Detail #60: A lexical derivation detail

In some language lacking grammatical gender, form adjectives/nouns for members of ethnicities or tribes by

• female members designated as [tribe name][causative][agent]
• male members designated as [tribe name][past participle, or passive causative or likewise]

Onwards with Detail #59

So, what cool things could we do with detail #59?

An obvious origin for it could be retention of dual first persons for just a few verbs. Another option could be somewhat more tense-aspect-like: we did is more likely to be exclusive than we will. How would that be extended into all tenses and aspects? Possibly by generally weakening the ~transitivity~ of inclusive verbs.

The logic behind this might not be all that obvious, so I'll walk it through a bit. [...]

Another obvious thing to do could be to have separate lexical entries for exclusive and inclusive. Here, the kind of meanings expressed by the morphemes I'd expect to show up for this kind of thing are here showcased with fake English exsamples:

withtravel - travel (including you);
travel - travel (without you);
co-oppose - oppose (each other, you being one of the opponents)
oppose - oppose in general, but not used if opposition between 1st and 2nd person is present.
meet - meet each other, 2nd person inclusion assumed
foremeet - meet someone not included in the present company

The inclusive version could have an extra fake-dual use: singular person inclusive includes the 2nd person (so 1st person singular: you and I, 3rd person singular: you two (of whom one person is not present)).

A limited set of reciprocally marked verbs easily could acquire such notions as well? meet-rcp-2pl 3rd-person.obj = we.incl meet him, meet-2pl 3rd-person.obj = we.excl meet him.

Most other sources I can imagine for clusivity seem to - at least to my mind at least - tend to lend themselves rather badly to a limited kind of clusivity, so I will not go into the general sources of it.

Detail #59: Limited clusivity

Imagine a language where first-person plurals can be inclusive/exclusive, but only in certain specific situations. The most obvious thing would be to only distinguish inclusive/exclusive in certain cases - say the nominative and the accusative, while merging it in other cases. Another option would be to have it linked to certain verbs. These specific verbs would then have separate markers for inclusive and exclusive first person (probably a separate affix from the first person plural marker). The verbs that have this would be verbs where such a distinction is culturally significant. 

Some verbs could likewise have this in the passive (but not in the active), if it's culturally important in those. 

It would generally not be used productively, though.

Detail #58: Kinship terms and morphology

A thing that I hadn't noticed earlier but suddenly dawned on me is that in English, several of the closest kinds of kinships have nouns that end in the same sequence of sounds as agent nouns deriving from verbs, -er.

While I do believe this is a coincidence, (compare how Swedish has broder, syster, fader, moder, but -are as the agent derivation morpheme. (All but syster somewhat restricted to higher stylistic registers or archaic use, having slightly reduced forms in colloquial use - bror, far, mor, with brorsa, syrra, farsa/pappa and morsa/mamma being quite low register).

Now, what if a language has voice- or transitivity-marking agentive (or patientive) affixes, a bit like -ee vs. -er, but including things like reciprocals, and kinship terms were treated as though they were derived from verbs (although they are not). Maybe there could be interesting uses of morphology there, such as -

brother.reciprocal agent.plur = a set of persons who are each other's brothers

my brother.intransitive = my brother (uttered by a woman)

my brother.reciprocal = my brother (uttered by a man)

my fathers.intransitive.vocative =  every man that has offspring among my guests!

my fathers.transitive.vocative =  my ancestors!

my father.intransitive = my older friend

my father.transitive = my father

Further vague things that might turn into ideas:

• something transitivity-like for nouns, that isn't just possession-related or related to the noun being an agentive form of a verb
• more asymmetric kinship terms (e.g. older brother, younger brother)
• reciprocal passives enabling chains - e.g. fathers.reciprocal.passive = a chain of ancestors (not really reciprocal, but each member of the set but one is the father of a father), parents.reciprocal.passive = one line of ancestors, parents.transitive.passive = all ancestors, ... who knows, there can be any amount of weird semantic things going on here.

Musing: Congruence blocking blocking, feasible?

Some introspection on me speaking Finnish recently got me thinking about things blocking congruence blocks. First, a description of the situation in Finnish:

Finnish negation works slightly like English negation - you have a negative auxiliary (ei, c.f. don't) which has congruence for person (en, et, ei, emme, ette, eivät, c.f. don't, doesn't, isn't, ain't, aren't, ... ). However, unlike in English, it does not take the infinitive, but a special form (the conegative form, which in the present tense indicative mood, for all persons is identical to the third person singular imperative), and unlike in English, tense, aspect and mood does not go on the negative auxiliary. Instead, the form the main verb takes indicates all this information. In the imperative, there's a special auxiliary (älä, älkää, älköön, älkäämme, älkööt), which in somewhat archaic language actually distinguishes a sub-mood by a special form (ällös).

Now, the thing that got me thinking is that as a semi-native speaker of Finnish, I have internalized these rules very well, but only so much that I sometimes get the feeling that deviating from them would feel more natural. Especially when the verb is emphasized, it feels like the usual verb form would attract more attention to it and the regular negation structure feels too mundane?

On the other hand, since the content verb has a very weakened congruence in the negative (in the past tense and in the imperatives, number is distinguished), one could basically argue that the negation serves as a congruence block. Is it reasonable to assume languages can have a block operating on a block this way?

I find the Finnish negative a fun thing in how non-natives sometimes deal with it: a fair number of Swedish-speakers maintain congruence and can even use the wrong verb form, so 'I didn't watch it' comes out as *en katsoin sitä (instead of en katsonut sitä)- where katsoin is the regular past tense indicative, and 'I don't watch it' comes out as *en katson sitä, instead of en katso s:itä. Estonian has a similar negative verb as Finnish has, but it lacks person congruence on it, and some Estonian speakers of Finnish carry that over too. During my stint at a place with lots of Estonian workers, I recall some of them sometimes going all pro-drop on negative sentences, thus obtaining wonderfully unclear statements like 'ei tiedä'. So, two relatively large groups of non-native Finnish speakers (I surmise there's more Russians than Estonians in that category, though) have quite the opposite mistake in their formation of the negative - one keeping too much information, the other omitting too much.

Somehow, I find the Estonian approach more likely to cause a congruence block block to appear, though.

Challenge #5: Verbal numbers

What possible things other than

• existential statements of amounts ("there are N so-and-so" → so-and-so N.verb)
• N repetitions of an action
• increasing something by a factor

could verbs derived from numbers signify? 

Modern forum culture is kind of introduce the idea of 'stating agreement, where each person stating such says which number in the line he has' (seconded, thirded, but I have not seen any higher numbers.)

My mind does go in a few directions with regards to this:

• time-span related things, "I seven work on that now" → I will work for seven days on that
• rank-related things, maybe intransitive (he tens → he is the boss of ten people), maybe transitive (he tens technicians → he is the boss of ten technicians) 
• performing a specific number of culturally significant obligations? Verbed ordinals could signify specific obligations.
• Worship of some kind?

Other ideas would be interesting as well.

Detail #57: Congruence blocking, again

A language where specifically night-time actions take no verb congruence.