Bryatesle Personal Adverbs

There are a number of adverbs in Bryatesle that historically go back to verb forms. These basically go anywhere in the sentence, and almost all of them only come in one form - the largest chunk are former first person verbs, followed by a chunk of former second person verbs - and mostly singular, although not entirely. The translations attempt to catch the idiomatic senses of the usages-

ktat - I hear(d), "allegedly"
gzunet - I hope, "hopefully"
zd̪edmat - I surmise (telic), "probably"
varbet - I long_for, "may it happen soon"
xulnat - I notice(d) (telic), "apparently"
vixret - I say, "for sure"
tkasrat - I disapprove (telic), "alas, sadly, unfortunately"

A few plural 1st person verbs are these: 

galenim - "we praise", as an adverb often used in sentences with religious statements as an intensifier
kulknim - "we remember", often used in recollections of public events and statements, even if the witness restating it is a singular person. Might be best translated as "as made public".
gilsam - we serve (telic), "as commanded", "as you wanted", "as per instruction"

All of these are used as predicates as well, except varbet, which has been replaced by the verb surbret.

For second person verbs commonly acting as adverbs we have

kter - you hear, "for sure", but can also be part of a command structure, an imperative auxiliary adverb, essentially
stumer - you are tired (atelic), "unfortunately, sadly"
xuster - you reach (atelic), "soon"
vildar - you guard (telic), "already"

Finally, a couple of third person verbs: 

bn̪eder - it has sufficient strength (atelic), "it is possible that" 
krima - it creaked (telic), "suspiciously enough"
rupurez - it smells (atelic), "suspiciously enough"

A great variation of similar usages for any number of verbs appears throughout subsets of the speaker community.

Detail #170: Possessive Comitative Constructions

To me, it is intuitively quite clear that the comitative is a context where a distinction between reflexive possession and other third person possession is somewhat more likely than in other oblique positions. In the spirit of that intuition, let's go for a peculiar construction for reflexive possession!

Let the comitative be marked by an adposition. When there's a reflexive possession going on between the subject and the comitative, i.e.

he₁ went there with his₁ wife

the language marks this by having a passive marker on the comitative adposition, thus

he₁ went there with.PASS wife.

The alternative construction

he went there with his wife

would parse as

he₁ went there with his₂ wife .

A Discovery in Personal Data-Archaeology

I thought it had disappeared entirely, but ... finally I have rediscovered it! About ten years ago, sano made a script and font for Bryatesle.

Now, it just so happens that embedding fonts on blogger is not an entirely reliable technology. Still, I've had it working once (on firefox), and I hope chrome's gotten up to the task as well.

Detail #169: Present Participle Morphology on Nouns

A language with zero copulas could easily take present participle morphology and put it on nouns used as complements whenever they denote a temporary or non-essential quality:

man captain-PCPL = the man is a captain
man cousin me.dat = the man is my cousin

The latter is a non-temporary quality: being cousins is mostly a fixed quality. Let's extend this idea a bit further: certain nouns that are rather unchangeable can be intensified:

she mother = she is a mother

she mothering = she has recently become a mother, and thus has more mothery obligations than usual

We further extend this so such nouns turn into regular nouns.

Detail #168: Split Quirky Case / Split Differential Object Marking

Quirky case and differential object marking can of course be "split" in the sense that split ergativity or some other similar system can be split.

As for split DOM, Baltic Finnic sort of has that already: only non-negative verbs distinguish telic from atelic objects. However, seeing the negative verb as the 'typical', non-split context seems weird, and this might be why it's not reported as a split DOM all that much. 

As for split quirky case, that would be all that more interesting really - some verb that can take quirky case subjects/object only does so under certain circumstances - and picking the non-quirky subject/object indicates something as well in that circumstance. This makes it slightly more lexically restricted - given that quirky case generally signifies a lexically restricted set of (usually) verbs that require an odd case for their subjects or objects.

This can of course also go on for participles and the like. As an example I'll use a 'fake' Finnish where 'to have to', viz. 'täytyy' has Split Quirky Subjects (in real Finnish, the subject is invariably in the genitive). Let's also imagine that this split only happens in the transitive:

minu	-n		täytyy		syödä
1sg	-gen		must	(-3sg)	eat
I			must		eat

Note that the "3sg" is a sort of 'placeholder' - impersonal and third person verbs are marked the same in Finnish.

Let us now imagine that in past tense, there's a quirky subject thing going on, where the subject can be nominative as well - and this affects verb morphology too:

minä			täyty-i	-n	syödä		ruoka/ruuan*
I			must-past	(-1sg)	eat(telic)		food
I			had to		finish eating		the food

BEWARE: the above sentence is malformed Finnish; Anyone using google to find attestations of nominative subjects with this construction beware!

minun			täyty-i		syödä		ruoka
1sg gen			must-past	(-3sg)	eat(telic)		food
I			had to		finish eating		the food

What kind of a distinction could we have by this very restricted quirky subject split? Maybe something about how the obligation came about - or perhaps even more interesting, "minun täytyi" might imply that this was part of a causal chain with relevance in the presence, i.e. "I had to finish eating the food - and that's why I am late", whereas "minä täytyi" lacks that implication.

* The Finnish object is funny - whenever there's no nominative subject, a singular telic, non-negative object is in the nominative, otherwise in the genitive. (In the plural, it works slightly differently: the nominative and the accusative are identical, and thus "ruoat"/"ruuat" would cover both options.)

Detail #167: A musing on noun morphology

Sometimes, languages have different combinations of things in different parts of the verbal paradigm. For instance, the Russian past tense verb has congruence for gender, but does not mark person in any way. Meanwhile, the Russian present tense verb marks person - but does not mark gender in any way.

Is there perchance some way of conflating marking in some clever way in the nominal morphology? Obviously we could go for a very simple solution - have core cases distinguish gender in their morphology while non-core cases don't. However, this is only maybe the most obvious such conflation.

Let's go a bit further afield and try to come up with something a bit weirder. How about ... case, definiteness and number marking gets lost on nouns whenever they are possessed and whenever they are possessors. (Note: I assume this conlang uses case a bit like German or Ancient Greek, so not too excessively over-reliant on it.) However, when possessed, there's an explicit gender prefix as well as a prefix that codes for whether the possessor is the noun higher or lower in the animacy hierarchy (possession is done by simple apposition, and both orders go). For arguments that are not preceded by a preposition, this also triggers the presence of inverse marking on the verb.

Conclusion to the post: not a very good idea, and not as interesting really as the Russian verbal split. It seems things along the line of the Russian split are easy to come up with for verbs (just replace categories that trigger some agreement or under which some other category is permitted - i.e. have negative verbs not distinguish realis and irrealis, or have the future tense merge some aspects or whatever, etc) than it is for nouns (I've been trying to come up with something more clever for days!)

So this is a bit of a challenge as well – please, come up with something better!

Detail #166: Slightly onwards with #165

Merging persons for some class of person throughout a language may be fairly unlikely to develop in a real language. However, in a language where possessives and subject/object pronouns form entirely different systems, it could be reasonable for such a difference to exist. Such a system would have even more obvious implications regarding social status and such.