Pñæk grammar (so far)

[chris_notts]

Since there's a few discussions recently about using typology books to structure grammars (see here and here) I thought I'd share my own incomplete grammar of Pñæk. It's still a bit of a mess: there are bits missing, the vocabulary is quite small so the examples are repetitive, etc., but I got a bit obsessed with filling in the syntactic bits first.

The structure is a bit of a mix: many of the chapters, e.g. "The Noun Phrase", have a structural focus, whereas others are more functional. The chapters based on more functional-typology works like Dixon's books are "Discourse Pragmatics and Reference", "Clause Linking", "Complementation", "Spatial Expressions" and "Temporal Expressions" in particular.

The link is here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1sL0RU ... seqWqP4dJc

[So Haleza Grise]

I am still working through the grammar - it looks impressive - but I have to say at this point that I really like your LaTeX page headers.

[chris_notts]

I am still working through the grammar - it looks impressive - but I have to say at this point that I really like your LaTeX page headers.

Thanks! It's all third party packages of course. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with LaTeX. What it does well it does really well, but bullying it into doing some things is a nightmare, packages may interact in unexpected ways, and a lot of it is showing its age. Still, I'd rather write a grammar using LaTeX than Word or other affordable WYSIWYG editors.

[Vardelm]

How dare you steal someone's doctoral dissertation work detailing a heretofore undocumented language and publish it as your own, thereby diluting their contribution to academic linguistics and posterity?



Seriously, though, really good stuff, although I've only been able to browse through quickly. I really like the semantics of infix nominalisations that result in different root forms. Variable stems is something I've been struggling with on 1 conlang, so call me #jealous. I'd like to go back through at some point & take more time to read through. Nice work!!!

[bradrn]

I haven’t read much of it so far, but this looks excellent! I don’t often read grammars all the way through, but I might make an exception for this one. The formatting is excellent too; I would love to know which font you used!

(Some minor formatting feedback: did you use math mode for the syllable structures? There’s some very weird spacing in sequences like CVCCV, and the font changes to Computer Modern, which are the usual results of using math mode where it doesn’t belong.)

EDIT Another question: in section 2.3.1 (on demonstratives), you say there are three demonstratives: sñi ‘here’, hoos ‘there’ and huok ‘over there’. What exactly is the difference between hoos and huok? (EDIT 2: never mind, I found it on page 32.) And I found another place where it looks like you’ve used math mode: in the description of infix templates.

[chris_notts]

Seriously, though, really good stuff, although I've only been able to browse through quickly. I really like the semantics of infix nominalisations that result in different root forms. Variable stems is something I've been struggling with on 1 conlang, so call me #jealous. I'd like to go back through at some point & take more time to read through. Nice work!!!

Thanks!

[chris_notts]

I haven’t read much of it so far, but this looks excellent! I don’t often read grammars all the way through, but I might make an exception for this one. The formatting is excellent too; I would love to know which font you used!

I think it's Linux Libertine, but I can check later.

(Some minor formatting feedback: did you use math mode for the syllable structures? There’s some very weird spacing in sequences like CVCCV, and the font changes to Computer Modern, which are the usual results of using math mode where it doesn’t belong.)

Yes, I wanted something that stood out from the text, and I also needed subscripts. There are other ways to get subscripts in LaTeX, but math mode is the quickest and easiest I've found, short of creating an alias for commands like the unreasonably long \textsubscript.

[bradrn]

I haven’t read much of it so far, but this looks excellent! I don’t often read grammars all the way through, but I might make an exception for this one. The formatting is excellent too; I would love to know which font you used!

I think it's Linux Libertine, but I can check later.

I actually was thinking that it did look a bit like Linux Libertine, but I wasn’t too sure.

(Some minor formatting feedback: did you use math mode for the syllable structures? There’s some very weird spacing in sequences like CVCCV, and the font changes to Computer Modern, which are the usual results of using math mode where it doesn’t belong.)

Yes, I wanted something that stood out from the text, and I also needed subscripts. There are other ways to get subscripts in LaTeX, but math mode is the quickest and easiest I've found, short of creating an alias for commands like the unreasonably long \textsubscript.

True. Personally I like making aliases for these sort of things, but to each their own. One point though: could you at least change the math font to Linux Libertine? You can do it like this:

Code: Select all

\usepackage{libertine}
\usepackage{libertinust1math}

(Source: https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/linuxlibertine/)

That way you don’t get that jarring alternation between Linux Libertine for the text and Computer Modern for the syllable structures. (At least, I find it jarring; probably most people won’t even notice!)

[chris_notts]

True. Personally I like making aliases for these sort of things, but to each their own. One point though: could you at least change the math font to Linux Libertine? You can do it like this:

Code: Select all

\usepackage{libertine}
\usepackage{libertinust1math}

(Source: https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/linuxlibertine/)

That way you don’t get that jarring alternation between Linux Libertine for the text and Computer Modern for the syllable structures. (At least, I find it jarring; probably most people won’t even notice!)

Thanks, I'll give it a try.

[akam chinjir]

This is so good.

(Maybe I'll come up with something more constructive to say tomorrow, when I should have time to finish reading, but for now, about halfway through, all I've got is praise.)

[chris_notts]

I haven't done more work on Pñæk itself, since I've been suffering a bit of burn-out to be honest. I did a bit most days for months, but every now and then I just need a break. But since the old SAE discussion popped up again, I decided to retake the online test.

https://risteq.net/languages/phonologytest.php

Firstly, phonology. The phonology of Pñæk is actually more or less Austroasiatic at least in its consonants and word structure, although the vowels are a bit different. Now, I wouldn't have said that Austroasiatic looks that European, since if anything it's much more permissive with its consonant clusters, but Pñæk score quite highly at 73/100.

https://risteq.net/languages/grammartest.php

On the grammar side, the score is 28/100, which is funny since if anything I was worried that some bits were too English-like. It's true that there are some very significant surface differences, but given that Pñæk is an isolating VO language, like English, certain solutions to common problems fall out "naturally".

[evmdbm]

Ploughing through this - up to chapter 4 on the noun phrase, but it does worry me that you have 139 pages and claim it's not finished! I felt quite pleased with myself at 20 or so pages for Vedreki and Cheyadeneen

[chris_notts]

Ploughing through this - up to chapter 4 on the noun phrase, but it does worry me that you have 139 pages and claim it's not finished! I felt quite pleased with myself at 20 or so pages for Vedreki and Cheyadeneen

To be fair, it depends what it's for. If it's for you, and you have a firm idea in your head of how the bits fit together, or intended as a summary, then 20 pages of notes may be plenty. I find, though, that I need to go into all the functional details and interactions in detail so things "fit" and I know thr right way to express things, and if you want other people to understand how to express anything in it that they can in English without guessing I think you need more. For comparison, here's the length of some grammars written by linguists I have handy:

The Manambu language of Papua New Guinea - 702 pages
A Grammar of Semelai - 493 pages
A Grammar of Tariana - 705 pages
Imonda, a Papuan language - 236 pages
The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia - 732 pages

And some more learner oriented material:

An Introduction to Classical Nahuatl - 453 pages
The Basque Language - 462 pages
Georgian, a Learner's Grammar - 482 pages
Thai Reference Grammar - 443 pages
Modern Spanish Grammar - 446 pages
Colloquial Japanese - 386 pages

So the question is whether your grammar is intended for you, as an introduction for others, or as a complete grammar for others, and if for you how much you personally need on paper to feel happy that you know how to express things.

[aporaporimos]

Wow, this is really impressive! I used to use Latex for my conlangs, but eventually I gave up the pretense that my notes were intended to be comprehensible to anyone except myself... now I just use a word processor. (And my Latex skills are pretty limited.)

Reading through at a leisurely pace; I've made it through chapter 4. Random thing I like is the "maybe me, maybe you" construction you use instead of an explicit disjunctive coordinator. Is it based on a real-world model? I wanted to avoid having a word for "or" in one of my languages, but I didn't think of / wasn't aware of this strategy.

[chris_notts]

Wow, this is really impressive! I used to use Latex for my conlangs, but eventually I gave up the pretense that my notes were intended to be comprehensible to anyone except myself... now I just use a word processor. (And my Latex skills are pretty limited.)

Reading through at a leisurely pace; I've made it through chapter 4. Random thing I like is the "maybe me, maybe you" construction you use instead of an explicit disjunctive coordinator. Is it based on a real-world model? I wanted to avoid having a word for "or" in one of my languages, but I didn't think of / wasn't aware of this strategy.

At the clausal level, I believe use of modal markers for "or" is quite common. In "The Semantics of Clause Linking", Dixon claims:

As said before, relatively few languages have a construction in which two clauses are linked by a disjunctive element similar to English or. Instead they may employ, in each clause, a modifier such as 'might (be)' - 'The chef might fry fish or he might roast chicken on Friday' (implying that he'll probably do one of these things, but it's not impossible that he will do neither). This is one way of indicating an open disjunction.

There's also this paper, which gives a few examples of non-dedicated modal markers for "or". Commonly these also function as "if", "maybe", "future", "irrealis", ...:

https://www.academia.edu/427085/The_irr ... isjunction

For example:

WARI’
’am ’e’ ca ’am mi’ pin ca
perhaps live 3 perhaps give complete 3
‘Either he will live or he will die.’ (lit.‘perhaps he will live, perhaps hewill die’)

The same paper says:

Thee behavior of Wari’ is not an isolated case, since other languages without a disjunctive connective use similar irrealis markers to allow the inference of an al-ternative relation. As will be made clear in Section 3, by disjunctive connective is meant here any dedicated marker which specifically encodes the relation of alter-native. An irrealis marker, on the other hand, is a marker that encodes the irreal-ity of the SoA in which it occurs (it can be a dubitative adverb, a hypothetical orinterrogative mood, a question marker, a conditional conjunction and so on, see Section 3.2).

A glance at what happens in the languages of the world reveals two majorsignificant phenomena: (i) the relation of alternative is expressed by a variety ofdifferent morphosyntactic strategies in individual languages; (ii) languages with-out a disjunctive connective express the relation of alternative with the same strategies they use to convey other meanings belonging to the overall domain of irreality. Yet, none of these facts has been investigated in detail in the cross-linguistic literature on coordination (Longacre 1985, Mithun 1988, Stassen 2001, Wälchli2005, Haspelmath 2006)

See also:

https://www.unige.ch/lettres/linguistiq ... _12_11.pdf

(12) Hup (Vaupés Japurá, Epps 2005: 683)
wĭh cím’-íy=cud ʔûhníy, yaʔambŏʔ g’əç-əy=cud ʔûhníy
hawk claw-DYNM=INFR maybe dog bite-DYNM=INFR maybe
‘Either the hawk clawed (it), or the dog bit (it), apparently.

Knowing if there is any language that uses this as its dominant strategy for nominal disjunction is harder. The Pñæk strategy is basically to not have a dedicated nominal strategy, and to only have (elliptical) clausal disjunction. Finding a good typology of nominal disjunction isn't easy. The reason I went this way was to keep things "simple": I know from the length of the grammar it doesn't seem that way, but I was trying with Pñæk to do more with less. It doesn't have adpositions, it doesn't really many semantically specific clause linkers, and so on. There's an awful lot that's either conveyed by fairly open classes (verbs, adverbs) or is just conveyed by context.

[chris_notts]

The following post claims some languages use "and if not..." for nominal disjunction:

https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics ... or_at_the/

A lot of languages don't even have "or" in the first place. Disjunctive meanings may be realized, for example, by simply asking a second question (Do you want tea? Water?).

Those that do have identifiable disjunctions may be polymorphemic and semantically transparent. Lai, Naxi, and Nuosu (all different branches of Sino-Tibetan) all use a variant of "and if it's not," with the disjunction "or" being made up of a conjunction "and," a negative, and an existential/copula. Hawaiian has similar, but doesn't have an explicit copula, just "and if not." Some languages, like Korean, just have a negated and/or conditional existential "if it's not" without a conjunctive coordinator.

These can overlap or have further distinctions. In Naxi, for example, nominal disjunction uses "and if it's not" while verbal disjunction uses a dedicated form. On the other hand, the nominal conjunction can be used disjunctively as well, leaving it up to context whether the intended meaning is "and" or "or," and two negative clauses is sequence are ambiguous between conjunction and disjunction (something that happens in English even with an explicit disjunction, where "he didn't X or Y" can be read disjunctively as "he didn't do one, but did do the other" or conjunctively as "he didn't do either.).

[aporaporimos]

Oh, that paper looks interesting—thanks! FWIW, what I did for that conlang: there are disjunctive questions, formed by repeating the clause-final interrogative marker wa after each of the options. (Usually the first option is a complete clause, and the second is elliptical, consisting of just the element that differs from the first clause. Nouns are marked with case, so ellipsis doesn't normally cause ambiguity.) Then that same construction can be used in a declarative context for (exclusive) disjunction. Looking through the paper, there are a lot of languages that form disjunctive questions by repeating an interrogative marker, but I don't see any that use the same marker in realis contexts.

One idea I had but hadn't fleshed out is that if nouns are placed in sequence with no explicit coordination, it can be interpreted as either "and" or inclusive "or." The paper gives examples of languages that work that way, and even suggests a helpful way of distinguishing them: a realis verb favors the "and" interpretation, an irrealis verb favors "or."

[chris_notts]

Oh, that paper looks interesting—thanks! FWIW, what I did for that conlang: there are disjunctive questions, formed by repeating the clause-final interrogative marker wa after each of the options. (Usually the first option is a complete clause, and the second is elliptical, consisting of just the element that differs from the first clause. Nouns are marked with case, so ellipsis doesn't normally cause ambiguity.) Then that same construction can be used in a declarative context for (exclusive) disjunction. Looking through the paper, there are a lot of languages that form disjunctive questions by repeating an interrogative marker, but I don't see any that use the same marker in realis contexts.

Yes, I'm wondering now if I should add a mention of the multiple question strategy for interrogatives in Pñæk. It makes sense, to go along with the "maybe X, maybe Y" and "if not X then Y" strategies which are possibly more appropriate for declarative clauses.

One idea I had but hadn't fleshed out is that if nouns are placed in sequence with no explicit coordination, it can be interpreted as either "and" or inclusive "or." The paper gives examples of languages that work that way, and even suggests a helpful way of distinguishing them: a realis verb favors the "and" interpretation, an irrealis verb favors "or."

I was surprised to see some languages did that - it feels a bit too ambiguous for me, but I guess it's not since there are real people doing it!

[aporaporimos]

One strategy I thought of but which I don't know of any language actually using, is a partitive construction: "Between James and John, one of them left."

[bradrn]

By now, I’ve read up to section 11 (‘Clause Linking’) of the Pñæk grammar, and I’ve skimmed the next few chapters, so I feel like I’m now in a better position to give some feedback other than ‘you use LaTeX wrong’.

Firstly: How dare you peer into my mind and steal all my best ideas! I’m working on an SVO isolating conlang as well, and Pñæk uses all the best ideas I was looking forward to using!! Now I’ll have to find new ideas so my conlang doesn’t become a Pñæk ripoff!!! Do you have any idea how much work that will be?!!!! You should feel ashamed of yourself for doing such an awful thing to me!!!!!

(Terry Pratchett once said that ‘five exclamation marks are the sure sign of an insane mind’. On reflection, I think he was right.)

Now on a more serious note: In case I have to say this explicitly, I don’t seriously think you read my mind, nor do I think you should be ashamed of yourself. Rather, I think you should be proud, for making what is one of the most detailed conlangs I’ve ever seen. Parts of it are even more detailed than many natlang grammars!

In terms of the content itself, I don’t have too many comments or criticisms. Here’s all the ones I can think of, which are mostly places where you’ve forgotten to include something:

• It would be nice to know if Pñæk is set in a conworld, or if it’s purely a personal artlang.
• Similarly, does Pñæk have any diachronics behind it?
• The Pñæk linker takes the form ⟨-’r⟩ after a vowel. However, this seems to disobey the phonotactics, which states that a word may not end with a consonant cluster. It would be nice to resolve this apparent contradiction.
• On pages 22–23, you give the meaning of the agent nominalisation (‘derives words for those who typically perform the action described by the verb’) and the process/result nominalisation (‘marks nominalisations which describe the process or result of a verb’), but you don’t include the meaning of the instrument/locative nominalisation. I assume this is probably just an accidental omission.
• The organisation of section 3.1 (on the nominalisation infixes) seems decidedly odd to me. Normally, if I were writing a grammar, I would first describe the basic meaning of an affix, then its exact semantics, and finally any phonological issues. However, you do nearly the opposite: first you define their semantics (subsection 3.1.1), then their phonology (3.1.2–3.1.3), and only at the very end do you say what their meaning is (3.1.4–3.1.7). I think you should alter the order of these subsections to give a more logical flow.
• You give a set of nominalisers in section 4.8, which is part of chapter 4 (The Noun Phrase). However, these nominalisers are described as having several functions, only some of which relate to the noun phrase. Due to this, I think you should move section 4.8 into chapter 2 (Word Classes).
• Section 5.2 (Basic Argument Structures) seems to be purely a typological overview. You could probably remove it with minimal impact to the rest of the grammar.
• Two of the moods of Pñæk are ones you call ‘indicative’ and ‘subjunctive’. However, to me these seem to be closer to realis and irrealis (although admittedly I’m hardly an expert on this topic).
• A positive criticism: I really like chapter 8, on SVCs. (Although I may be biased — right now I’m in the middle of Dixon and Aikhenvald’s Serial Verb Constructions: A Cross-Linguistic Typology, which you’ve based your description on.)

None of those issues are particularly large or important. However, I see one other issue with this grammar which is more serious. At the moment, this grammar doesn’t actually feel like a reference grammar in some hard-to-define way; instead, it feels like the first few chapters of a reference grammar followed by a series of typological overviews with no discernable order, where the details just happen to make up a description of Pñæk. I know that this was sort of the whole point, but given that it’s titled ‘A Grammar of Pñæk’ (rather than, say, ‘A Typological Overview of Pñæk’), I feel that you should reorganise this grammar into a more logical order more suited to a reference grammar. Here’s what I suggest:

1. Phonology (your chapter 1)
2. Word classes (your chapter 2 + 5 + section 4.8)
3. The Noun Phrase (your chapter 4)
4. Basic Clause Structure and Verbal Marking (your chapter 6 + 5.7 + 10)
5. Special Predicates (your chapter 7)
6. Serial Verb Constructions (your chapter 8)
7. Spatial and Temporal Expressions (your chapter 13 + 14)
8. Clause Linking (your chapter 11 + 12)
9. Derivational Processes (your chapter 3)
10. Discourse Pragmatics and Reference (your chapter 9)

To me, this seems like a much more logical flow compared to the current grammar.