Detail #291: Personal Pronouns with Complications

Few conlangs complicate up the third person pronoun a lot. Certainly such conlangs exist, but I still think it's reasonable to make up a short sketch of a language where personal pronouns are significantly more complicated, in order to inspire more such conlanging.

Let's consider a language where grammatical gender does not exist. There's one primary distinction, however – either animate-inanimate or human-nonhuman. I'll go with the latter. So, we now have pronouns for humans (let's use the Finnish pronoun 'hän' as a stand-in for this), and non-humans (let's borrow from Finnish again, 'se'). 

However, the language permits using other pronouns for third persons along a variety of distinctions. There's no necessity for there to be a pair of contrasting pronouns, even. We could imagine a pronoun for 'masculine' existing without a pronoun for 'feminine'; thus 'hän' could refer to either a man or a woman, but 'he' would refer specifically to a male. We could imagine certain age groups having pronouns, people of certain statuses or maybe in certain relative ranks of status, etc. Different pronouns could make different number distinctions as well. 

What could we do to make such words sufficiently unlike nouns to justifiably deem them pronouns? A few strategies exist:

• they can mark different grammatical categories
• more or fewer case distinctions (esp. convincing if nouns almost fully lack them)
• more or less specific number distinctions
• more suppletion
• lack of definiteness marking
• differences in distribution of articles and the like (i.e. they do not take counters or articles at all)
•  syntactical differences
• require antecedent or other referent to bind to
• follow the same binding rules as other pronouns with regards to what nouns they can refer to
• may not permit having adjectives or even attributes at all; may just restrict what kinds of attributes they accept (e.g. no relative clauses)
• may be cliticized as 'almost-congruence' markers on verbs in ways that nouns don't; sometimes, appear doubly due to this.
• tend to keep referring to the same referent after the first use, even if other possible referents surface - other third person pronouns that may fit the bill for the new referent will be used
• form reflexive pronouns
• have class-specific indefinite pronouns for each of the kinds of indefinite pronouns that the language distinguishes for indefinite pronouns in general, whereas nouns behave in a less complicated way with regards to indefiniteness of that type

Ŋʒädär: Explicit Absolutive and Adverb Marking, Zero Absolutive and Adverb Marking

In Ŋʒädär, there is a distinction among adjective-like words - those that are primarily adjectival, and those that are primarily adverbial. There are both morphological and minor syntactical differences between them.

Morphologically, the primary adjectives have zero marking in the absolutive, whereas those primary adverbs that can be turned into adjectives have an absolutive morpheme, -Or. Primary adjectives take -OlA if turned into adverbs.

A few examples of primarily adverbial adjectives are

ŋatu, fast (as in having great speed)
ləsnı, fast (as in occupying a short span of time)
änäc, slowly (either occupying a long span of time or having a slow speed)
ɣöv far away
rıdus, carefully
vada, meticulously (regarding religious observations)
ıgrəı, carelessly
t'oɣŋu, bountifully, plentifully
must'o, in a line, straight, without intermediate pauses, directly
uŋa, alternating, in a waving motion

Thus these have the absolutive form

ŋator, ləsnər, änäcör, ɣövör, rıdusor, vador, ıgrəıər, t'oɣŋor.

Other cases have no special congruence marker, but adhere to the regular congruence markers. The same marker, -Or, can also serve as a nominalizer with verbs. With adpositions, it can create nouns or adjectives - e.g. 'the underside', or 'the lower one'.

Detail #290: Cardinal Directions

Consider cardinal directions in a variety of circumstances. Although four directions at 90° angles does work nicely on a plane or locally on a sphere - or even globally with some distortion - other systems also work on these topologies and even on some others, and some topologies won't play nice with four 90° angles in a plane.

Now the polynesians if I have understood correctly did not rely exceedingly much on stellar navigation. However, a similarly sea-faring people could easily require a set of directions involving height so as to be able to quickly communicate and maintain skills related to stellar navigation.

To make this interesting, let's have 120° degree angles between the basic directions, and the points in the air are at a 60° offset, so combinations of a plane-based direction and a height direction exist in an inclined plane.

Sargaĺk Astronomical Beliefs and Terminology

The Sargaĺk have a few beliefs about the heavens that may seem peculiar to us; in part, these beliefs also have an impact on the vocabulary with which astronomical phenomena are described.

0. The Sky
The sky is a vault, made from the skin of a giant whale. Even though night and day sky are the same sky, they have different nouns:

c'ik'i - day sky, from *c'ı *k'ib, sun fairway
obŋ́k'i - night sky, from *obń, moon and *k'ib, fairway

1. The Sun,
The Sargaĺk believe in a succession of suns - the sun of today, yesterday and tomorrow are not the same suns. Suns are the eggs of a giant sea bird.
Thus, discussing weathers may use indefinite and demonstrative pronouns with regards to the sun of some day.

c'i - (a) sun

2. The Moon, Obń
The moon showcases some continuity in its behaviors - from day to day it waxes and wanes in a clearly predictable fashion, and its surface has several visible features. Therefore, the moon was known to be a single entity with a short cycle. However, it has several designations for its various phases.

Due to the difference in length of this moon's cycles and female menstrual cycles, no association between the moon and women in particular formed. However, it is used for timekeeping.

3. The Lesser Moon, O(b)sni, K'orpe
The second, smaller satellite of the world in which Sargaĺk is spoken also has a name. It is in a 2:1 resonance with the other moon, and its name in languages of the world often have some connection to that: words like 'halfling', 'little brother', 'slow star', 'double month', 'niner' (for the number of cycles wrt light it goes through per year)

Kor'pe is from k'orme (brother) + pe (diminutive)
Obsni is from Obn (moon) + sni (diminutive)

4. Stars, T'onəv
The complicated patterns visible in the stars convinced the Sargaĺk of the stars being the same from one night to the next. The word for a star is t'onəv, which goes back to a root with the same meaning.

5. Comets, Demkan
Peculiarly, the Sargaĺk do ascribe object permanence to comets - they essentially think there is but one of them. It is considered a star, and this is reflected in several of its names - imxas t'onəv - 'the smoky star', 'ot'amat t'onəv', 'wanderer star'. It is associated with duty. In the original pagan religion of the Sargaĺk, it is one of the eyes of the god Mexro, by which he supervises whether people fulfil their duties.

6. The rainbow, Mirmir
The rainbow is a road taken by good spirits and gods between this world and other worlds, and thus its appearance can be a blessing or a curse - a good spirit may be departing, or a good spirit may appear.  The root may be related to colour, mirəv.

7. Thunder, karbo
Thunder is considered an astronomical feature too. The Sargalk tribes consider it the most concrete reminder of the powers of the spirits. Many explanations for it exist - battles, divine blacksmith work, the cracking of failed sun eggs.

8. Auroras, Sanust'a
Auroras are roads taken by evil spirits and gods between this world and other worlds. Unlike the mirmir, however, auroras can be traversed by heroes and gods as well, making their badness less than the goodness of the mirmir.

9. Nebulas

A couple huge nebulas are visible in the sky. These dark spots are known as lokro, c.f lko, dark.

Detail #289: A Grammaticalization Path for Prepositions and Other Stuff

Let us consider a language where nouns are organized along some kind of hierarchical system. This system ultimately is an incomplete inverse system - the hierarchy exists, but no inverse marker serves to enable parsing things the opposite way around. The verb also has very little convergence with the noun classes. However, certain markers do cause measure words to appear. As a solution "Type-casting" a noun from one class to another appears.

Now classifiers become partially detached from their class - in certain contexts, they do appear with their class, but in other contexts, they appear to mark the function of the noun, analogously to the nouns normally of that class. So the more abstract measure words appear for words like 'in the manner of, as, like', the counter for very animate things also becomes a subject marker, the counter for inanimate things becomes an object marker, etc. 

Thus, a system where particles both serve as class markers in certain contexts and function markers in other contexts.

Detail #288: Causatives (and Alignment Stuff)

In a language with a case system, one could imagine a very simple way of forming causatives:

NOUN₁-NOM NOUN₂-NOM (NOUN_3...N-OTHER_CASES) VERB

 NOUN₁ would be the causer, NOUN₂ the causee.

This might seem a bit simplistic, but let's go on to consider similarities between causee and recipient - viz. they are both in the state they are in (modulo mood and aspect and polarity, and the states being either 'being in possession of', or 'doing'), due to the actions of a causee/giver.

person₁ person₂ thing take
= person₁ makes person₂ take thing
≈ person₁ gives person₂ thing

Suddenly, we could have give originate with take, and the indirect object and the subject marked with the same case. A more English-like give, without such odd an etymology, however, doesn't necessarily prevent this: the role distribution around give seems to me to be one that easily could shift. I am not sure 'give' is necessarily a driving force behind syntactical change - I am inclined to believe that 'give' more often has an exceptional pattern for marking the recipient than any other verb, if I were pressed to have an opinion, but also that other verbs are less likely to follow suit and become like give, than they are to force give back into line.

With such a shift, however, we would reach one of the odder alignment types, especially if the nominatives otherwise act similarly - i.e. both are subjects in some way. Maybe plural congruence is always triggered when both a subject and indirect object is present, because clearly there's more than a singular subject.

Maybe congruence is just off in some odd way, or who knows what really.

Ŋʒädär Postpositions

Ŋʒädär has a bunch of postpositions. Phonologically, postpositions attach directly to nouns in some cases, but differ from case suffixes in a few ways:

• They can be coordinated by simply lining them up.
• They can go on axı, 'or(?)'.
• They can form adverbials, and can be turned into verbs as well
• They can be given intensifying morphology
• Negation of a PP works differently from negation of a 'casephrase'.

Postpositions do change to account for vowel harmony, but they tend to have a 'favoured' form that is used when they're isolated from a noun. The vowels of that form are going to be included in this list. This is not an exhaustive list of the postpositions.

-bara - around

bararok - surround
baruk - envelop
baruŋrık - to exude

-ok'an - from, out of

ok'arok - to take something out of something
ok'uk - to originate somewhere
ok'uŋrık - to give forth, to provide, to be the source of a substance
ok'uŋrut'ık - to empty out into, to be the source for some recipient (a body of water, for instance)

-nok'an -  out of

nok'arok - to empty
nok'uk - to leave, to exit

-t'as - under

t'asarok - 'cover'. -aro- is a causative marker.

-nas - below in rank, lower in stature, shorter than

nasarok - demoting someone. It seems to be formed by analogy to t'asarok.

-vige - through
-vime -  across

vime and vige share the verbal and adverbial forms vikik(tr.v), viŋik (intr.v.), vike (adv)The verbs signify 'to pass, to cross', as movement (transitive), or 'to pass, to cross (+obl location)' for something that does not move, but whose location passes or crosses something else.

-p'öt - seated on
-p'öme - riding, mounted on

Two verb forms, p'ödök (dynamic), p'ömös (static), signify getting seated or mounting (dynamic) as well as riding (static).The adverb p'ömer signifies 'by horse'.

-kamo - without

kamo as noun: flaw, fault
kamak verb: to be missing (if missing from somebody, the person lacking the thing is in 
kamər adverb, 'weakly, flawedly, with previously mentioned lack'

-gəvı - in front of, on account of, for, as an emissary of

gəvək - represent
gəvərık - block, prevent, stand in front of
gəvımık - precede
gəvıŋrık - lead