Detail #278: A System of Noun Affixes

The rich systems of verbal morphology in the world's languages is very impressive - and oftentimes, it seems nouns just cannot compete at all with some of the insanity that goes on with verbs.

Here's a first attempt at even slightly getting there:

• two levels of definiteness (not necessarily morphologically marked!)
• some kind of case-system, probably, but not necessarily
• a set of affixes with the following meanings, some of which are changed by definiteness. These are in complementary distribution:
• topic
• different demonstratives (can also be topic)
• possessum
• 'another' ('the next' in the definite) (can be topic)
• no one ('the wrong one' in the definite)
• old ('the previous one'  in the indefinite)
• big (in the definite, it can also mark the object of comparison, which can also have case?)
• small
• sexual gender for animates
• this noun is only associated with the intended referent in some way (e.g. the noun is a possessor, or relative or 'a thing of this quality' etc)
• a marker that intensifies the adjective that is closest to the noun
• a set of affixes in complementary distribution that express
• number
• mass noun
• collectiveness
• singulativeness
• distributedness
• in combination with "small", this signifies lots of independent, unaffiliated things of the same type; in combination with "big", this signifies lots of things that do act in some form of concord.
•  whether to parse case suffixes as proper case suffixes or as general statements of type of motion without actual reference to the noun. Thus 'man-IMPROPER_CASE-in went' means 'the man went in' - in just has to settle on whatever noun it can if no other noun can carry it.

This is very much half-baked. But the idea of a language with really baroque nouns and rather simple verbs appeal to me.

Detail #277: Probably Blocked by Universals

So, apparently in some historical version of Czech, there was a situation where nouns with suppletive plural stems had the dual paradigm switch between the singular and the plural stem for different cases. This inspires the next post, which I am not sure if it's attested or not. Similar things has happened with umlauts in Germanic languages - even Old English, if I recall correctly - but I am unaware of any wholesale suppletion doing this.

Imagine something slightly weirder though. This table gives the stems for the noun forms, not the suffixes that express the case, in a language that would be slightly weirder:

	sg	pl
case 1	A	B
case 2	A	B
case 3	A	B
. . .	. B .	. A A
case n-1	B	B
case n	B	B

Notice that the numbers assigned to the cases is done so that A/B-cases go first, A/A cases go second, B/A cases go third, B/B cases go last. This is done just to make a reasonable way of speaking about these cases without having to name them or anything.

The morphology does clearly indicate as to whether a form is plural or singular, the stem itself is (mostly) not the only thing to determine that. How would a situation like this come about? (I doubt it would!)

Less weird would be something more regular like this:

	sg	pl
case 1	A	B
case 2	A	B
case 3	A	B
. . .	. . .	. . .
case n-1	A	A
case n	A	A

So, the most prominent cases have a suppletive root in the plural, which is lost in some oblique cases. Does not seem all that unbelievable? How about having the plural stem intrude on the singular instead?

Should these have the same pattern for all suppletive nouns? Should some permit using both in some forms? 

Finally, an option few conlangers seem to go in for is reducing the number distinctions in several cases - Chukchi only distinguishes singular from plural for inanimates in the absolutive, so it's attested in natural languages. One could imagine suppletive forms appearing in some cases and in the single plural form, although how that situation would have come about seems unclear to me.

Verbs for Death in Ćwarmin

Ćwarmin has several verbs related to death – so, in some sense, much like English. Much like in English, there are differences related to register with some of them. There's also a pair that behave syntactically a bit different from other verbs, viz. narmras and mićsis. The subject is a family member or friend (or tribe or village member) of the deceased, and the deceased person appears in the possessed object form. If the subject is a personal pronoun, it appears in the distant genitive form. If the deceased person is a personal pronoun, it'll appear in the accusative. These verbs are defective, lacking all participle forms as well as the regular past - only the recent past exists for them. 

Tosman signifies succumbing to a disease. A variety of not entirely medically sound named afflictions exist. What case such an affliction takes is lexically determined - some are instrumental, some are in some locative case, some in the genitive case, some in the reflexive possessive case. 

Tosmatan signifies succumbing to the damage done by a physical accident or fight, sometimes with the causer of the damage or the event that caused it in the genitive. Matnan signifies dying rather immediately in a battle, fight, or accident.

Paran signifies killing someone accidentally. Guknan signifies manslaughter or murder. Gukvarn signifies carrying out capital punishment on someone. Nisnən signifies killing in a war or raid. 

Nəvrən signifies killing a mammal for food, tunogzan signifies wringing the neck off a bird (for food) (from tunog, neck), makman signifies hitting a fish to a rock.

Some Sargaĺk Vocabulary with Etymologies

I have been thinking a bit about Sargaĺk historical linguistics, and while trying to come up with some kind of sound change history, I've come up with a bunch of historical roots and a bunch of words derived from those, which I hope form a sufficiently interesting system to be able to use for Dairwueh and Bryatesle as well, while being able to maintain the rather considerable divergences between the three languages. This is a very tentative attempt, and thus subject to lots of future changes. I have not even verified that there's a reasonable sound change path from the roots to the Sargaĺk lexemes, but I should get on that soon.

ak'ot fishbone (mass noun), *erk'ot
anməs leaf, blade (of knife) *almats leaf
ar foot, *aḍe foot
banil lid, *barner, lid
bak'am mute, *bak',mute
garəc whale oil, *ngerta slide, slip, glide
gigu lip, from *bwikbi lips
i about, for, by, *iji, say of, speak of, be spoken for by
ili oar, *jilıt stick, beam
ikən seal, *ıjka crawl
iknur seal-skin jacket, *ıjka crawl, *nowr skin
j slight, small, irrelevant, *gı
jajas weight, *ʒiagea to carry something heavy
jajra of unit weight
jactaŋ heavy
jax path, sequence, melody, *jaska walk
joŋa tooth, *ʒoŋər tooth
kolom a largeish fire made in a somewhat constant fireplace, *kolv
k'epar the heart, from *k'aipka, 'thump'
ĺp'a musk ox *lẹp' wool
luŋta crooked, *rungru bend
ĺy tasty, c.f. Bryatesle lim! (mm!), Dairwueh lien!
nuse a small fire, *nuks, a spark
pelyant roll of rope, *pal knot, *lyanta pile, bunch
ŕvosk slut, whore, *rəwatsk
sxome knife *sfaumei steel
toxon a type of mushroom *tasko mushrooms
uvas a member of a whale-hunting team, *ıbaa fetch
uvra a fully manned whale-hunting team
xorga eager, enthusiastic, avid, well-rested *skour?e

Sargaĺk: Polarity, Relevance and Knowledge

Negation and Intense Affirmation

In most Sargaĺk dialects, negation is done by inserting the particle pin or pic before or after the main verb; it can also be sentence-initial in order to emphasize the negation. An intense form, pinta also exists.

Negation and intense affirmation have certain similarities morphosyntactically.

In most dialects, the markers go after or before the main verb, but can be fronted as well in order to really emphasize the marker. In Savk'e and Tńga dialects, the negation and intense affirmation morphemes are part of the verb morphology, and differ significantly from other dialects. Savk'e and Tńga speakers  generally double their negations when speaking to outsiders, using both the regular pin morpheme as well as their usual affix. 

In Savk'e, pin- forms the root for the indefinite negative pronouns, however, and jok- has been restricted a bit in distribution. In Savk'e, the negative pronoun comes in two forms, pin(s)- and pic-, pin(s)- being the animate negative pronoun and pic- the inanimate one.

There is also an intensive affirmative morpheme that has the same syntactical distribution as pin: sad. Sad is a bit like 'verily', 'certainly', 'absolutely'. Sad- also has nominal forms that emphasize a noun phrase, but also can serve as a very emphatic third person pronoun.

Syntactical differences between negated and positive verb phrases exist:

• some specific verbs have different complement case marking
• less person congruence in the negative on certain mood-aspect combinations
• negativity congruence on some adverbials
• negativity congruence on certain infinitives in VPs

The Agnostic and Irrelevant Moods

The two usual polarities in Sargaĺk serve as the morphological and syntactical basis for two grammatical modalities – the agnostic mode and the irrelevant mode. These modes actually lack polarity of their own altogether. The markers go where the negative marker pin or the intensive affirmative marker sad would go. For the agnostic mode, ḿt'et'e, əmt'et or even ḿt'e marks that the speaker is not aware of the truth-value of his statement. With a rising intonation, this is one way of forming yes-no questions, although not a very common way.

The irrelevant mode uses the marker gos. It signifies that whether the statement is true or not is not interestinging at all. It uses the same syntactical features as the negated verb, however.

As a reminder to myself, I'll note down here that the Tńga and the Savk'e dialects will deal slightly differently with the agnostic and the irrelevant moods as well.

Detail #276: A Quirk for Comparatives and Superlatives

Imagine that certain nouns require comparative congruence. I.e. for these nouns, the comparative is the regular form, and the superlative is used instead for comparative purposes. A double superlative might exist, but it might be more interesting not having that but leaving that to context.

Detail #275: Counterfactuals, Tense and Other Stuff

This post in part is a contribution! Thanks!

In many European languages, counterfactuals are somehow 'contaminated'* with the past tense. What else could we have them contaminated with?

"If I were in Albania, ..."

The contributor suggests polarity - negate the counterfactual in some way.

Albania-LOC not be-COND-1s
"If I were in Albania (which I am not) ..."

Now, the next idea was that negated counterfactuals would drop the negation:

 Albania-LOC be-COND-1s
"If I were not in Albania (which I, however, am) ..."

Not sure I buy that idea in particular, although I could imagine some marking that is derived from the negative participating in the formation of counterfactuals.

Aspect seems somewhat plausible as well - maybe contaminate counterfactuals with atelic aspect or something. However, let's go a bit further afield? How about contaminating it with some form of evidentiality - say, counterfactuals are always hearsay? Or maybe, just maybe, counterfactuals are always things of one's own observation (since one's observed them with one's mind's eye). 

Another idea that feels partially clever is for a language with a non-future vs. future tense system to have counterfactuals that are marked with future tense.

Going further off into contamination, how about person? All counterfactuals inflect for third person plural? Not maybe all that odd, Estonian apparently partially inflects evidentiality by the same morpheme as plural third person (well, historically both come from the active participle, so there's that bit), so why not do counterfactuals in that way?

Conflating counterfactuality with anything really could be interesting - but so would conflating any kind of modal marking with any other kind of marking, to some extent.

Funnily enough, I think I've been raving about this kind of thing in nouns for years, but never really gotten around to raving about it in verbs. A brave new world opens!

* This is the word the contributor chose to use, and I am inclined to sort of agree.