Zompist Bboard Again

tyiŋə‘ra tyuŋwityə tyiya tyətux‘ə
ty-<ŋə>i‘ra tyuŋwityə ty-iya ty-ətux-‘ə
Vp-<IRR>good month.PL Vp-PROX Vp-follow-NOM
Happy new year! (lit. "may these next few months be good")

That's good information, and basically reflects my understanding of how the topic and focus are typically differentiated. And I will be honest that I've not actually given much thought to Asta intonation, so I should definitely cover the differences if/when I get round to it. As for the morphology t...

OK, so in order to make a post on this language before the new year, I'm going to discuss the core points of Asta syntax. Asta, like many polysynthetic languages, is relatively non-configurational. There is a tendency towards verb-initial word-order, however the only firm placement rule is that part...

In other news I've recently started to get into Carnatic as well as Hindustani forms of Indian Classical music. Mostly I've just been listening to recordings of T.M. Krishna, such as this composition in Hamir Kalyani . I'm quite enjoying noticing the differences, notably in the instrumentation, part...

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sat Dec 29, 2018 8:07 amThis is her third attempt, and all three I think have been hamstrung by her terrible writing.

Remind which ones the others were, in case I've seen them?

ima na ke asa nukuha Right now I really hate life. minuwuwa‘nuwəmatrə yərərityawəxempəpan‘iyəx yitə minyiŋuŋwa‘ə wa yex‘ə min-VC-uwa‘nə-wə-matrə y-VC-əritya-wə-xempə-pan-‘ə-yəx yitə min-y-<ŋə>iŋwa-‘ə wa y-eŋ-‘ə 1p-PROG-happy-PROG-difficult Ip-PROG-shallow-PROG-head-DIST-NOM-ADV person.pl 1p-Ip-<IRR...

Why does it seem that half of Southern Dravidian vocabulary is just Sanskrit with -am stuck on the end?

This was very useful. Incidentally, something somewhat similar to your, personal, [aː → i] happens/happened in vernacular Irish English with [maɪ̯ː → mi(ː)], occasionally. This is a general colloquial feature of British English throughout the British Isles; it's found in Cockney, Yorkshire, Scotlan...

I once had a chat with a Cambridge non-linguist alumnus (I think an engineer?), who commented that Chomsky's work "was a rather clever bit of mathematics but wasn't really terribly relevant to actual language", and that's kind of stuck with me.

3. Syntactic theories seem to be a lot like programming languages: every few years someone comes along with a new one which attempts to fix all the problems with its predecessors, but introduces many more of its own. Yeah, that's a good analogy. Another similarity with programming is that any parti...

Bob, mate, can I try and explain this to you. The main thrust of the responses you're getting from us is mainly sparked by our marked bewilderment at what you're posting. I think that fundamentally we are interested in what you have to say, but your presenting style makes it very difficult for us to...

One of the hardest things for me is trying to be as enthusiastic about all areas of my conlang, like being as interested/having as many ideas regarding the syntax as the phonology. This has often been a problem for me in the past: I come up with this great phonology, start a conlang... and then real...

OK, time to talk about nominalisations. Basically there are four nominalising suffixes in Asta: -‘ə, -sə, -n(ə) and -yən . I will discuss each of these in turn, explaining their semantics more than their syntactic functions (which are many and varied and would be a post unto themselves). The -‘ə is ...

OK, time for pronominal forms! There are three classes of pronouns morphologically speaking in Asta: personal/reflexive, demonstrative and interrogative. Personal and reflexive pronouns are built on the same principle: a common element with personal/noun class prefixes being prefixes on. This common...

Some bits of nominal morphology. Basically the only bits of nominal morphology (outside of the noun-class prefixes outlined above) are possession and the adverbial case marker. Possession is rather simple: possessive affixes attach to the noun, with any nominal (as opposed to pronominal) possessors ...

Adverbial suffixes now. These are a somewhat open-ended class, so I'll only discuss a few of them, and likely in the future I'll create even more. Firstly there is the distributive -pan, which normally is a true distributive, but can also have some interesting semantic effects with certain verbs. ‘i...

Next in the verbal template: noun incorporation. Asta has at least types I-III noun incorporation according to Mithun's schema, and maybe type-IV if I can even be bothered with it (so probably not). These incorporated nouns follow the verbal stem (after it's been inflected for aspect), retaining the...

Now for person marking. Person marking in Asta is at once simple and complicated, being as it is a mix of nominative and ergative alignments depending on person, and with some markers being able to appear in several different contexts. As we have said already the noun class prefixes on verbs agree w...

Now we'll move onto morphological TAM. This is more consistent, thankfully, but still relatively complex. Mood is simple enough: there is only a basic realis-irrealis distinction, with irrealis being marked by a -ŋə- infix before the first consonant of the root/after the first vowel. This basically ...

OK, verb stems. Asta verbs are either transitive or intransitive, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it! Actually that's not strictly true, there are ways to change the valency of a verb - two regular valency-increasing voice infixes, and several irregular stem alternations to produce tra...