Some Rawàng Ata

[Salmoneus]

As I mentioned in the random section recently, I've completed (for now...) a key bit of Rawàng Ata grammar. Some people suggested they might want to see it. So...

Do you want to find out how to say things like "the sailor makes a canoe out of stone" (dattà kuruburu songàya) or "the goat saw her grace, the late matriarch" (āhanàhangatura kèsar) in Rawàng Ata? Are you curious to learn why dattà buà kùhuya means "the sailor suffers from gastrointestinal difficulties", while rùan à means "the sea is blue", and sujota wa taìli means "the elder travels upstream through the forest"? Do you want to know how to translate everyday sentences like "I, a female, yet presenting myself in a non-sexual, relatively informal and yet somewhat distant context, blink" (that would be kàya manabàysutta) or "O turtle, you are in debt to somebody!" (à bolày nìshiya tsu nàsunutu)? What about "as for the elder, it's his lithe girl who hugs the young sailor" (sujota, kòma liàn kutokuìtsi tùk dattàm), or "you know that sailor? I ate his turtle!" (òng dattà, bolàjma kanàha)? And what does the word lokanatufùarahamayaraiyanga mean? ("I, a foreigner, push you, your ladyship, as his lordship here observes", of course!) Well, you need wonder no longer! All shall be explained!




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It's a large-ish document. Because I'm still making a couple of corrections to it*, and to avoid overwhelming people, I thought it might make sense to post it in (maybe three?) chunks.

As the first section explains, this is just about basic verbal clauses - the "Caecilius est in horto", "the cat sits on the mat" level of stuff. The first part is an intro and outline of how things fit together, followed by a discussion of verbal agreement affixes. Then it'll be a big section on case marking (and default word order). Then probably the third chunk will be some stuff that doesn't fit - discussing a type of verb form that's a bit more complicated/different, briefly covering 'animacy barring', and then talking about word order alterations in a topic/comment framework.

Because this isn't covering... well, everything else... there'll be a few things that aren't immediately obvious. In particular, yes, the grave accents sometimes seem to be in the wrong place - this is because of accent sandhi, I wouldn't worry about it. [or because I made a mistake. For now, let's blame sandhi]

It's not a particularly logical organisation, per se - I was trying to do something more useful, rather than more conceptually pure. You'll also note that the subchapters are broken up into numbered subsubsections in a fairly arbitrary way - these aren't, per se, necessarily well-justified conceptual divisions, but more just a way to break the text up and allow easier reference. But it does, unfortunately, yield a rather rambling quality...


So, first chunk up now: here.

Second and maybe third chunks, up tomorrow.


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Please, any feedback is welcome! Can you understand what on earth I'm going on about? Is there a glaring typo, or apparent total contradiction? What do you think of the language - what does it bring to mind, phonologically and/or grammatically? Is it a sin against language, linguistics and the soul of all mankind? Let me know!

Thank you!








*I ended up furiously wrestling with the diachronics again, and had to force myself to stop, for now - so some words are likely to change in future, once I get around to it.

[akam chinjir]

This looks really interesting! I'm trying to work out something that'll probably family-resemble your species/class system, so I'll look at that carefully, at least. (But not quite yet, I've just crossed the Pacific, and have not yet really woken up.)

[Ares Land]

Please, any feedback is welcome! Can you understand what on earth I'm going on about? Is there a glaring typo, or apparent total contradiction? What do you think of the language - what does it bring to mind, phonologically and/or grammatically? Is it a sin against language, linguistics and the soul of all mankind? Let me know!

I like it a lot. A minor complaint is that the use of 'species' bothers me a little. To me, at least, 'species' brings to mind something fixed, somewhat akin to a verb class. I think I'd stick with voice myself.

The language has an Austronesian feel to it; I could see it spoken in a place much like Indonesia.

I'll comment further later on, I'll need to more time to really look through the grammar and try to figure it out.

[Ares Land]

More extensive comments:
It occurs only when the verb is in the transitive species, when the subject is female (i.e. of the damùn, yanha or maòkosònga) and Là (etc), and when the direct object is male (i.e. of the yojo or òro) and Là (etc) : I don't get the part in bold.

A small mistake here:
b) dattà ra-sàkkanga-ra fòna-m sailor AN-kick-AN foreigner-ACC the sailor kicks the foreigner
c) dattà na-sàkkanga-ra fòna-m sailor AN-kick-AN goat-ACC his excellency the sailor kicks the foreigner

(For a second there I thought they simply called foreigners 'goats' and I still like that interpretation better.)

I think a conjugation table would help. Also, I wouldn't mind a summary of when each agreement pattern is used. (Esp. double marking vs. object marking)

Besides those altogether minor caveats, I like it a lot.

I could see the parent language as not unlike like spoken French, with subject and object pronouns slowly reanalyzed as affixes -- but not in formal speech. (We even have something like third participant marking, though not to that extent).

[quinterbeck]

It occurs only when the verb is in the transitive species, when the subject is female (i.e. of the damùn, yanha or maòkosònga) and Là (etc), and when the direct object is male (i.e. of the yojo or òro) and Là (etc) : I don't get the part in bold.

It looks like some kind of gender system? I'm interested to know more, and it would illuminate a number of usage points to have a bit of background on what these terms mean

Also, I wouldn't mind a summary of when each agreement pattern is used. (Esp. double marking vs. object marking)

I was thinking the same thing. There's a helpful mention of which 'species' use subject marking at the top of the section, but no such on the object or double marking sections

[Salmoneus]

More extensive comments:
It occurs only when the verb is in the transitive species, when the subject is female (i.e. of the damùn, yanha or maòkosònga) and Là (etc), and when the direct object is male (i.e. of the yojo or òro) and Là (etc) : I don't get the part in bold.

Cultural issue. As quinterbeck says, it's a gender system... or, at least, a sort-of-gender system. I'm hesitant just calling it "gender", because it's very different from a modern Western sense of gender, as it's also tied to class, occupation, birth-order and the like. And because they also have a concept of gender.

A brief intro:
- the damùn are the matriarchal... class? gender? profession? whatever. They're female - the archetypal females. They are the childbearers, the nurturers, the homebuilders. They're also the rulers of houses and clans. Among the Là (the people who speak Rawàng Ata), land is passed down from mother to daughter, as are family affiliation, houses and household goods, and inherited debts, credits, rights and obligations. [it's not a pure matriarchy - men own the ships and tools, and have a substantial role in controlling the family as well. However, it's not a total illusion. To a large extent, you can imagine the matriarch as the chairman of the large familial "corporation", and the patriarch (who is usually one of the husbands of the daughters of the matriarch) as the CEO. The patriarch has power on a day-to-day basis, but is in legitimate danger of being fired by the matriarch if he doesn't do a good enough job.] The damùn is largely confined for life to her house (although if the household is too big, some damùn may leave to form a junior household) - while it's not exactly taboo for her to be seen in public, it is considered degrading in normal circumstances - the Là compare damùn to the queens of bee hives, and you don't expect the queen to go find nectar herself (damùn do, however, sometimes visit close friends, particularly when young). As a result, it is difficult for women of a lower class to ever be damùn - to some extent it is an issue of class, as being damùn is a form of conspicuous idleness. It is not, however, generally resented by the lower classes, but rather aspired to.

- the yanha are also female. They, as it were, do the female things that damùn are too damùn-y to do. Someone needs to buy some expensive glassware and the servants can't be trusted? Send the yanha. Someone needs to drop round to the neighbours' to offer sympathy for the bad news? Send the yanha.
The institution of the yanha comes from the institution of sister-adoption. It's expected that an aristocratic house will have a certain number of women in it - these people are big on family, and big estate houses are almost like small villages. If a family doesn't have many daughters, it's seen as a sad thing - after all, given that the damùn will spend most of their lives in this house, who will they socialise with? On the other hand, of course, having too many daughters is also a problem, for financial reasons. So fertile families started adopting out their extraneous younger daughters to families who didn't have so many. This of course also provided considerable political benefit, as it helped form strong alliances between families, so before long everyone was doing it. [It's helped by the fact that the ruling class among the Là practice group marriage - rather than split inheritance between daughters, daughters agree that their children are the children of the elder sister. Similarly, husbands are invited into the house, but don't strictly belong to one sister or another (although, of course, in practice there are no doubt preferences). So there has to be a suitable balance maintained between the number of wives and the number of husbands, to prevent too much frustration on either side...]

Anyway, these adopted sisters became the yanha, so that's a definition on the ground: those who stay in their birth families are the damùn, and those who join new families are the yanha. Who goes and who stays can be a complicated question. Part of it is the personality of the young women - damùn are meant to be serene, caring, yet authoritative, whereas yanha are more 'male', more shy, more playful/boistrous, more practical. But it's also age - in a cohort of children, the older daughters are more likely to be raised to be damùn, and the younger daughters to be yanha (though if the age gap is big enough the cycle can restart as a new cohort). And it can also be influenced by interpersonal dynamics within the house (which daughter does the mother want to keep with her? which sisters can't stand living together?) and outside it (which daughter is more in demand from a eligible prospective sister/wife?). [on which note: the Là are considerably more libertine about sex than modern Europeans. Being sexually active is not compulsory (one advantage of group marriage - there are spares if necessary...), but is expected, and there's little sense of sexual orientation per se (it's recognised that some people are more attracted to some people than others, but because they're rather more open and sex-positive in general, it's not expected that people will only have sex with those they find attractive - they see sex as about fun, reproduction, and intimacy, not about attraction per se) - yanha, as the more 'male' women, will often be expected to serve as husbands when the men are away (which they often are, since they do the sailing/fishing/trading/etc), in all capacities, so whether they're better seen as having 'sisters' or 'wives' is a difficult question.]

It's also, again, about class. Women who aren't rich enough to be damùn end up as yanha by default. In that sense, although in aristocratic families the yanha are those who are specifically sent away from home, more conceptually the yanha state is, as it were, the default form of womanhood, which only blossoms into full damùn-hood when suitable conditions arise.

- the maòko are also female, although by European standards they are biologically male. They are in a way the most 'specific' of the 'genders' - they arose as monks, and although they can take other roles, they are more ritualised and limited in profession. They may live alone, or in community with other maòko - after a certain age, they no longer live in normal families, and are considered somewhat outside the family structure (it's common for them to maintain familial bonds to individual family members, but they are not attached to the family as an institution. Again, in this sense they may best be seen as analogous to monks). Historically, they often castrated themselves, but these days that's not normal ouside a few particularly hardline religious sects. They are seen as, as it were, having the maternal power of damùn and yanha, but without the family structure that normally attends it, and therefore their femininity is in a sense spiritualised. There are disproportionate numbers of them involved in the government, and in charitable organisations.

- the yojo are male. The word means literally 'husband', and that's what they are. They are men who marry into families to act as husbands - or who want to do so, or did so in the past. They're the only 'gender' for whom sexual orientation is a non-negotiable - a man who can't have sex with women successfully by definition isn't yojo. They're the default male gender. In personality, they are meant to be serious (to be able to handle a family's business appropriately), obedient (to not annoy the matriarch, and to a lesser extent the women they're married to), but also ideally entertaining.

- the òro are also male. They're the men who don't won't to (or can't) get married. They're particularly associated with living as a sailor - in a sense, an òro is a sailor who never has to 'go home' the way that yojo sailors do (although not all òro are sailors in a literal sense). They're able to be more irresponsible (as they have fewer responsibilities), and have a reputation for being more lively and ostentatious. The connotations differ with class - upper class families sometimes do have some excess men who wouldn't make good husbands, who can be respectably sent off to be ship captains or soldiers or forest-station-inhabitors. For the lower classes, becoming òro is seen as possible but in most cases rather disreputable - it's a luxury the poor can't afford. (that said, it varies - for example, if a boy's relatives all die, and no woman will have him, there's nothing wrong with him trying to make a future for himself as an òro).

- the kùnyi are... complicated. They are in some ways seen as female, but in most respects treated as neuter. They are, as it were, seen as people who are biologically female, but in whom femininity has somehow (naturally) been suppressed (as opposed to the masculinity of maòko - maòko aren't male at all, they just look male, whereas kùnyi are in some sense female, but don't act like it). The name etymologically means "egg-layers" - kùnyi are women who don't have children, and who typically avoid any potentially procreative sex (it's acceptable for kùnyi to object to sex with their husbands and/or wives as a general point of principle). A kùnyi who has children is clearly, factually, not a kùnyi. They often overtly avoid behaviour that might be interpreted as female. It is often believed that in kùnyi, the natural feminie urge to produce life has been sublimated into more abstract form, and there's an expectation that kùnyi will probably be more creative than other people. There are, of course, talentless kùnyi, but in general it's true that many of the great artists have been kùnyi. Supporting a kùnyi in the family is obviously a financial burden, so again, this is a luxury only the rich can afford - but that doesn't mean that kùnyi only emerge among the rich. Kùnyi often marry up - they are adopted as sisters/wives by more affluent families (those that don't have a family to adopt them... well, then they're not kùnyi, are they? These categories importantly are not (wholly) identities that people choose for themselves, they're social functions negotiated with society, and of course some people have more to negotiate with than others)

A small mistake here:

Thank you!

I think a conjugation table would help.

Well, a 'table' is difficult, because there's no, as it were, second axis (as there's virtually no fusion). Although I suppose some issues, like the subject prefixes that are altered by the class of the object, perhaps could do with a tabular reminder.

Also, I wouldn't mind a summary of when each agreement pattern is used. (Esp. double marking vs. object marking)

OK - although for now, you can refer back to the colours used in that first table.

Besides those altogether minor caveats, I like it a lot.

Thank you!

[Pabappa]

Very nice work. Interesting cultural gender system. Interesting grammatical gender system too, with the inanimate/animate/feminine divide (but you do recognize males as distinct from other animates when they are the patient of a verb).

Those politeness prefixes are quite long, ... I can see myself being reluctant to use them .... though theyre not longer than such things as "your majesty".

[akam chinjir]

I'm not sure I'm fully awake yet, but here are some reactions.

So what stands out is that you've got something akin to a grammatical voice one of whose purposes is to let the speaker encode a variety of distinctions related to intimacy, respect, deference, register, and so on; and to encode it via cross-referencing on the verb. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it, and I think it's great.

There are first- and second- person forms only in the (agentive and patientive) disynthetic species---right? Does that mean that a first- or second-person argument can get cross-referenced with the regular gender affixes, or that they can be cross-referenced only in the disynthetic species? (I think you imply the latter, but am not completely sure.)

Is it also possible to avoid cross-referencing a first- or second-person subject by using a species that cross-references only the object?

The bit about using the reflexive to allow double-marking is a nice touch.

Looking at how you handle tu see, would it be right to say that they take an obligatory patient-like argument, which is treated syntactically as an object? And that when a stimulus argument is present, it gets treated as a subject? ---I'm assuming that in an example like 6a tu kòme the girl sees, there's not supposed to be a silent or covert subject, it's a genuinely subjectless sentence. (Are there any patientive verbs that do require a subject?)

...Presumably it's possible to use intransitive patientive verbs with first- or second-person arguments. Is this also done with a reflexive? From your example 17b, it looks like in this case the experiencer ends up as subject (and with ergative case-marking), with the reflexive looking like an object. Is that right? Or does that only work when the semantics are genuinely reflexive? (Three of your four examples with ergative-marking involve the verb tu see, I guess there's probably a subtlety here that I'm missing.)

A couple more small things.

You've got some examples that you gloss like this (2d):

dàn   lubù-m   ra-sàkkanga
3.INT ball-ACC AN-kick
"He kicks his ball; OR: as for him, it's the ball he kicks"

English's "as for" construction suggests a topic shift (which is a bit odd with a pronoun), is that what you're after here? I'd have expected something more like "It's the ball that he kicks" or "He kicks the ball".

And (very minor here), is it really that unusual for voice morphology to be not-fully-productive, and a bit particular? Turkish at least has lots of peculiarities, and I think it's pretty common for at least some voice morphology to look pretty derivational. ---Which is not to say your species are voices, you haven't said enough here about how they work for me to have an opinion like that.

Thanks for the read!

[Salmoneus]

I'm not sure I'm fully awake yet, but here are some reactions.

So what stands out is that you've got something akin to a grammatical voice one of whose purposes is to let the speaker encode a variety of distinctions related to intimacy, respect, deference, register, and so on; and to encode it via cross-referencing on the verb. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it, and I think it's great.

Thank you!

Hopefully most of your questions will be answered in the next chunk, which, again, sorry for not having put up yet. Stuff!

But some brief answers...

There are first- and second- person forms only in the (agentive and patientive) disynthetic species---right? Does that mean that a first- or second-person argument can get cross-referenced with the regular gender affixes, or that they can be cross-referenced only in the disynthetic species? (I think you imply the latter, but am not completely sure.)

Semantically, you can indeed cross-reference first- or second-person arguments using the regular gender affixes, which is why I'm hesitant to call those affixes 'third person', although in a way they are.
Syntactically, however, you can't. What I mean by that is that once something is "officially" first- or second-person, you have to use the disynthetic - i.e. whenever you use a true pronoun that's first- or second-person, or whenever you address something in the vocative. However, extensive use is made of "pseudopronouns" - nouns that work as pronouns - that are 'officially' third-person, but that are recognised as first- or second-person by context. So a young woman may use kòma to refer to herself, and someone talking to her may use it to refer to her, and because they are 'grammatically' still in the third person, they don't have to use the disynthetic, which, as pabappa correctly points out, is kind of a hassle to use all the time.

Is it also possible to avoid cross-referencing a first- or second-person subject by using a species that cross-references only the object?

Yes - the need for the disynthetic is triggered syntactically, not semantically.

The bit about using the reflexive to allow double-marking is a nice touch.

Thank you! I think as I've learnt more about languages, I've become more accepting of, and even attracted to, the argument "there's no good logical reason for this, but it's a good cheat to avoid some other rule or problem" as a motivation for linguistic quirks...

Looking at how you handle tu see, would it be right to say that they take an obligatory patient-like argument, which is treated syntactically as an object? And that when a stimulus argument is present, it gets treated as a subject?

Yee...ess...?
I actually put a caveat up in the next section, because this is kind of a judgement call. I do indeed call the experiencer an object and the stimulus a subject - this is how it works for word order, and I think it makes the description of the species more straightforward, and it's also relevant for things like serial verbs and clause coordination (which won't be covered here). BUT: I recognise that the idea of subjectless verbs with compulsory objects may raise some eyebrows, and those eyebrows will be even more elevated by the fact that these "objects" have the same case as the "subjects" of other verbs. So I think there's probably a genuine case to be made that experiencer argument IS the subject, or at least is partially the subject. However, while that argument might be appealing to some linguists, I think it probably makes the language more complicated to describe, so I stick with calling that argument the object.

---I'm assuming that in an example like 6a tu kòme the girl sees, there's not supposed to be a silent or covert subject, it's a genuinely subjectless sentence. (Are there any patientive verbs that do require a subject?)

By itself, yes, it's subjectless (leaving aside the above discussion). However, for clause-coordination purposes it would often be treated as having a covert subject.
And no, no patientive verbs require a subject (in the objective species - they do in the patientive disynthetic, of course)

...Presumably it's possible to use intransitive patientive verbs with first- or second-person arguments. Is this also done with a reflexive? From your example 17b, it looks like in this case the experiencer ends up as subject (and with ergative case-marking), with the reflexive looking like an object. Is that right? Or does that only work when the semantics are genuinely reflexive? (Three of your four examples with ergative-marking involve the verb tu see, I guess there's probably a subtlety here that I'm missing.)

Sorry, laziness in example-thinking is one of my flaws!

Another of my flaws is not addressing this issue directly, though I really should have done.

I think that patientive reflexives only work when the semantics are genuinely reflexive, yes. The more general case of wanting a subjectless patientive with a first- or second-person object (e.g. "I see") is instead dealt with via a dummy noun in subject position. [I do have an example of this later in the text, but without enough explanation...]

And whenever I think of this question, I ask myself "why did you not give this language a proper passive!?!?!?"
[fun fact: there was a passive, diachronically. It's now a minimally-productive derivational process...]

A couple more small things.

You've got some examples that you gloss like this (2d):

dàn   lubù-m   ra-sàkkanga
3.INT ball-ACC AN-kick
"He kicks his ball; OR: as for him, it's the ball he kicks"

English's "as for" construction suggests a topic shift (which is a bit odd with a pronoun), is that what you're after here? I'd have expected something more like "It's the ball that he kicks" or "He kicks the ball".

Well, not topic SHIFT per se. And your translation may indeed be better - 'he' is the topic here (taking this in isolation), and the ball is indeed the focus. Rawàng Ata's grammar is more interested in topic than in focus, but I don't know if that's why I translate like that, or just because I instinctively focus (no pun intended) on the topic myself.

And (very minor here), is it really that unusual for voice morphology to be not-fully-productive, and a bit particular? Turkish at least has lots of peculiarities, and I think it's pretty common for at least some voice morphology to look pretty derivational. ---Which is not to say your species are voices, you haven't said enough here about how they work for me to have an opinion like that.

I think it's unusual to have so many voices, though. That said, I can see an argument for just calling these things voices - probably the fact that I don't speak a language with much voice-based hijinks biases me toward caution in doing so!

Thanks for the read!

Thanks for reading!

[Salmoneus]

Anyway, if anyone's still interested, second chunk up here

[quinterbeck]

Anyway, if anyone's still interested,

Yes, of course

second chunk up here

Very interesting, it does escalate somewhat when we hit the disynthetic! Why the choice of term 'disynthetic' by the way?

You describe the disynthetic species inversion as a rule preventing pronouns from appearing outside the direct case - is that avoided elsewhere as well? Or are there situations where a pronoun might appear with case marking?

I also had a question about the Là sort-of-gender system, which is also very interesting to read about. When and how does society start to discern what category an individual child belongs to? I'm also curious about how they discern basic gender, since they de-emphasise biology in comparison to Western cultures (based on what you say about maòko)

More: show

A few typos:
Ex. 40 d and e are labelled as [objective] but they look to be stative
Section 3.18, last sentence of the first paragraph, 'locative verbs' should be 'locative nouns'

[Salmoneus]

Very interesting, it does escalate somewhat when we hit the disynthetic! Why the choice of term 'disynthetic' by the way?

I'm not entirely sure. In a literal sense, it is di-synthetic, in that it takes two sets of agreement affixes. But I seem to remember reading something that used the term or a related one that made me suddenly go "oh, yes, that's exactly what it should be called!", something more specific than just the concept of synthesis... but I can't remember what it might have been...

You describe the disynthetic species inversion as a rule preventing pronouns from appearing outside the direct case - is that avoided elsewhere as well? Or are there situations where a pronoun might appear with case marking?

No, (true) pronouns are never case-marked. [In this analysis. It may, however, be noted that many pronouns end with the same -ya ending that elsewhere is described as the ergative case, so maybe they're all in the ergative all the time!]

I also had a question about the Là sort-of-gender system, which is also very interesting to read about. When and how does society start to discern what category an individual child belongs to? I'm also curious about how they discern basic gender, since they de-emphasise biology in comparison to Western cultures (based on what you say about maòko)

I'm not honestly sure. I think in most cases it's in the teenage years, but it differs for the different 'genders'. I think maòko are identified relatively early. In part, this is because although they are considered women, they don't "act like women", or even really "not act like men" (Là masculinity is a bit less restricted than modern European masculinity, particularly in youth), but rather they act specifically like maòko. Maybe early to mid-teens? I think next it would be kùnyi who are identified, in their mid- to late teens - both because the biological/psychological side of it (lack of interest in boys and motherhood) probably becomes evident at that point, and because there's an element of grooming/training involved (if your daughter is kùnyi, you want to find out early, and help her get some skills that will make her valuable - not all kùnyi are painters or poets, but they do, economically, need to work harder to prove their value to a marriage, given that they don't offer anything essential (like a womb, or semen)). The division between damùn and yanha, on the other hand, while probably being suspected from an early age (based on birth order and basic personality), doesn't have to be settled until later, until you're actually marrying them off. [And since damùn stay and yanha leave, you can try them out as damùn
a bit if you're not sure and still send them away later]. And the yojo/òro split is last - men marry later.

It should be said, though, that most of these decisions can be changed if circumstances demand. You may intend your children to be such-and-such, but until they've actually been committed to a marriage (or become maòko, which typically involves ritual adoption by other maòko), they can always be changed. Your second daughter is obviously a kùnyi? Sure... but if her elder sister dies, then she will just have to be repurposed as a damùn or yanha. This again is why I'm a bit wary of using the term 'gender' to describe it...

A few typos:
Ex. 40 d and e are labelled as [objective] but they look to be stative
Section 3.18, last sentence of the first paragraph, 'locative verbs' should be 'locative nouns'

Thank you!
And I'll add another one myself: ex. 40 e is mislabelled as (a second!) ex. 40 c...

Mind you, this is making me glad I included example and section numbers...

[alynnidalar]

It should be said, though, that most of these decisions can be changed if circumstances demand. You may intend your children to be such-and-such, but until they've actually been committed to a marriage (or become maòko, which typically involves ritual adoption by other maòko), they can always be changed. Your second daughter is obviously a kùnyi? Sure... but if her elder sister dies, then she will just have to be repurposed as a damùn or yanha. This again is why I'm a bit wary of using the term 'gender' to describe it...

Yeah, it's an interesting system. While there's clearly still a biological/physical appearance factor, it's more focused on social roles than "Western gender" is.

[Ares Land]

Anyway, if anyone's still interested, second chunk up here

Still very interested I'll need some time to figure out the disynthetic I think.

One thing I'm not sure about is valence... Does that mean you can't have an ergative and, say, a lative, or an ergative and an indirect object? In other words, doesn't that restrict the total number of noun phrases in the clause?
Let's say, I don't know, something like 'the sailor walks on sand with wooden shoes' or 'the girl goes on foot out of spite'?

(I thing the name 'ergative' is potentially confusing since it's sometimes used for patients... I'd suggest using 'lative' instead. There are enough idiosyncratic uses of the lative to justify it, I believe).

[Ares Land]

It turns out the disynthetic isn't that hard to figure out after a good night's sleep.
What's a djadjang, by the way?

I'm waiting for the next installment, but so far it makes -- though I suspect the language would be a bitch to learn . You may want to add a summary of case use at some point (I found myself frequently referring to previous sections to try to remember which case is agent, patient, and so on...)
I'd be interested in seeing various uses presented as syntactic transformations (though there's no rush or anything, of course)

[Salmoneus]

Anyway, if anyone's still interested, second chunk up here

Still very interested I'll need some time to figure out the disynthetic I think.

One thing I'm not sure about is valence... Does that mean you can't have an ergative and, say, a lative, or an ergative and an indirect object? In other words, doesn't that restrict the total number of noun phrases in the clause?

Yes, it does. Most clauses are quite simple.

Let's say, I don't know, something like 'the sailor walks on sand with wooden shoes' or 'the girl goes on foot out of spite'?

A good question. There is some room for prepositional phrases with an adverbial function, but most of the time you're going to be relying on topics. Either you take a third noun 'out' of the clause by making it a topic ("regarding the sailor: wooden shoes walk on sand"), or you break comples clauses up into simple ones with a shared topic ("the sailor wears shoes, walks on sand").

(I thing the name 'ergative' is potentially confusing since it's sometimes used for patients... I'd suggest using 'lative' instead. There are enough idiosyncratic uses of the lative to justify it, I believe).

Yeah, but in European languages sometimes the 'accusative' or 'dative' is used for subjects, so...

[Salmoneus]

It turns out the disynthetic isn't that hard to figure out after a good night's sleep.
What's a djadjang, by the way?

A predator. I think it's an egg-laying mammal analogous to a jackal or coyote, or large fox - perhaps a thylacine might be the nearest Earth analogy? They're common in the forest - they hunt small animals and scavenge large ones, as well as eating fruit and fresh shoots. In general they avoid attacking humans, but they do often follow them (hoping for abandoned or poorly guarded food), and they can become dangerous when hungry. At the periphery of towns, they are known to steal sheep and birds, and even babies. Once upon a time, the aristocracy would let starving djadjang out to guard their property at night (they don't bark or anything, but if hungry enough they do eat burglars), but this became a hated practice (with a lot of urban legends about cruel aristocrats training them to stalk the streets at night and eat the children of the poor), so it no longer occurs.

I'm waiting for the next installment, but so far it makes -- though I suspect the language would be a bitch to learn . You may want to add a summary of case use at some point (I found myself frequently referring to previous sections to try to remember which case is agent, patient, and so on...)
I'd be interested in seeing various uses presented as syntactic transformations (though there's no rush or anything, of course)

Summaries and tables would be helpful, yes - but the problem is managing to express all the information in a way that isn't more confusing than the written descriptions...

[Ares Land]

Yes, it does. Most clauses are quite simple.

Ah, OK! It all makes more sense now. Is that sort of restriction common, cross-linguistically, by the way?
Thanks for the answers, BTW, and I'm looking forward to part three...

[akam chinjir]

Sorry for the delayed response! A couple of week-long conlang challenges arrived at the same time, and took all my focus.

I've juts got a few little questions.

In something like ex.21, where you've got a locative noun (taìli) as sort of an unselected indirect object, can you also have locative phrases that are just adjuncts? If so, would there be a significant difference in semantics or surface word order or something? (Like, suppose I wanted to say that a bird is flying in the forest, under the canopy I mean.)

Your instrumental and idiom-forming uses of the ergative, do you think of the noun as referential? Like, "foot" in "go on foot" seems non-referential to me, but "canoe" in "travels.upstream in a canoe" seems maybe referential, but in "travels.upstream by canoe" it wouldn't, I think. ("I want to go on foot" doesn't have a "there are feet I want to go on" reading, I think "I want to go in a canoe" does have a "there's a canoe I want to go in" reading, but I think "I want to go by canoe" doesn't.)

(Maybe the partitive use of the ergative is related? That's presumably referential---though you allow both "the girl drinks water" and "the girl drinks some of the water" as translations of ex.31a, and "water" is nonreferential---or nonspecific or whatever---in the first of those.)

You have many of the nouns with both count and mass uses as foodstuff nouns. I think the analogous pattern in English often gets associated not just with standard-serving-size interpretations, but also specifically with (broadly speaking) restaurant contexts. (I might order a milk in a restaurant, but would probably just as for milk at home.) Anything analogous in Rawàng Ata? Or does the count use of these nouns always get an actual-portion interpretation?

In ditransitives, you say that a full noun recipient (as opposed to a pronoun recipient) will normally be topical. How does that work? I'd have thought recipients would fairly regularly be new information, and wouldn't have thought new information could be topical (and also that topical recipients would most often be represented by pronouns).

fwiw, I like the decision to call the single argument of objective verbs the object.

A couple of remaining questions about transitive verbs.

First, you say they have to describe physical actions. How much work is "physical" doing here, and, if it's a significant amount of work, what's it getting contrasted with, and how? It's hard to be specific without knowing more than I do about the belief systems of Rawàng Ata speakers, but I'm wondering whether there might be people who believe in telekinesis, but wouldn't use a transitive verb to describe its operation; or who believe in gods, but wouldn't use transitive verbs to describe their actions; or if you could even use a transitive verb to describe a mental activity (such as imagining a unicorn).

Second, you say these verbs have to imply a change of state or location, that the object has to be materially affected. Your first example though uses sàkkanga kick, whose gloss implies that it wouldn't count as a change of state verb on many accounts of this sort of thing. I guess you're thinking that causes a sensation in the object, and that's enough? (So you couldn't use sàkkanga transitively to describe kicking a tree?) Do Rawàng Ata speakers think of sensations as material? (I've got no objection if they do, I'm just trying to understand the distinctions at work.)

...Those are the main thoughts that have occurred to me. Looking forward to the next instalment!

Edit. Oops, I forgot another question about transitive verbs---what about when someone is preventing a change of state or location, say by holding someone or something down or restraining them? ("I held down the paper so it didn't blow away in the wind.")

[dhok]

A dumb question, since I'm sure there's a sketch back in the old Zeeb's archives: can we get a quick phonological sketch so I know what I'm supposed to be reading when I see the language?