle lacks!) is case congruence on adjectives. What makes this particularly Indo-European-like (and not, e.g. Baltic-Finnic like or Kayardild-like) is the existence of distinct sets of morphemes for the adjectives and for the nouns. 

I have understood that the origin for this in Indo-European is that morphemes originally used with pronouns for some reason migrated onto the adjectives, although this of course leaves open the question of the origin of the distinct morphemes on the pronouns. (However, typologically I doubt whether that's very unusual. We find small examples of similar things elsewhere, such as the Finnish -t accusative for personal pronouns, or the comitative requiring possessive suffixes on the noun - the latter possibly leading, over time, to a situation where the noun and adjective have distinct forms.)

What's this to do with names? In Dairwueh, personal given names can behave both like nouns and like adjectives, depending on the presence of a clan name. A patronymic can behave like a noun if no other part of the name is present.

Thus,
nom: Doras
acc: Doranna
dat: Doraar
gen: Doraat
loc: Doraŋa
would be the noun-like forms, and if Doras' father was Elti, you get
nom: Eltikar Doras
acc: Eltikan Doranna
dat: Eltikarz Doraar
gen: Eltikarz Doraat
loc: Eltikari Doraŋa
however, if a clan-name was involved, Doras too would - except in the nominative - inflect by an adjectival paradigm:
nom: (Eltikar) Doras Marzi
acc: (Eltikan) Doran Marzinna
dat: (Eltikarz) Dorarz Marziar
gen: (Eltikarz) Dorarz Marziat
loc: (Eltikari) Dorari Marziŋa
In the nominative, the patronymic has its own feminine form e.g. Eltikama (derived from the father's name, though), but in all other forms, it basically used feminine congruence instead on the masculine patronymic stem.

Nick-names of course exist, and tend not to adhere to this pattern. However, a nick-name nearly never is used in apposition with patronymics or clan-names.

As linguistic history goes by, other forms of 'family names' besides clan-names start appearing, with the usual suspects: professions, places of origin, remarkable attributes, etc.

// TODO: I should definitely finally get around to getting those adjective case markers done for Dairwueh.


Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Detail #393: Differential Alignment

This kinda gets on the border of what makes sense, but hear me out:

Let's consider a split-S language, where e.g. 1st and 2nd person singular and plural are the triggers for one alignment. However, 1st person singular exclusive is excluded from this, and thus alignment communicates clusivity.

Saturday, March 9, 2019

Copulas and Objects

I wrote this as a comment in a facebook conlanging group, regarding the assumption that the copula is transitive.

Usually, for European languages, copulas are considered intransitive. They do not have objects in any European language. (Some African languages, however, do seem to have their copulas be properly transitive).

OK, hey... wait a sec. What's the thing that goes on the right side of 'is' then, if not an object? Isn't SVO the rule of the day in English? Let us call the noun that typically is on the right-hand side of a verb the ... 'right-hand noun'. However, do not take this to mean that the 'right-hand noun' has to be on the right hand of the verb.

Objects have more properties than being right-hand nouns! These properties enable us to make tests for determining whether something is an object or not. One thing you can do to objects in English, that you can't do to other things, is turn them into the subjects of passive verbs (Note: some speakers can do this to indirect objects too). So,

he kicked the ball → the ball was kicked
Nearly no speakers, however, will permit
he was the CEO of ACME Industries →
the CEO of ACME Industries was been by him
(This might happen in modern poetry, however, but modern poetry intentionally violates grammatical patterns on occasion)

Another thing English permits is coordinating objects of different verbs:

he saw him and acknowledged him →
he saw and acknowledged the man

Try this with a typical transitive verb ('saw', for instance) and a typical copula ('was') and you'll find a problem.
 

*he was and saw a man
*he saw and was the man in the mirror

I imagine these may appear in poetry, but they feel weird and at the very least will fail to be considered grammatically well-formed by most speakers.

However... you can coordinate the right-hand noun of 'to be' with the right-hand noun of some other verbs:
he suddenly became, and maybe still is, a good chess player

Another test which English kinda-sorta lets us do, but which is bad for a variety of reasons, is case assignment.
Some speakers require the nominative for right-hand nouns of copulas: 

"it is I". 
This seems inconsistently applied, though, and I bet it's rather associated with the particular verb × person pairing, i.e. the same person may have
"it is I", but "it is him!",
or 
"it is he" but "the stem cells that became him". 
In English, apparently, for some (most?) speakers, the accusative case is tied to the right-hand noun, rather than to objecthood. English case assignment is inconsistent from speaker to speaker, and even for speakers it is inconsistent from verb to verb or from person to person with a single verb.

What we further can notice, is that the copula can take arguments that are not nouns, but are e.g. adjectives or adverbs or prepositional phrases, and these are still as closely tied to the subject as would a right-hand noun be. It can take 'red', whereas a transitive verb usually takes 'a red one'. (With weird exceptions like 'see red', which basically is sorta intransitive, since it rather just encodes 'to rage' or somesuch - i.e. 'red' in 'see red' does not really have an actual referent!)

Summary: in very many languages, verbs can take noun arguments that are not objects. Assuming that a verb is transitive just because there is a noun in the same position that an object would normally go does not necessarily work out, and a verb is not necessarily transitive just because it lets you do NOUN VERB NOUN.

Exceptions, however, exist, and in several African languages apparently 'to be' is indeed transitive in the sense that the 'right-hand noun' in fact passes objecthood tests in these languages.