Detail #212: Things with Participles

Make case inflection of participles affect the marker that forms the participle so much that in certain cases, different types of participles are conflated. E.g. "the robbing man" and "the robbed man" are distinct when these men also are the subjects or objects of some other verb, but when they're a comitative, the grammar doesn't give a shit whether they're robbed or robbing. This would be interesting with a slightly greater number of pariticple forms than English has, so something like recipient-participles and the product sets of tenses and voices, and not just a weird conflated thing like what English has (conflating present with active and passive with past).

Diminutives in Sargaĺk

Sargaĺk, much like its southern neighbours, has diminutives. It forms them in its own ways, however. Three common ways, of varying productiveness, are these:

Initial clipping: for many bisyllabic or longer nouns, the first syllable can be dropped or replaced by the vowel in it:

barxas : xas, axas sheep, lamb
setirmun : tirmun coat, vest
resvat: svat rope, short piece of rope

Derivational suffixes:

-pe- (m), -gi- (f), -sni- (m), -sa- (f), -se- (m), -si- (f)

Stress movement: for many words, stress movement to the last syllable can be an indicator of diminutiveness.

kádil, kadíl : tree, little tree
vípek, vipék : sharp edge, sharp point

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Animacy and Case in Sargaĺk

The Sargaĺk gender system has a further subdivision – there is an animate vs. inanimate distinction as well. This does not appear very clearly in the case morphology, but in some constructions they are treated in different manners. This distinction cuts through both of the genders, in effect giving us a 2*2 gender system. A relatively small number of nouns are inanimate feminines, the majority of inanimates being masculine.

1. Causatives

An animate causer argument of a causative is in the pegative or nominative case (depending on how transitive the resulting verb phrase is). However, inanimate causers take a postposition - ips - which requires the accusative case.

(A further detail: there can at most be one constituent in the pegative case in a VP, so a structure like "A made B give C D" comes out with A in the pegative, B in the nominative, C in the nominative and D in the accusative. However, if A is inanimate, B is pegative.)

Coordination between subjects requires both to be marked the same way. Usually, an animate subject can "promote" an inanimate subject to take the same case marking, but some speakers seem to favour the other approach.

2. Demoted Subjects of Passives

The agent of a passive verb can be represented using a comitative-instrumental for animates, but takes acc + ips for inanimates.

3.Subjectless Verbs

There is a set of verbs that do not, normally, take (syntactical) subjects at all. These include nagan, slumber, imbur, be temporarily settled somewhere, urdrys, to grow, izgər, to breathe, uvis, to whistle (or 'there's noise from the wind'), mondyr, to listen to, anmir, (of ice on the sea), to melt. For all of these, an inanimate subject is acc + ips, an animate subject is comitative.

A New Approach to Copulas?

Some languages have an explicit copula. Some have some extent of zero-copulas. Some languages permit putting TAM-markers and person congruence on the complement, i.e.

car new-3sg.neuter → (the) car is new

man town-loc-3sg.pres → the man is in town

However, an approach I've not seen much of - except maybe borderlinely so in English - is marking the subject for TAM and person, and have the complement unmarked for such things.

If this is attested (beyond clearly reduced copulas as in English), I'd be interested in knowing of it.

Reduplication in Sargaĺk

Sargaĺk has a few types of reduplication.

• Non-morphological Reduplication
  

  These are words that are made to reappear with the same marking in a sentence, with the same referent (if they're nouns), or the same verb (possibly with slightly different markings). With verbs, it restricts the meaning to very literal. In the present tense, it also implies habitual, whereas in the past tense it is very much perfect and intense.
  
  For nouns, it marks the importance of the noun (or adjective or adverb) with regards to the discourse.

• Full reduplication in situ
  

  Intensifies verbs, With nouns it can be restrictive: only x, the only x. For some indefinite pronouns, this changes the meaning (any → some, (roughly speaking); one → each, what → is there even such a thing )

• Single-syllable triplication
  

  This has a rather specific use: to imply that someone is going on about something too much. Any verb, noun or adjective can be used this way. The syllable before the stressed syllable is tripled.
  

  Inik mramramrasuta
  stop(imperative) (your) whine-acc.
  
  Esarsarsartenzvi!
  (you) with your cousins!

  savt kaveveveĺtva nisissu
  she speak-ak-ak-3sg.fem dog-loc
  she is speaking of dogs all the time

  
  

Detail #211: Numbers with Rhythm and Metre

It seems to me to be pretty likely that some languages might have a very strong idea of numbers forming a very rhythmic and potentially rhyming structure. (Note: rhyme need not be the main repeating thing - it might be alliteration or any kind of phonological similarity combined with some type of rhythmic structure, really). Basically, you'd expect this to happen in some culture where counting is almost always done out loud, and where numbers seldom are used in any more abstract sense.

However, sound changes wear down the rhythmic structure, and undo the rhymes – however, due to the sprachbund having that thing for such structures, the number systems tend to be reshaped so as to replace the old, lost structure with a new structure. This means numbers change faster than other lexemes, as they are reshaped to create some kind of regular, appealing rhythmic flow and rhyme where it has been lost - and not necessarily with the same flow and rhyme as previously; new rhymes, new rhythmic patterns keep emerging.