Conlang Random Thread

[malloc]

The pronominal agreement system in my polysynthetic conlang relies heavily on the animacy distinction. The problem is that the whole system assumes that inanimate nouns normally serve patient roles and lacks an elegant way of handling inanimate agents. This makes it difficult to translate scientific writing about subatomic particles and so forth without constantly resorting to workarounds. All of which makes me wonder if the emphasis on animacy has inadvertently rendered the language ill-suited for technical subjects.

[bbbosborne]

The pronominal agreement system in my polysynthetic conlang relies heavily on the animacy distinction. The problem is that the whole system assumes that inanimate nouns normally serve patient roles and lacks an elegant way of handling inanimate agents.

can you elaborate more on your system? why not add the "elegant way of handling inanimate agents?"

[Nortaneous]

gvue du xqa kuordhiar pon huo xefti ohcee nyiwi terkvaer

[dhok]

A common method of working with inanimate agents is to require sentences that involve them to be passivized. There is a good deal of evidence that this was true in PIE, and it is semi-true in Algonquian--the Algonquian inverse isn't exactly a passive, but it's similar, and the inanimate-agent verb forms of Algonquian languages are all built on the inverse. (There are surely other examples of this.)

[Nortaneous]

Japhug requires the inverse for verbs with a nonhuman agent and a human object.

[Pabappa]

I do something similar in my conlangs (all of them so far). But it may not solve the problem of transitive verbs where both arguments are inanimate. How would languages of this type express a sentence like "the electron absorbed the photon"? Since I like free word order, I had to use animacy promotion here, making the animacy distinction irrelevant to verbs, since anything can behave as animate .... it's just that inanimate objects take markers on the noun whenever they are the agent of a transitive verb , and animates don't.

Edit: there was a typo

[Nortaneous]

Inverse marking doesn't affect verb valency, at least not in Japhug.

[mae]

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[malloc]

I do something similar in my conlangs (all of them so far). But it may not solve the problem of transitive verbs where both arguments are inanimate. How would languages of this type express a sentence like "the electron absorbed the photon"?

Yes, that is precisely the problem I am facing with my own project.

[Zaarin]

Want to make the correspondences for Sarmač (working name for the para-Slavic + Iranian substrate thing) kind of interesting and thinking about doing Tw > Kw (alveolars followed by *w become labialized velars). So cognate to Proto-Slavic *tvarь and *dvьrь we have /kʷar/ 'thing' ; /gʷɨrɨ/ 'door'.

I did this in an Indo-European language (a sort of cousin to Italo-Celtic, whether you consider that a sprachbund or genetic relationship) called Ultevian that I'm working on. I had originally gotten rid of /gʷ/ by merging it conditionally with /w b/ (IIRC--I've been working on its two daughters most recently) but found I wanted it back, so I had Tw > Kʷ.

[akam chinjir]

I do something similar in my conlangs (all of them so far). But it may not solve the problem of transitive verbs where both arguments are inanimate. How would languages of this type express a sentence like "the electron absorbed the photon"?

Yes, that is precisely the problem I am facing with my own project.

Maybe a middle? "The photon absorbed at the electron"---or something like that.

[mèþru]

@mae
That's what happened to most borrowings with <tv> and <dv> in German. Think quark (the cheese)

[Salmoneus]

I do something similar in my conlangs (all of them so far). But it may not solve the problem of transitive verbs where both arguments are inanimate. How would languages of this type express a sentence like "the electron absorbed the photon"?

Yes, that is precisely the problem I am facing with my own project.

But where is the problem here? Just don't allow sentences like that - your conlang doesn't have to perfectly calque English. The same meaning can be perfectly well expressed with a univalent verb and an oblique. Or by a bivalent intransitive. Or, indeed, without any verb at all. There's no reason you can't just say "photon into electron like ink" or "photon now under electron's stomach".

The fact that English forces this event into the framework of an agent (that isn't an agent) performing a transitive action (that isn't even an action, let alone a transitive one) is just a fact about English and its syntactic obsessions. It's useful to take a step back and think about the situations you're describing, and how another language might describe them, rather than trying to translate English sentences literally.

[missals]

So I'm thinking of a split-S conlang where:

- Inanimates can never be the syntactic subject of a transitive verb (a real thing)
- Non-specific inanimates can't be (syntactic) objects of a verb at all (a real thing)

And I'm thinking there's going to be a form that removes the object from transitives (i.e. an antipassive) (so non-specific animates can be an adjunct - "He threw-ANTIPASS of a rock" vs. "He threw the rock") and a form that removes the subject from transitives (a detransitive? or middle?) (which could be used like a middle/reflexive "She bathed-MID" vs. "She bathed her child", or to accommodate phenomena that would call for an inanimate subject - "I broke the window" vs. "A rock flew at the window and it broke-MED")

But I don't want to have a passive at all, partially since that's more interesting, and partially since something like "The window was broken by a rock" or "The window broke-PASS by a rock" kind of implies that the sentence "A rock broke the window" exists at some underlying level, which I don't want. But I don't know if it's very realistic to have both an antipassive and a middle voice type thing without also having a passive. I guess it doesn't matter since I'm going to try it anyways, but I was wondering if anyone knew any examples of languages that don't have a passive but do have other valency-transforming operations for verbs.

EDIT:

How would languages of this type express a sentence like "the electron absorbed the photon"?

Trying this with my idea...I think I'd take a verb meaning "absorb", and instead of doing the ungrammatical "The electron absorbs the photon", I'd use the detransitive/middle verb form, akin to the (colloquial?) English "The water absorbs into the sponge" or "Is the water done absorbing?" and then add the electron as an oblique argument - "The photon absorbed-MID into the electron." And I'm thinking of free word order so it could be "Into the electron the photon absorbed-MID." Not too inelegant.

Actually, since inanimates can't be subjects of transitives, and "absorb" as a transitive verb is very likely to have an inanimate subject, I might just have the equivalent of "absorb" be intransitive - maybe like "seep" or "leach" ("The water seeps into the rock") with an oblique argument - "The photon seeps/soaks/absorbs into the electron" or "Into the electron the photon seeps/soaks/absorbs"

[Nortaneous]

@mae
That's what happened to most borrowings with <tv> and <dv> in German. Think quark (the cheese)

dang I was pretty sure I'd posted about this somewhere before but I guess not. German has both /kv/ and /tsv/ as possible outcomes for /tv dv/:

Zwang ~ Dutch dwang
Zwerg ~ dwarf
zwingen ~ Dutch dwingen
Zwetschge < VLat *davascena < Lat. damascēna
Quetsche < VLat *davascena < Lat. damascēna
quengeln < zwängen + -l
quer < PGmc. *þwerhaz
Quark < *tvorog`

[malloc]

But where is the problem here? Just don't allow sentences like that - your conlang doesn't have to perfectly calque English. The same meaning can be perfectly well expressed with a univalent verb and an oblique. Or by a bivalent intransitive. Or, indeed, without any verb at all. There's no reason you can't just say "photon into electron like ink" or "photon now under electron's stomach".

The fact that English forces this event into the framework of an agent (that isn't an agent) performing a transitive action (that isn't even an action, let alone a transitive one) is just a fact about English and its syntactic obsessions. It's useful to take a step back and think about the situations you're describing, and how another language might describe them, rather than trying to translate English sentences literally.

Perhaps, but it feels intuitively weird to treat "the man pushes the broom" and the "water erodes the riverbed" as fundamentally different constructions. They are both actions in which one entity acts on another and changes or moves it somehow. The ease with which English expresses notions like "the electron absorbed the photon" makes it well-suited to scientific writing. Without that ease of use, I feel like writing about physics or any field where inanimate objects regularly interact would become rather onerous.

[Kuchigakatai]

But where is the problem here? Just don't allow sentences like that - your conlang doesn't have to perfectly calque English. The same meaning can be perfectly well expressed with a univalent verb and an oblique. Or by a bivalent intransitive. Or, indeed, without any verb at all. There's no reason you can't just say "photon into electron like ink" or "photon now under electron's stomach".

The fact that English forces this event into the framework of an agent (that isn't an agent) performing a transitive action (that isn't even an action, let alone a transitive one) is just a fact about English and its syntactic obsessions. It's useful to take a step back and think about the situations you're describing, and how another language might describe them, rather than trying to translate English sentences literally.

Perhaps, but it feels intuitively weird to treat "the man pushes the broom" and the "water erodes the riverbed" as fundamentally different constructions. They are both actions in which one entity acts on another and changes or moves it somehow. The ease with which English expresses notions like "the electron absorbed the photon" makes it well-suited to scientific writing. Without that ease of use, I feel like writing about physics or any field where inanimate objects regularly interact would become rather onerous.

You're taking the metaphors of English far too seriously, they're just metaphors. Again, Japhug marks constructions like "water erodes the riverbed" differently, and the marking doesn't have to be intrusive at all, you could just use a change in tone for example.

[akam chinjir]

Perhaps, but it feels intuitively weird to treat "the man pushes the broom" and the "water erodes the riverbed" as fundamentally different constructions. They are both actions in which one entity acts on another and changes or moves it somehow. The ease with which English expresses notions like "the electron absorbed the photon" makes it well-suited to scientific writing. Without that ease of use, I feel like writing about physics or any field where inanimate objects regularly interact would become rather onerous.

Actually you could argue the opposite (in fact I'm sure it's been argued): that using the same construction both when you are and when you are not attributing agency to the subjects of your verbs isn't suited for clear scientific writing. Figuring out that certain phenomena occur without agency, without even goals, has been central to some fairly momentous developments in science, it's not hard to imagine the argument that it'd be clearer to reflect those insights in syntax.

[mae]

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[gach]

Have you ever read a contemporary physics paper before? Writing about physics in English (or any other contemporary natural science) is absolutely an onerous task.

Do you have any particular feature of scientific English in mind or just the requirement of good technical language to be specific and concise?

It could be interesting to take a systematic look at the styles of academic writing (specifically journal papers) in different fields and see how much they differ from each other. In physical sciences at least the prevailing style is dry and to the point. You get a feeling that if the style of a paper is too conversational, the authors may not trust that their results could speak for themselves.