A Link (a webcomic)

Jumping a bit late on the bandwagon (since badconlangingideas got there first), but ... just in case I have readers who don't also read BCI (like such readers exist, right?), I might as well recommend this webcomic:

Grammaticality and other Judgments

A pretty clever webcomic about linguistics. Should appeal to linguistics nerds.

Some Nahuatl Links

A friend of mine has a blog on nahuatl stuff, which might be inspiring for a conlanger to read about.

And this reminded me of an article about a no-root verb in some Nahuatl dialect - a verb consisting of two affixes, and nothing else. It's quite an interesting essay.

Detail #140: A Link and riffing on its contents

Aszev wrote, some time ago, a pretty good summary and introduction to systems of answering polar questions. It is a good read, and really condenses the matter very efficiently.

What could be some fun way of going slightly beyond this? We could of course try to come up with some 'new' table not present in the typology offered by Aszev.

1) Right-left flip on the Three-Form System
Conflate positive answers to negative and positive questions, distinguish negative answers to negative vs. positive questions. An obvious extension. Why it doesn't seem to be attested surprises me a bit. This is a three-way system mirrored left-right.

	pos!	neg!
pos?	yes	nay
neg?	yes	nope

2) Pseudodiagonal Languages
The agreement system gives a nice diagonal system.

	pos!	neg!
pos?	yes	no
neg?	no	yes

But we could obviously make one of the diagonals not conform to letting it be diagonal.

	pos!	neg!
pos?	yes	no
neg?	no	nope

Or alternatively make one of the nos deviate.

	pos!	neg!
pos?	yes	no
neg?	nope	yes

3) Doing other things with this:
We could imagine a language that takes two types of this, and basically marks for both. Of course, let's not have the marking have similar exponents at all!

We take an agreement system (and apply that to presence of person inflections on the verb, for instance), and a negation particle that follows the English two-form system:

	pos!	neg!
pos?	yes, congruence	no, no congruence
neg?	yes, no congruence	no, congruence

We could maybe use some other exponent for this, who knows? Maybe the things I currently mark 'no congruence' get a peculiar subject case? Or maybe something like:

	pos!	neg!
pos?	yes, verb	no, did not verb
neg?	yes, did verb	no, not verb

There's endless possibilities. Of course, these will interact with other negation in general, and possibly one might want to use some of these as negation (or affirmation)-approaches in other circumstances. Maybe the markings given by the neg?-pos! cell encodes a strong affirmation, pos?-pos! encodes a reaffirmation, neg?-neg! a strong negation, pos?-neg! something else, so there's use for this outside of the slightly limited context of polar questions.

We could of course combine some other systems in some neat ways like this as well.

A Link

Speculative Grammarian (and other related zines archived on the same site) is one of the finest linguistics satires. The occasional articles also delve into miniature conlanging, although for satirical purposes obviously.

One of my favourite articles deals with numbers in the Moundsbar language.

However, reading that article reminded me that there's a site elsewhere with lots of notes on Moundsbar, and some other linguistics thrown in as well.  These are classics of their genre.

Detail #81: Indefinites

We all recognize the normal indefinite pronouns, c.f. Ye Merrye Conlangre's treatment.

What if we'd take some of these and switch the information content to some less usual word class, i.e. verbs?

I can't find the solution -> I can not find solution.acc

I can't find any solution -> I any.1sg not able to find solution.(some other case)

I have ideas -> I have ideas.acc

I have some ideas -> I do have ideas

A hammer would do -> hammer is sufficient

Any hammer would do -> hammer does suffice

Some car drove past -> car did drive past

The/a car drove past -> car drove past

This way, it may be difficult to know which particular noun is affected by the meaning change. Probably either a hierarchy (certain nouns are more likely to be definite than others) determines which noun is intended to be understood as the definite one, or there's specific auxiliaries for indefinite objects and specific ones for indefinite subjects. I would prefer just stacking them when both are indefinite, or leaving it unmarked.

A paper worth reading

There is a fascinating paper by David Tuggy on a verb in Orizaba Nawatl, detailing a verb that has no stem - it consists, entirely, of grammatical affixes. Well worth reading.

In addition, having it linked here I will not displace it by cleaning out my bookmarks when they're getting too many, or by reinstalling the OS and not keeping the bookmarks backed up. Which I suspect may be appreciated by the friend who brought this to my attention, as I have already asked him to link it a full four or five times over the last several years.