Shameless Self Promotion

I figured I could just as well promote my own music a bit.

Both pieces are in 11-tone equal temperament - a scale most of my readers probably never have heard anything in, since almost all western music is either in 12-tone equal temperament or in some "adaptive just intonation" of some vague sort. This adds quite a number of complications for the composer to grapple with, but I think I've rather managed to overcome some of these challenges with these two pieces – the first two instalments of a series of songs with somewhat similar ideas underlying them.

For the record, microtonal theorists kept saying that 11-tone equal temperament is very useless except for atonal music until at the very least a fair bit into the previous decade.

Detail #165: Mergers in Person * Gender

Imagine a language in which all persons are marked for gender. Further, there are at least three social genders, which I will call i, ii and iii.

I.i, I.ii, I.iii
you.i, you.ii, you.iii
3sg.i, 3sg.ii, 3sg.iii

Let's now imagine that there's some conflations, but that these conflations are not within one person, i.e. it's not the case that 2nd person conflates genders ii and iii or somesuch - it is the persons that are conflated instead:

1/2 sg.i	1 sg.ii	1/2/3 sg.iii
	2/3 sg.ii
3 sg.i

This means if you're gender iii, you use the same pronoun you'd use for a second or even third person of your gender. This would probably either be a gender considered very expendable or interchangeable, or one where the set of members is so small that it's no problem. For the other genders, the situation obtained by this complication might be less obvious, but could imaginably have interesting cultural reasons behind them.

Barxaw: Lexical Aspect and Verbs of Perception

In Barxáw, many verbs have an aspectual component to their meaning, for instance

xéλ - say, utter (perfective or rather maybe punctual)
najɛ̀  - talk, speak, orate, (imperfective, non-punctual) 

vár - to discover someone by hearing, to perk up from hearing something, to hear a very short sound
vìk - hear, listen

bìris - to decide in favour of something
t^harí - to think of something with an approving mindset

qursé - to be pricked by something, to experience a short flick of pain (that is generally not from heat)
sáré - to experience a pain that does not immediately pass (and is generally not from heat)

Now, with subordinated verbs where the main verb is one of perception, there's generally agreement between the lexical aspects of the main verb and the subordinate one, e.g.

nín qursé sa vár úŋ  - It stung, hearing you (enter or some other punctual thing like that)
*nin qursé sa vìk úŋ

nín sáré sa vìk úŋ - it pains/pained me to hear you (talk or sing or whatever)

 te úŋ vìk sa nín tiλì? - did you hear me sing?
*te ún vár sa nín tilì?

Situations where a non-punctual stimulus is perceived for just a punctual time-span requires some periphrasis:

nín tiλì, úŋ vár pex.
I sang, you discovered it/perked up from hearing it.

nín t^harí sa úŋ tiλì
I think with approval of your singing, "I like your singing"

Other new vocabulary in this post:

nín: I
úŋ: you
pex: a pronoun that refers to previous clauses. Also can mean something along the lines of "thus" or "such".
sa: a subordinating particle
tiλì: sing

Ćwarmin: Adjectival Attribute Syntax

Ćwarmin adjectives generally precede the noun they modify. However, some complications exist.

Possession is syntactically adjective-like, and genitives can appear anywhere in the string of adjectives. With genitives, any attributes of the genitive noun has to be in the genitive as well, and are more tightly coupled, syntactically to their noun:

gara migitite wicxitite lank[...]

red old-GEN.DEF house-GEN.DEF door[...CASE]
the/a red door of the old house

Proper nouns differ in that adjectives seldom are used with them unless the adjective is part of a proper noun phrase, i.e.

salcan Murustu
great tusk-NOM.DEF (the name of a town)

nerel salcuta Murstuta varsan
leeward great-GEN.DEF tusk-GEN.DEF harbour
salcuta Murstuta nerel varsan
great-GEN.DEF tusk-GEN.DEF leeward harbour
a/the leeward harbour of the Great Tusk.

However, adjectives can be compounded with proper names, and this is the common way of using adjectives with personal names and only slightly less common with names of places. It is not unusual for such a form to become the usual designation for a person, and official records may even prefer such designations over given names.

Salcaŋire ≃ Salcan Gire, "big Gire"
Misketadu ≃ Greedy Tadu
Farnapalb ≃ Farna Palb, "old Palb"

Compounds differ in intonation from phrases in that the initial stress of the second word is significantly weakened. 

Generally speaking, all attributes are marked as singular and indefinite. All adjectives can basically stand as nouns and vice versa, but statistically an adjective is very likely to stand as an adjective and vice versa, and this essentially helps identify whether a case-marked word is the head of a phrase or not. Intonation also helps out, with noun phrases tending to have a slight pitch raise on the stressed syllable of the head noun.

The order of adjectives in general tends to follow these orders, although the different orders seem to be somewhat independent of each other: personal characteristics > size > age > colour > material on one hand, value > shape > use-related adjectives on the other. A few other orders probably also exist. The order is not as fixed as in English, however. 

Subjects can be separated from their adjectives by the verb, simply putting an arbitrary number of its adjectives before the verb, and the subject directly after it. Likewise, the object can have an adjective shunted to the end of the clause. Such movements, the adjective often has a more central role in the clause - fronted adjectives say something about the state of the subject with regards to the verb phrase, adjectives that have been moved to clause-final position say something about the state of the object with regards to the verb phrase.

Challenge: Onwards with Detail #11

I went and edited a really old post recently, because I realized I had never visualized the idea in it well enough.

I realized while looking at it, that maybe a few quirks could make it even better. Right now it's fairly rigid - two or three words are resolved to their roles, and no way of changing how they are resolved. Every adverbial and other argument basically requires its own VP, so that's a bit unwieldy, but not all that impossible ultimately. The language probably needs a bunch of subordinating conjunctions for that kind of thing, but let's not get our hands in that deep just yet.

Let's consider the illustration of the words' "distributions" along the SOV circle:

life as a graphical artist is not in my future

Now, what operations would give us full control over this? How many possible elements do we have in the first place? An element is an n-tuplet of the form [S, O, V, d, z]. S, O and V ∈ {1, 0}, d ∈ {clockwise, counterclockwise}, z ∈ {s,v,o}.

Interpretation of this tuplet works like this: if S,V or O is 0, it is not close to that point along the circumference, if S,V or O is 1, it is close to the corresponding point along the circumference. d gives the direction along the perimeter as shown, and z (for 'zero') is the starting point, the most preferred element out of the elements.

Thus there are 2⁴*3 possible configurations for the words, a total of 48 possibilities. A three-word clause can be 48³ combinations of configurations. Meanwhile, three words can map onto subject, object and verb in six ways. We have a bit of a gap of orders of magnitude here. 48³ = 110592.

We have more than one hierarchy here: for each word, there's an internal hierarchy. [1, 1, 0, clockwise, s] prefers being Subject, over Verb, over Object. However, when resolving which out of a = [1,1,0,clockwise, s] and b = [1,0,0,clockwise,s] gets to be the subject, we find that b is more likely of the two to be the object, and a ends up our subject. 

Challenge: come up with a small set of markers that operate on this system in a way that does not reduce to directly marking role, but that operate on the tuplet-level of the representation, yet provides us a full way of getting any of the six possible SVO-assignments out of any of the 48³ possible configurations.

Detail #164: A Register in a Tonal Language

In a tonal language, have a specific register with some added complications to the phonology. This register deals with the music theory of the language, and the complications are entirely due to this.

Triads as well as common motifs all are thus given fairly straight. The underlying syllables, however, inform us a bit about the melodic/harmonic structure - so, i.e. "major triad played in first inversion simultaneously" comes out as na.a.a - with the three vowels having the tones of such a chord. An arpeggio is given with an exaggerated pause: naʔ:naʔ:naʔ:. Glissandos are expressed as actual glissandos. Closer details may be given: to specify which degree of the scale it starts and which it goes to, you use the tone's name's syllable and substitute the lexical tone it should have with a pitch (if possible, corresponding to the actual scale tone if a musical context is present), and a glissando upwards.

A lot of the musical terminology is basically more regular lexemes with tonal substitutions that illustrate the musical details. E.g. glissandos in general are the (monosyllabic) words for "jump" or "fall", but with a glissando (rising on jump, falling on fall) instead of the usual tone the words should have.

Chords. motifs, intervals and progressions in general may be given in slightly shortened forms, and with underlying words like "order", "sequence", etc. Such combinations enable theorists to innovate terminology rather efficiently, by reusing the word for "progression" with different tones to obtain different progressions, or the word for chord or motif or melody with added syllables or such to encode different chords, motifs or melodies.

Of course, "sequence" has its own real tone that is used in the rest of the language. These tones are carried over and remain - the "usual" tones of the language are pronounced in a way that is slightly off from the musical intervals, in a sufficiently audible way that a person who has mastered the register can distinguish "sequence" as "sequence" from "sequence" as "I-IV-V progression".

Detail #163: Interrogative Pronouns from Verbs

Imagine verbs with the rather specific meaning of 'to ask about the location of +OBJ', 'to ask about the manner of +OBJ', etc. Now, for whatever reason, these verbs are widely used in certain registers out of some deference-strategy where it's preferable to frame your question using a certain mood if asking your superior. This is then generalized, so that these verbs are widely used.

Now, instead of

where is the parrot(.nom)?

you get

may I [ask about the location of] the parrot(.acc)?

After a while, this turns into

[ask about the location of] the parrot.acc?

in whatever participle or infinitive or even finite form that the language happened to end up on. The interrogative word is reduced significantly, and we end up with a semantically bleached interrogative, which we'll know translate as 'where':

where (is) parrot.acc?

Suddenly, we've produced a split where intransitives where one side is an interrogative have accusative ~subjects. Now, in the transitive case we can envision different things having happened: the same strategy, and having this strategy somewhat ignore the roles of previous nouns, or we could have something like this:

may I [ask about the location of] his seeing the parrot.acc?

Possibly leading to an ergative pattern whenever interrogatives are present? However, we could also have the pattern differ between transitive and intransitive verbs, so that the transitivity of the verb forces the usual case marking onto the constituents, whereas intransitive verbs just get a tad odd.