Detail #229: Grammaticalized "Selectedness"

A thing that could be somewhat similar to definiteness, but also to some other things nouns can distinguish. Let us consider the mental act of selection as the distinctive trait. 

Selection can be performed by the speaker, the listener, or even a third person. However, only persons aware of an object can select it, and the only relevant people for the act of selection are either speaker, listener or a third person relevant to the state of affairs described by the verb phrase.

Selection happens when the object is mentally marked out among others.

house-SEL on the hill: that house on the hill (out of many houses, or out of many potentially relevant objects)
house on the hill: a/the house on the hill

she likes snow (she generally likes snow)
she likes snow-SEL (she likes snow over the other options present)

As the house example shows, selection is not the same as definiteness: a single house on a hill is not necessarily marked as selected despite being the only thing on the hill. (However, maybe on the hill too could be marked for selectedness, thus distinguishing the full phrase house on the hill as selected, as opposed to, say, house by the beach). The snow example also shows that indefinite, mass nouns can be selected.

In imperatives, ommission of selection generally implies free choice, selection is basically the same as a demonstrative - although a fairly vague such, as some other NP involved may affect its meaning, e.g. "sell John's car-SEL" will resolve to whichever car John prefers you to sell.

Reuse of the selection morpheme refers back to the same entity as previously selected. Doubling it means a new selection takes place, after which a simple selection morpheme refers to the new selection.

Dairwueh and Bryatesle Indefinite Pronouns

The Bryatesle indefinite pronouns, according to my old grammar for Bryatesle, followed the pattern given below:

				(7) DN
(1) SK	(2) SU	(3) I/NS	(4) QU	(6) IN         A
			(5) COND	(8) COMP  A
				(9) FC

lermud, lertën, lerbat/lervind, lerden/lertar. White fields where never assigned a pronoun!

I like the ler- series of indefinites, especially as it is closely related to the relative pronouns of Bryatesle but not to the interrogative ones (which creates a nice unusual situation, typologically - although it probably could be explained by recourse to historical developments). Lerden and lertar differ by whether the free choice is 'free choice among some options' or 'free choice with infinite options'. Although I like this series, I am inclined to reject it now in favour of this somewhat simpler and improved series:

				(7) DN
(1) SK	(2) SU ()	(3) I/NS ()	(4) QU	(6) IN
			(5) COND	(8) COMP
				(9) FC

bale, dury, uka

An extra detail is that dury sometimes stretches in to I/NS, sometimes even as far as (2) SU, but I couldn't be arsed to make a gradient in the background of (3). Another extra detail is that mass nouns tend to take the definite secondary case marking when determined by an indefinite pronoun.

In Bryatesle, all of these can be used both independently and as determiners. They seldom take secondary cases, but when they do so they tend not to mark their primary case at all. Their inflectional stems are bal-, dir-, uk-/mys- (mys- appearing for non-nominative cases in a few dialects).

Dairwueh is somewhat similar:

				(7) DN
(1) SK	(2) SU	(3) I/NS	(4) QU	(6) IN
			(5) COND	(8) COMP
				(9) FC

vael-, nur-, mik-

Here, the blue field sometimes spills over into (6) IN, but more often, red spills into (2) SU, and at times it may reach (3) I/NS. Unlike Bryatesle, these cannot be used independently, and need some extra morpheme in order to be able to stand independently. In most dialects, this is the interrogative pronoun del, which is prefixed to the pronoun: delvael, delnur, delmik.

Detail #228: Conegative Verbs with a Lexical Twist

Consider the system present in many Finnic languages, where verbs have forms without (much) congruence whenever the verb is negated, i.e.

minä syön - minä en syö
sinä syöt - sinä et syö
hän syö - hän ei syö
me syömme - me emme syö
. . .

The examples above give I, you, he/she, we (don't) eat. Not all forms conflate the connegative and the third person:

hän tulee -  hän ei tule

Imagine some verbs whose meaning are somehow seen as 'negative' in some sense - lie, be missing, deceive, fail, forget, etc. Now, let's assume these lack the con-positive form entirely. So, in a normal positive utterance, they do not take congruence (or, if the language works differently from Baltic Finnic, take some extra marker or some other congruence or whathaveyou). In Finnish, for forget, you'd thus get this form:

*minä unohda (vs. minä unohdan)
*sinä unohda (vs. sinä unohdat)
*hän unohda (vs. hän unohtaa)
*me unohda (vs. me unohdamme)
. . .

Some amount of redundancy has been lost here, though. In a language that very much enforces some level of redundancy, we could imagine a positive marker becoming mandatory here, thus

*minä kyl unohda
*sinä kyl unohda
*hän kyl unohda
...

Where kyl is colloquial Finnish for kyllä, yes. One could go analogously to the negative auxiliary and do something like

*minä kyn unohda
*sinä kyt unohda
...

Mutatis mutandis for however your conlang deals with negation.

Indefinite Pronouns in Ćwarmin and Sargaĺk

Again I want to turn your attention to ye merrye conlangre's little typological treatise on indefinite pronouns. It is gold.

With Ćwarmin, we have to use several tables, because the different pronouns overlap each other too much otherwise:

bek'-:

				(7) DN
(1) SK	(2) SU	(3) I/NS	(4) QU	(6) IN
			(5) COND	(8) COMP
				(9) FC

bek' is barely ever used productively in the zone marked with gray. However, a number of fossilized expressions have bek' in that position.

vak'e-:

				(7) DN
(1) SK	(2) SU	(3) I/NS	(4) QU	(6) IN
			(5) COND	(8) COMP
				(9) FC

suv-:, ink'-

				(7) DN
(1) SK	(2) SU	(3) I/NS	(4) QU	(6) IN
			(5) COND	(8) COMP
				(9) FC

Sargaĺk has a slightly simpler system:

				(7) DN
(1) SK	(2) SU	(3) I/NS	(4) QU	(6) IN
			(5) COND	(8) COMP
				(9) FC

mar-, vur-, jok-. Vur- sometimes reaches into COMP.

In Ćwarmin, the pronouns can be used both independently and as determiners. Sargaĺk does not permit their independent use, but forms compounds with the adjectives 'good', ete, thus getting forms like marete, vurete, jokete. With human referents, it often uses kime instead, obtaining markime, vurkime, jokime. In certain situations, suma, 'saint' can be used, obtaining marsuma, vursuma, joksuma; this can either be a very profound religious expression or very rude.

I am working out a similar set of graphs for Dairwueh and Bryatesle, with the intention of comparing and contrasting these systems through some example sentences.

Detail #227: A Syllabary with a Quirk

Consider a language where there is a bunch of very uncommon syllables, i.e. these syllables appear in about a handful of words. Now, syllabaries easily get a fair share of symbols, and having symbols for syllables that basically don't form "minimal pairs" ever, due to their being very uncommon in the language might seem like a waste of effort.

So, have a symbol for "other syllable", that appears in a handful of words, but is realized in very different ways in them.

Detail #226: A Twist on Verb Markings

Let us consider a language where verbs usually have a fair share of meaningful morphemes on them whenever they're used in whatever form, i.e. a verb is nearly never used without semantically meaningful affixes. By this rather vague terminology I mean to say none of the morphemes used are exclusively used to mark the verb as belonging to this or that morphosyntactic category - i.e. nothing is exclusively a marker of a verb being an infinitive or participle or third person plural or whatever - generally it also marks some other central thing, such as location, direction, intensity, ...

Now, almost all verb phrases will adhere to the above. However, some verbs permit simpler markings, especially a few imperatives - help (in a situation of dire need), run, and a few others. However, another situation is extreme rudeness. Omitting the markers entirely is nearly always parsed as if the most rude possible affixes were included. Thus hold means wank, run means running away like the coward he is/you are, etc. Not just the meaning of the verb, but the tone in which it is used is turned as negative as possible.

A Noun Formation Pattern common to Ćwarmin and Sargaĺk

Sargaĺk and Ćwarmin share a few patterns in word formation, patterns that have spread from one to the other, and generally also tend to be present in the area at large. These are, however, not present in Dairwueh and Bryatesle, which do not form part of the same convergence zone.

A good example of a very common pattern is the noun pair question - answer. The verb to ask is ŕebat in Sargaĺk, and kinil and kinən in Ćwarmin. The nouns for 'question' are related - ŕeber in Śargalk, kinij in Ćwarmin.

However, answer also derives from the same root, using the suffix -ada in Sargaĺk and -elə/-ola in Ćwarmin, thus ŕebada, kinelə. The suffix goes back to an early ĆŊ participle, the passive causative participle. It has later come to be used on nouns that are results of other nouns, as well as nouns that are results of verbs.

Thus, you also get nouns like Ćwarola, "those caused by the Ćwar people", which essentially means 'the next generation of Ćwar", or Sargada, with a similar meaning with regards to the Sarg people.