Zompist Bboard Again

I should try to create an issue of an Almean linguistics journal... I'd be very curious to see that! Working through competing grammatical traditions could be a lot of fun. For me, though, I couldn't really do these without having the reference grammars first, though perhaps not in complete form. Y...

Another strategy is to just not call it cheese at all, but a proprietary brand name, like Velveeta. Surprisingly, both Velveeta and other forms of "American cheese" are over a century old. Usually disgusting foods that were invented during a time of hardship get some grudging respect (Spa...

The first time I heard the expression "American cheese" it was in French, and I assumed it was mockery.

...I wanted to check something else, and discovered that the 1800-page Cambridge Grammar of the English Language doesn't have a chapter on phonology. (The closest they come is a brief section explaining how they'll do phonological transcriptions.)

I sometimes think I'd be more interested in foused studies of conlangs, rather than general grammars. Like Verdurian Clause Structure or Karazi Focus Constructions or something. Or for that matter your idea of a study of a particular poem. I really like learning not just about how things work in the...

Vædty Qyṣ, focus and aspect It's just occurred to me that maybe the main way that perfective aspect will get marked in Vædty Qyṣ is with the focus particle =gy and, also, even . To be frank, the idea that perfectivity has to do with thinking about the event as a whole, without concern for its inter...

KathTheDragon wrote: ↑Sun Aug 25, 2019 1:02 am edge inflection

Something new to learn about

Vædty Qyṣ, the modal participles Alongside its future tense in -sæni , deriving from Qɨsə sɛːn+niː , Vædty Qyṣ has a participle in -sen , from Qɨsə sɛːn . I'm going to assume that Qɨsə -sɛːn already produced a participle, and that the forms with and without niː were near equivalent in the range of ...

According to your example, isn't definite article realized as high tone in entire word to first word in phrase? However, neat idea. A tone morphology can get really weird. It can actually change constituent order, too: the noun can precede a modifier only in a definite noun phrase. Though what I'd ...

A language in which: Constituent order in indefinite noun phrases is rigidly modifier-noun (and degree words go before adjectives). The definite article is a second position clitic that must occur with exactly one phonological word to its left within the noun phrase. To satisfy this requirement, one...

Vædty Qyṣ, verbal updates This is meant to give Vædty Qyṣ verbs a bit more depth. It substantially revises verb conjugations in the present, past, and future tenses. 1. The simple tenses There are two tenses that I'll call simple : the present and the past. Both go back to Qɨsə (though in Qɨsə it w...

Vædty Qyṣ, the resultative participle Yeah, this is going to be one of those SOV languages with a host of participles and converbs and nominalisations and so on. Here I'll just talk about one of them, the resultative participle. In case it matters, I'm assuming that a participle is any verbal form ...

Vædty Qyṣ, some diachrony It looks like Vædty Qyṣ is going to end up at laest substantial enough for Akiatu's ancestors to acquire vocabulary from it. And since Akiatu's been in search of a verb-final language to give it some verbalising morphology, it's looking like Vædty Qyṣ is the donor. So mayb...

Vædty Qyṣ, the future Oops, first some housekeeping. I was taking it for granted that the y in the copula ṣy would always surface. I think the best way to guarantee that is to say it's underlyingly ṣi , with conflation of i and y after retroflexes. Then the copula will have a si allomorph after alv...

I'm actually going back-and-forth on the question of whether the ṣy copula should be a suffix or a clitic. I've actually already edited the post on just this point; for the time being, it's a suffix. The relevant issues involve interaction with stress and final clitics, and the use of focus clitics ...

Yeah, gach, I definitely agree with that. And here's me playing with some grammar choices. Vaedty Qyṣ, some sentences Okay, let's try some simple sentences. mava-s   vor     -yn  hyrtag=ko Mava- DEF  tree.rat- ACC  hunt  = DECL " Mava is hunting tree rats " This is SOV , which I take to be...

Thanks for the questions! I think with egophorics, the issue is the epistemic authority of the speaker, and the issue is whether the listener will believe what the speaker says. With =saj , I'm imagining it used in speech acts that the speaker needs authority to perform, and =saj is affirming that t...

Vædty Qyṣ (verbs, first pass) I seem to be enjoying this thing enough that I want to have a go at verbs and simple clauses. I've managed to avoid mentioning so far that Vædty Qyṣ is pretty consistently head-final, though maybe that was obvious enough in the treatment of nouns. Anyway, it's consiste...

Vædty Qyṣ (nouns, cont'd) Possessor agreement I've decided that possessor agreement does go in the same slot as the definiteness marker, and also that the definiteness marker(s) I covered in the last post are (also) used with singular third-person possessors. I'll generalise what I said last time a...

Vædty Qyṣ (nouns) This is just about morphology: plural, definiteness, case, and focus markers. This morphology is entirely suffixing/encliticising. Eventually I'll also need possessor agreement (I think it'll probably go in the same `slot' as the definiteness marker), but I'm not even a little bit...