Detail #274: Negation and Alignment

Imagine a language with verbs having slots for both subject and object markers, thus:

verb-subj-obj-other.stuff

Oh, this language is ergative, btw, so 

verb-erg-abs-other.stuff

is maybe more accurate.

Let's further imagine that certain other things go on the verb, e.g. negation. Let's further imagine that negation (and maybe something else) occupies the object slot, and intransitive congruence moves to the ergative slot, whereas objects of transitive verbs just don't get congruence at all. (Consider how, for instance, subjects don't get congruence on the main verb at all in negative clauses in certain Finnic languages – having this for objects seems even less weird, really.) 

Now we've created a situation where the ergative is the nominative in negative clauses, which iirc is typologically uncommon. In fact, the ergative serving a nominative role in splits is generally speaking uncommon.

Other things than the negative might occupy the same slot.

Detail #273: Passives and Semantic Roles

One thing that could be interesting is to have the passive more sensitive to the semantic role of the object of the verb; thus, objects that are stimuli acquire different passive markers than objects that are patients, etc.

But what if we want to mark a subject's role with similar precision? Simple, use a voice that turns the subject into an object (and drops the regular object, and makes the verb lack subject), then stack the passive on top of it, giving us the following:

verb_stem-antiactive-passive[semantic role]

Detail #272: A Potentially Weird Grammaticalization Path

Consider comparatives and plurals; we could imagine combining the two to form the meaning of 'even more than previously mentioned'. Thus,

our side had soldier-s, they had soldier-s-er
our side had soldiers, they had more soldiers

This goes on to things like

I had students, and they had student-s-er
I had students, and they in turn had students

Now we're getting to the point where the plural comparative may be losing its comparative sentiment. Originally, it signifies |S₁| < |S₂|, but slowly, the meaning is turning into |S₁| < |S₁ + S₂|, i.e. the comparative's frame of comparison no longer is S₁ but the size of the whole set of things - i.e. we're no longer comparing the number of my students to the number of "my grand-students", we're comparing the number of everyone who can trace their educational lineage to me to the number of my direct students.

As this meaning is slowly entrenched, the comparative form's comparative meaning is lost, and the meaning turns more into 'here, new nouns of a type previously mentioned are introduced', so student-s-er simply means '(more) new (as far as the discourse goes) students'.

At this point, the comparative might turn into a marker that is basically an indefinite article for nouns, maybe restricted to nouns of types already participating in the discourse?

Detail #271: A Really Minor Detail

Consider a morpheme along the lines of English 'too'. This word has multiple meanings:

~even: a baboon, too, was set to appear on stage ~ even a baboon was set to appear on stage

~also: me too!

~exceeding some kind of limit: that is too big

Historically, too is the same as to, but has gone through slightly different sound changes in most dialects due to different prosodical situations obtaining for the different meanings. Now, cognates to to are used for slightly different meanings as well:

en till: one more (as in one to (the ones already counted/included))

to, obviously, also has a locative and dative meaning. To me this suggests a nice little thing for a language with postpositions: conflate the (singular) dative, the nominative plural, and something along the line of -que (morphemes similar to -que exist in Finnish (-kin), and Georgian (-ts), so I am convinced they're not all that unusual elsewhere either). Obviously it's no huge idea or anything, but it's the kind of nice little twist that has an air of realism to it, while also not being quite identical to, say, English conflating plurals, singular genitives and plural genitives.

Detail #270: Experiment with Minimal Words

Let's consider a word whose earlier form has been one along the lines of

ʕə

or

n̩

or something else very very small. Let's also assume it's exceptional in some way - e.g. the only word to begin with ʕ, or the only onsetless syllable with a syllabic nasal or something else along those lines. Now let's imagine sound changes where this leads to this word turning into ∅, except also leaving traces on the previous word's last syllable - maybe some tonal thing, or nasalization or whatever.

Now, this wouldn't be so surprising with a grammatical marker, but let's imagine this word means something like, I dunno, 'man' or 'thing' or 'house' or something. Suddenly, you have a word with no syllables, yet it does have phonological form in some sense.

Could a human keep trace of such a thing, which behaves syntactically like a noun (or maybe a verb), yet does not provide its own syllable?

Historical Linguistics - Some Thoughts

Historical Conlinguistics are hard. I am currently trying to figure out Proto-Ćwarmin-Ŋʒädär(-Dagurib), so that I can get on with developing both (or all three) in greater detail without fearing that I'll break "historical compatibility".

I'm currently trying to come up with some neat ways of connecting these two vowel systems:

Front		Back
Unrounded	Rounded	Unrounded	Rounded
i	ü	<ı> ɯ	u
e	ö	<ə> ɤ	o
	ä		a

Notice the orthographic reform regarding how /ɯ/ and /ɤ/ will be written. This in part to reduce visual conflict with regards to /ɣ/

and

Front & Centre		Back
i		u
e	ə	o
		a

Currently, I'm thinking that Proto-CŊD had a vowel system that is slightly richer than Modern Finnish, but with a very similar vowel harmony:

Front (Neutral)	Front Round	Back Round
i	ü	u
e	ö?	o
ɛ		ɔ
	ä	a

Here, we get a number of mergers; Ŋʒädär pulls /i e/ to /ı ə/ in the presence of /u o ɔ a/ and also in the presence of certain back consonants. I might just let ü and ä cover a greater area of the articulatory space, though, making ö disappear as a phoneme entirely.

However, all this mucking about with historical conlinguistics leads me to thinking about some epistemology of historical linguistics things: I don't want this proto-language to be entirely by fiat, but I want it to be close enough to a realistic reconstruction of two conlangs. See, there are methodological things with regards to historical linguistics that are not all that obvious, and which affect my work on this proto-conlang. I want my reconstruction to suffer from the flaws that real reconstructions must suffer from by the nature of the very methods used.

I recall a while ago a discussion on a facebook conlanging group, where someone - I don't recall who - pointed out, to a  newcomer, that in historical linguistics, the unit we deal with is the phoneme. I was under the same impression for the longest time, but had gotten the opposite stance pointed out to me. At this point I decided it was time to think a bit about what was the more reasonable position.

It turns out that when we look at a language in its modern, living form, we generally have an idea of the phonemes involved - although even there, they may exist unclear spots. (Say /ɨ/ vs /i/ in Russian, or maybe which exact sets of fricatives form phonemes together in Standard Swedish).

It seems, however, that sound changes don't operate on the level of phonemes all that often, but more often hit phones or features. Thus, while undoing the sound changes, we end up with the particular phone or cluster of features that the proto-language had.

Given that lots of vocabulary gets lost between the proto-language and its descendants – for proto-Uralic (including Samoyed), about 200 lexemes can be reconstructed – we don't really end up with a lot of vocabulary to work with.

This is probably only a fraction of the size of the words of the language; potentially, several hundred more of the words of the proto-language may still have extant descendants, but if a word only has cognates in one branch of descendants, we cannot know whether they were part of the proto-language (and even if there's cognates in two branches, we might not recognize them as such, if one or both sets have gone through very crazy reductions or semantic changes or whatever). Sometimes, we may have reason to suspect that some word has been in the proto-language, but also have reasons to suspect that its being present in several branches is due to early loaning between branches - failure to conform to some sound changes may indicate such a thing. If a word just happens not to have been hit by any early sound changes in either of two branches, knowing whether it's got a shared origin, or has been loaned can be difficult as well. Each of these introduce uncertainty.

So, we have few vocabulary items to work with. How is this relevant for phonemes vs. phones? Easy! We test whether two phones belong to the same phoneme by minimal pairs. Once you've shedded 90% of the vocabulary or more, coming up with minimal pairs is not necessarily possible at all – and the opposite, failing to find minimal pairs is clearly way less significant.

We may have words where k and kʰ appear, and they might even appear in words that suggest complementary distribution - but given that k maybe appears in 8% of syllables, and kʰ maybe in 8%, we find that for some string of letters - ....kʰ..., W_onsetkW_coda, – where the onset and coda only are the relevant part of a syllable (but here, onset and coda mean 'goes before' and 'goes after' k/kʰ, not 'onset of syllable' vs. coda of syllable'), we could expect a minimal pair for 0.08² of syllables – 0.64% of syllables will provide evidence for that particular minimal pair. If we've lost 90% (which is a low estimate) of the vocabulary we can probably just cheat a bit and also say we've lost 90% of the syllables. It's quite probable we've also lost all the places where the two formed minimal pairs. However, we cannot decide whether such a thing were lost or not unless we find evidence of such a thing! The probability will vary with the frequencies of the phonemes, obviously.

Obviously, we have a few extra things to note: 

• Since there's lots of phonemes in a language, even if the likelihood of a minimal pair for any specific pair of them might be low, several phoneme pairs may have minimal pairs coming up.
• But since our reconstruction might be flawed – our methodology might make us favour certain other sounds in our reconstructed roots, which might make it likely for us to create a minimal pair that never existed in the first place.
• For reconstructions that are not very deep in time - e.g. Proto-Germanic or Proto-Slavic or the like, we may very well get sufficient vocabulary to be able to come up with sufficient minimal pairs.
• We might be able to somehow use our knowledge of the sound changes from phones to phones and our knowledge of the phoneme systems of the descendants to make well-informed guesses about the phoneme system of the ancestral language; for a family with many branches, we might even be able to reiterate this process, but every step along this line introduces more uncertainty.

So, to get back to conlanging: I want there to be signs of these problems in the reconstructed form, I don't just want there to be a set, certain list of roots and a set of sound changes applied algorithmically that churns out descendant forms. I want there to be space for uncertainty.

Sargaĺk: Basic Directions and Direction-Metaphors

Sargaĺk has several different important directional adverbs, and also a number of related locational adverbs.

A few directional adverbs are mostly used in hunting and fishing:

sak'ĺy - downwind
p'ankŕ - upwind

sak'ĺyas (at a location that is) upwind
p'ankŕas (at a location that is) downwind

However, these also are used metaphorically to mean 'into the house' or 'out of the house', with upwind being outside, and downwind being inside.

kimŕ - out from land
dĺaŕ - in towards land

kimŕas, dĺŕas, analogously signify on land/off land.

Two of the Sargaĺk islands are mountaneous - mainly fairly old, worn mountains. However, among the settlers of these larger islands, some have settled some way inland as well, and brought reindeer herding into those areas since encountering it with the Ćwarmin. A few adverbials of direction are restricted to these two islands, and in different forms on both:

galurne - up the mountains, inland
galuru - up in the mountains, located inland
galusta - down the mountains, to the shore

from galu, hill.

lutne
lurru
lutsa

from ĺte, high. 


Your home island, home village, and home bay are three rather important locations each referred to as kufŋa, with adverbials kufru, kutsa, kuffe.

In addition, any direction can combine with the morphemes teʒ or sox in the daytime, where teʒ signifies "on the sun's side of the direction", and sox signifies the other side. In the nighttime, the meanings of the markers it combines with vary: teʒ signifies the moon if visible, and sox the other side, but if the moon is missing, a polar star-like star takes its place as point of reference.