Some family terms in Ćwarmin

The basic family terms:

julo = son
ot = oldest son
zel = daughter

father =  aru
mother = viri

brother = raŋa
older brother = cawot
sister = zuja

In older Ćwarmin, possessive suffixes existed, but are used in very restricted contexts. However, in some lexemes, they appear as derivative elements of unclear meaning. Thus

-ata | -ete, formerly 1sg possessive

has lead to these terms:

raŋata ('my brother') = uncle
zujata ('my sister') = aunt
aruta ('my father') = grandfather
virite ('my mother') = grandmother

Apparently, parents referring to their siblings and parents has become a way children refer to their uncles, aunts and grandparents, and this was lexicalized. Other synonyms do exist, however. In addition:

aruta and virite are sometimes used as formal address to parents.
julata and zelete are used by some clergymen to refer to congregants.
cawata is used by some clergymen to refer to their senior clergymen.

The plural forms never have the possessive suffixes in use, as the morphological complexities for that has been largely forgotten. 'Otata', 'my oldest son' appears in some testaments and such.

Parents- and siblings-in-law also have forms such as 

raŋaś
zujaś
aruś
viriś

In some regions, second person suffixes (-aba/-ebe) are used instead of these historical third person suffixes. Why second or third person suffixes won out in different regions is unclear.

Detail #433: The Antideponent Verb

Let's for a moment consider the deponent verb. This is a verb which lacks morphologically active forms, despite being active. This might seem a bit weird, but let us have a look at some Swedish deponent verbs.

First, Swedish has a morphological passive, mostly formed by affixing -s to verb forms. (Swedish also has two periphrastic passives, but this is irrelevant for now.)

Here are some verbs which never appear without their -s:
andas (to breathe)
hoppas (to hope)
minnas (to remember)
låtsas (to pretend)
brås (to take after, to be similar to someone - in both cases due to family connections)

Some of these can take objects (granted, a minority). Andas can take the gas which is breathed ('breathe air', or, say, the aliens of Jupiter breathe methane - varelserna från Jupiter andas metan). "Hoppas" can take det ('that, it') as its object, signifying 'I hope so' (but literally 'I hope that'). Minnas can take any person or thing or fact as its object. Låtsas often is an auxiliary with a transitive verb under it.

In Swedish, these lack a past participle - but some do have a gerund (that morphologically looks exactly like a past participle; however, syntactical differences clarify that it indeed only is a gerund). I will warn against looking into lists of Swedish deponents, because some of them do seem to be just passives with slightly odd semantic shifts, or sometimes even just ... passives. The Swedish -s form also imho is not just a passive marker but also happens to be a reciprocal and an aspectual marker.

Other languages with deponents may have other restrictions - maybe all the deponents are intransitive, or maybe a verb is only partially deponent (i.e. deponent in, say, the participles but not in the finite forms).

Let's make up a set of features:

+ active syntactically
+/- transitive
-  active finite forms
- active infinite forms
+ passive finite forms
+ passive infinite forms
- can take agent adverb (e.g. the 'was seen by us' part)

Let's use these features to consider the antideponent.

Verbs such as 'boil' in English seem to permit somewhat similar behaviors, i.e. they can be passive in meaning (or active), thus passive syntactically is partially true. However, English does have active finite and infinite forms for boil, i.e. 'to be boiled' and the participle 'boiled' itself. The active form, 'boiling' interestingly enough does serve to convey the passive meaning of 'being boiled' as well. It cannot, however, take the agent:
the egg is boiling by me is wrong, I'm boiling the egg is acceptable.

Let's inverse the above table fully:

- active syntactically
+/- transitive
+ active finite forms
+ active infinite forms
- passive finite forms
- passive infinite forms
+ can take agent adverb

The interesting bit here is the +/-transitive, and I think that's where we could distinguish this from run off the mill split-ergativity, where some verbs just happen to have an ergative-like behavior. If we restricted this so it only ever happened with intransitives, and the actual subject was demoted to agent adverbial, whereas the subject either is empty or a dummy pronoun, this is getting us into some interesting ground.

Another option is just simply having these as a sort of lexical restriction: these verbs just don't do passive. I think English maybe actually might have some of those even beyond the auxiliaries?

A further option is of course to take something like English 'I broke the window' but only permit these two options:

The window broke.
The window broke by me.
*I broke the window.

Once more voices are involved, some interesting options emerge, such as gaps in the voice paradigm for verbs.

Detail #432: Generalized Wh-movement

Wh-movement tends to come in two forms in conlangs, as far as I can tell: English-like or wh-in situ. Let's consider some other options! This post was inspired by some questions in the conlang mailing list.

1. Wh-at the end

There are, apparently, some reasons to consider this highly unlikely in languages. OTOH, it might not be entirely unattested.

2. Wh-in wackernagel

The Wackernagel position, i.e. the second word in a clause, seems a rather natural option.

3. Wh-next-to-verb

Both the position after and before the verb seem to make sense as possible attractors for the interrogative pronoun.

4. Discontinuous wh

There are further complications we can consider, such as discontinuous-wh. I find this most likely for two types of interrogatives: determiners and adjectival interrogatives ('what type of a', 'yes/no-query determiner', 'which', 'of what qualities', etc).

These actually occur in some Slavic languages with interrogatives like "kakoj" and "kotoryj". 

Anyways, discontinuous-wh can probably be combined with any of the three previous forms, and in different ways - maybe the head noun is moved instead and the wh remains? Maybe vice versa. Different movements for both parts of the interrogative noun phrase seems unlikely, but parts of the noun phrase may well be pulled along with the interrogative particle.

Let's imagine "Q" is an interrogative particle that forms a yes/no-question focused on the noun it belongs to. Congruence makes it clear it pairs with "house" in this imagined language, marked by roman lowercase numerals picked at random. We can now imagine that Q pulls along pertinent 'factors' along with it:

Q.iii red.iii you saw house.iii?
did you see the red house?

Verbal interrogative markers seem somewhat more likely to be discontinuous - just consider the English polar question.

Relative Clauses in Dairwueh

 I have previously given a short introduction to relative clauses in Dairwueh. Let's up the ante a bit.

Resumptive pronouns in relative attributes

Since the relativizing verb does not carry (much) information about the syntactical role that the referent has in the subclause, resumptive pronouns are often used. Some dialects and varieties of Dairwueh have a resumptive pronoun stem ner- (from a historical nez, the fricative popping back in some forms). Most use the neuter pronoun stem, but inflected for gender - the capital literary form specifically uses the t-stem version of the nominative and accusative.

A peculiar thing about the resumptive pronoun is that it can even be used for the subject of a subsequent subclause, as if this were how to form two subclauses in English:

the man who plays the guitar and he sings.

Weird restriction

Consider an utterance like 'don't reject applicants for being too boring'. In English this cannot be rephrased as 'don't reject applicants who are too boring', since this alters the meaning significantly. A strict reading has the rephrasing signify that no one that is too boring must be rejected, whereas the first only means that boringness must not influence the decision.

In Dairwueh, use of the irrealis form of the subordinating verb is used, among other things, for this particular structure.

The irrealis form can also be used to communicate a purely irrealis subclause, e.g. 'those who would do so-and-so'. To enforce the "purely irrealis" reading, a resumptive pronoun is used. To enforce the purely 'for being X' reading,the subordinate verb may be irrealis instead of infinitive - or in some varieties, a demonstrative pronoun is placed before the relative verb.

Finally, the irrealis form of the relative verb can also express an indirect question: I wonder the men who will sing -> I wonder whether the men will sing.

Use of the interrogative pronoun before a relative subclause requires irrealis in some dialects, and requires irrealis for present tense in many dialects.

Adjectives have a similar function as well when using the irrealis participle marker e-...-šis on them.

Things I would like to research or develop

A while ago, in a post I said something like "more research required" regarding a particular feature of Swedish grammar. This made me think of things I'd like to research, but which I probably never will. These would all be at least somewhat original research.

Linguistics

A variety of tiny syntactical and typological questions that have occurred to me over the years:

• Does the Swedish relative pronoun or relativizer "som" permit exceptional coordination over gaps?
• How uniform are the rules for partitive-vs-accusative among speakers of Finnish?
• What case do speakers of Swedish prefer for the complement of a copula in contexts where the subject of the copula is a non-subject syntactically? ("We will let you be you").
• How does congruence and number work in coordinated-over-gaps compounds in Swedish?
• Do speakers of English naturally prefer the accusative for complements of the copula? I am pretty sure that examples like "it is difficult to be me" and a few others showcase that accusative in fact is the natural case that everyone prefers, and that most "it is I"-speakers have a cultivated and artificial case selection that fails whenever a single complication arises. The test could be one of "select the correct case" with sentences with a gap, and measuring response times. Needs to start out with simple clauses and progress into increasingly long ones, with some of them there only to be able to calibrate for expected response time. Comparably complex structures also need to be used.
• Syntactical differences between standard Finland Swedish and middle  Ostrobothnian.
• Figuring out the full set of sound changes of Björkö dialect. (Conlang idea: apply all these sound changes to late proto-norse and create a 'fully björkö' dialect.)
• How common is it for existential statements to have quirks in terms of congruence, case marking, word order, ...)
• To what extent are 'than' and 'as' (and 'än' and 'som' as element of comparison) objectively speaking prepositions in the grammars of speakers of English and Swedish - even among those who claim they exclusively are conjunctions.
  
• To what extent can we find evidence that the rule against definite form after 'denna/detta/dessa' in prescriptivist Swedish is made-up to spite southern and southwestern Swedes?
• Swedish has two patterns for forming "this": "denna" and "den här". (Both are further inflected for gender and number.) 'Den här' is always followed by the definite form of the adjective as well as the definite form of the noun. 'Denna' is - in prescriptive usage - followed by definite adjectives but indefinite nouns.
• In texts predating the middle of the 18th century, you find variation on this: both the definite and indefinite noun are used in the nominative. (Other cases only take the definite.)
• 'Denna' is predominantly used in the south and southwest, 'den här' is predominantly used everywhere else.
• "denna + indef" quickly gains ground in books printed in the "den här"-area towards the end of the 18th century, and basically becomes mandatory in writing in the 19th century, but "denna + def" never goes extinct in the south and southwest.
• There seems to be at least some 18th century correspondences between publishers that hint at this actually being an intentional change to turn southern Swedish "wrong".
  

Theology

• It is my firm belief that even many apparently philosemitic Christian clergymen in their sermons plant the seeds for antisemitism. The research would require the following steps:
  
  Finding a corpus of sermons and sermon-like texts that in one way or another discuss Judaism and the Jews, and their role and their beliefs from a Christian p.o.v. In this corpus, statements that misrepresent Jewish beliefs in ways that may lead to negative perceptions about Judaism, and statements that use Jews as a negative example - when similar negative examples can be found within Christianity itself - have to be found, and the "actual" fact about Judaism needs to be verified. (Examples: does Judaism teach that all who are born non-Jewish will automatically burn in hell? I have heard this claim from Christians. I know it is false. It is often presented in order to prop up certain Christian dogmas and to make Christianity seem the compassionate alternative.)
  
• The way in which such mistaken statements nurture antisemitism needs to be evaluated in some way, and the effect on listeners - both believers and non-believers alike - need to be estimated. 
• Some measure as to how common this is would either reassure me that it's just a few bad apples, or confirm my own experience that it's fairly common.
  
• it would also interest me to research the use of fabricated Jewish traditions to prop up Christian theology. It is not entirely uncommon for Christian preachers to claim that there is an ancient Jewish tradition about so-and-so, and this tradition explains some detail in the NT or even later Christian traditions. Sometimes it might hold up, most of the time it doesn't.
  

• It would greatly interest me to find examples of humour in the Bible, in the Talmud, in the midrashes and targums, in the baraitha literature, and even in more general literature from ancient Mesopotamia - that have failed to be identified as humour. I am convinced that the cultural gulf between modern humans and those of antiquity is so great that we may fail to appreciate just how some of the statements in the literature mentioned above very well may been intended as jokes to convey some point. Many Jewish scholars - and even fairly "average yeshiva-level" students seem to be aware of some of these jokes, but secular scholars often seem to fail to spot such jokes. I am not saying this is a universal problem, but I get the impression that there may be a fair share of humour that no one's identified as such. It is not inconceivable that greek philosophers as well have jokes that have been missed.
  

Music

• Tymoczko has (and possibly other theorists have) identified that modulation and chord progressions are very similar phenomena. He doubts that listeners could manage keeping any kind of track of a third similar level. Using, say, pentatonic scales embedded in diatonic scales embedded in uneven extended meantone chromatic scales could provide a way of creating exactly that structure. Extended meantone chromaticism could also be used for extending the chord_progression-modulation complex to a chord_progression-modulation-metamodulation complex.
• What kind of notion of "keeping track of" do we have in mind?
• To what extent can listeners appreciate functional harmony using isoharmonic triads that are not predominantly 4:5:6 (and its utonal version). Do they need to be rooted at powers of 2? Does 8:11:14 do a better job  than 6:7:8, 7:9:11, 7:10:13 or 9:11:13 because 8:11:14 is rooted at 2³? How important is root motion of 3/2 (i.e. by perfect fifths)? (I believe the tritone substitution G7 → C 🠮 G7 → F# shows that a root motion of a fifth is not necessary.) (Normally, the tritone substitution is given from p.o.v. of the tonic, so G7 → C 🠮 Db7 → C, but sometimes, it's good to think of it in other ways as well.)
• Can asymmetric chords in the wholetone scale help facilitate a functional tonality in it?
• Temperaments such as mavila warp familiar relationships. Can this warping be 'eased in' by modulating into successively more warped regions of a very warped temperament while fully maintaining the relationships - i.e. the relation between root and third still feels as though it passes through the cycle of fifths in the same way?
  
• Figuring out how to use sus4-chords as an extension to normal harmonic praxis? (Notice the - not♯.) Other uses of quartertones as subtle additions to harmonic praxis are also of some interest.
  
• Can we somehow formalize the "similarity" between the use of chords in functional harmony and jins in maqam?
  

 Maths and CS

• How well can games make players get used to weird geometries and topologies?
• Can a player discern things about the geometry of a game from hearing warped intervals in the music that directly correspond to the geometry? 
• Comparing the complexity of a variety of geometrical problems in different types of geometries.
  

Design of things

• A string instrument with plastic frets ('fishing line'). The frets are attached to two beams that are easy to attach to the neck. At least one of the beams needs to be small enough to fit under the strings.
  

Software design:

• Some cursed versions of gomoku.
• Improve my pitch perception practice app
• Some basic topology/geometry toolkit, especially with the intention of visualizing some of the topologies and geometries present in microtonal theory
  
• A set of scripts that utilize some sound change applier and git to make managing multiple a priori conlangs easy. (Separate repos for sound changes, for input vocabulary, and for output. Also, the sound change applier can parse certain extra commands for splitting a language, for borrowing vocab from a different language at some particular step, etc)
  
• An AI for writing microtonal harmony and counterpoint.
• A duolingo-like web engine for conlangers to use.
• Some games that utilize weird topologies and such.
• A game with very forgetful terrain generation
  

A Conreligious Practice: Alphabetic Thread Manipulation

Among some of the more ritualistic Bryatesle-Dairwueh religions, a devotional practice involving strings of wool and the hand has developed.

Strings (regionally, this varies from ribbons of about half an inch width to actual strings) are wrapped around the hand in order to imitate the shapes of letters.

Words are written through repeated application of this. This is done in order to emphasize important words in a prayer or meditation. Very few would write an entire sentence this way, but sometimes, groups collaborate in writing full hymns on their hands.

Varieties

The first  main difference is between ribbon-users and string-users. Naturally, ribbons and strings behave slightly differently, with ribbons not permitting quite as sharp 'turns', thus leading to significant differences in the notional 'fonts' they use.

Not a single tradition tolerates both ribbons and strings; they all are strictly one or the other. All manner of justifications for their favoured type exist. Their opinion of the other group is not violently hostile, but always somewhat negative. However, negative opinions may exist between different groups that share the ribbon (or string), and sometimes over purely technical details: linen vs. wool, blue vs. red, patterned or plain ribbon, woven or crotcheted ribbons, single thread or three threads? All threads of the same colour or different colours?

Ribbon-users tend to have different colours on the two sides, and they may consider which side is visible to be of some importance. Ribbons can also use folds that are difficult to form with strings. Strings can have tighter loops.

Weaving beneath and above fingers, forming angles, using the palm, etc are all parts of this. Both sides of the hand are used in some varieties, whereas in some, only one side is used.

In some traditions, letters are also tied with strings around the hands of the dead, usually one letter on top of the other, so that the outermost letter is the first letter of the word. Which words are used tends to vary strongly.

Really strict beliefs

Although these practices are far from universal, in some areas they are considered important. Special importance is ascribed to the letters tied on the hands of the dead, and they are often considered passwords for the afterlife. (The tradition, however, rather seems to have originated as a way of conveying messages to angels and relatives and God himself, rather than as passwords.)

This of course may cause problems for people who lose a hand or who have lost fingers. Losing a hand in such a way that the hand is physically 'available' often leads to performing this ritual before burying the hand. Some traditions are strict about which hand the letters should be formed on, and so losing 'the other hand' may be less important. In traditions where which particular hand it is doesn't matter so much, it still happens that people bury the first hand with letters in case the other were to be entirely lost in the future.

Loss of fingers may also cause issues, and grafting wooden sticks into the hands of the dead as a solution occurs. Entire wooden hands are sometimes used.

Further developments

Hand-shaped growths on trees sometimes get similar words tied o nthem. These are not of a sign-post nature (signposts are either cut out or chiseled or some other method), but purely ritualistic. Such growths are sometimes also buried as a message to the other side.

Detail #431: A Strategy for making Unreliable Morphology

Consider a system - maybe case, something else - where -n is e.g. a case marker. However, it is also a marker similar to the -n in English a/an.

Thus

I bought an car (an = acc)
a car is parked in my spot

but

I bought an apple
an apple a day keeps the doctor away

So, the only situation in which the case is visibly marked is whenever 'a' stands before a consonant. One could imagine a similar thing for, say, some marking on verbs (maybe plural marking or some tense marking on some verbs).