Conlang Random Thread

[aporaporimos]

Starting to sketch out a language, and I'm thinking of marking the person and number of the verb subject separately; say, person with a prefix, number with a suffix. And I'm including a clusivity distinction in the person, so there are four categories: 1st exclusive, 1st inclusive, 2nd, 3rd. Number is singular/plural. Now, the singular/plural distinction is otiose for 1st person inclusive, since it logically has to be plural. So, my idea is to use the "1st person inclusive singular" form for the dual (just me and you, no one else) and the corresponding plural form for "me and you and one or more other people." Does this make sense, if the language otherwise doesn't have dual number as a category? Are there any natural languages that do this?

[Pabappa]

I've seen that in other conlangs at least, and it certainly works well enough. You could also distinguish number in the 1st person exclusive too if you wanted .... consider "me and him" vs "me and them".

[aporaporimos]

Well 1st person exclusive singular is just normal 1st person singular "I/me."

[chris_notts]

Starting to sketch out a language, and I'm thinking of marking the person and number of the verb subject separately; say, person with a prefix, number with a suffix. And I'm including a clusivity distinction in the person, so there are four categories: 1st exclusive, 1st inclusive, 2nd, 3rd. Number is singular/plural. Now, the singular/plural distinction is otiose for 1st person inclusive, since it logically has to be plural. So, my idea is to use the "1st person inclusive singular" form for the dual (just me and you, no one else) and the corresponding plural form for "me and you and one or more other people." Does this make sense, if the language otherwise doesn't have dual number as a category? Are there any natural languages that do this?

Similar things are definitely attested. Take Otomi for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otomi_gra ... t_and_mood

It has person marking by subject, plural marking by a suffix, and a clusivity distinction. It doesn't have the exact plural inclusive meaning you want, but this is well known in independent pronoun systems and called a "minimal augmented" system. Googling suggests that Winnebago combines the two. See the following from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnebago ... n_prefixes

Person and number marking paradigm for intransitive action verb šgaac
Ho-Chunk verb Translation
Agent 1SG hašgac (ha-šgac) 'I play'
2SG rašgac (ra-šgac) 'you play'
3SG šgaac (∅-šgac) 'he or she plays'
1I.DU hįšgac (hį-šgac) 'you and I play'
1I.PL hįšgacwi (hį-šgac-wi) 'we (inclusive) play'
1E.PL hašgacwi (ha-šgac-wi) 'we (exclusive) play'
2PL rašgacwi (ra-šgac-wi) 'you (plural) play'
3PL šgaacire (šgaac-ire) 'they play'

[aporaporimos]

Thanks, this is helpful!

[bradrn]

A couple of miscellaneous grammar questions which I couldn’t find an answer to anywhere else:

1. Is it plausible to mark number as well as definiteness in an article? (e.g. having four articles: DEF.SG, DEF.PLU, INDF.SG, INDF.PLU)
2. Is it at all attested (or at least plausible) to allow articles to co-occur with demonstratives? I imagine it’s not, since demonstratives are usually inherently definite. (Motivation: if it is plausible to have articles marking definiteness, allowing constructions like ‘DEF.PLU that’ seems like an easy way to avoid having to make separate singular and plural demonstratives.)

[Pabappa]

the 1st question is just basically like Spanish la~las / una~unas, so that's a definite yes.

the 2nd question I dont know about .... English can say "this one", "that one", etc ... and the word a~an derives from "one" ... but the word here is functioning as a noun, not a demonstrative. Also English allows "this book here", "the book here", "a book here" where the subordinator that is is omitted. Thats still not what you want, because the function words are positioned on opposite sides of the content word, but i could definitely see it happening and wouldnt be surprised if it has. however a language that does this is liable to evolve into one where the forms have fused and are no longer analyzable as separate morphemes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_ ... e_pronouns <---- Romanian might have done it ... though i should caution that my sole basis for that speculation is that i see three /l/'s in one word, which is unusual considering Romanian deleted much of its /l/.

[bradrn]

the 1st question is just basically like Spanish la~las / una~unas, so that's a definite yes.

Thanks! I had a feeling that there were already attested languages which do this.

the 2nd question I dont know about .... English can say "this one", "that one", etc ... and the word a~an derives from "one" ... but the word here is functioning as a noun, not a demonstrative. Also English allows "this book here", "the book here", "a book here" where the subordinator that is is omitted. Thats still not what you want, because the function words are positioned on opposite sides of the content word, but i could definitely see it happening and wouldnt be surprised if it has. however a language that does this is liable to evolve into one where the forms have fused and are no longer analyzable as separate morphemes.

As you say, I’m not sure either of your examples qualify. In ‘this one’, the ‘one’ is definitely acting as the noun here — more specifically, I believe it can be considered to be a pro-NP. As for ‘this book here’, I’m not entirely sure how to analyse that, but it’s definitely not what I’m looking for, since ‘this’ and ‘here’ are both modifying a noun ‘book’, whereas I want an article to directly modify a demonstrative such as ‘this’.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_ ... e_pronouns <---- Romanian might have done it

I’m not quite sure what you’re pointing out here… that looks like a pretty standard system, and the article doesn’t make any reference to articles occuring with demonstratives.

[Pabappa]

yeah I msorry ... I always post hastily and then edit my posts .... even when I made that post, I wasnt very sure of myself, so I wrote "might have", but i should have been more clear what i was unsure about.

Romanian did /l/ > /r/, and then /ll/ > /l/, which is why the definite article still has it. Exceptions in content words are common because of loans, but it catches my eye that a function word would happen to have three /l/'s in it.

Anyway ... hmmm ... so if a language started with an expression equivalent to "one of these books", with a plural form equivalent to "some of these books", where the "of" was a genitive marker on the demonstrative ..... and then lost its genitive, would that be what youre looking for? Someone with deeper knowledge may be able to straight-up pull out an example of this but I can still think of possibilities, which, if this is for a conlang, might be all you really need.

[bradrn]

yeah I msorry ... I always post hastily and then edit my posts .... even when I made that post, I wasnt very sure of myself, so I wrote "might have", but i should have been more clear what i was unsure about.

Yes, I have the same habit as well.

Romanian did /l/ > /r/, and then /ll/ > /l/, which is why the definite article still has it. Exceptions in content words are common because of loans, but it catches my eye that a function word would happen to have three /l/'s in it.

Anyway ... hmmm ... so if a language started with an expression equivalent to "one of these books", with a plural form equivalent to "some of these books", where the "of" was a genitive marker on the demonstrative ..... and then lost its genitive, would that be what youre looking for? Someone with deeper knowledge may be able to straight-up pull out an example of this but I can still think of possibilities, which, if this is for a conlang, might be all you really need.

That makes sense as a possible explanation, but I’d be reluctant to include this feature in my conlang purely on the basis of such indirect evidence.

[bradrn]

I was looking through WALS when I stumbled across two examples of demonstratives and articles together. From Kana (Niger-Congo):

ló

DEF

bári

fish

āmā

this

this fish

And from Ngiti (Central Sudanic):

yà

this

ndɨ

DEF

dza

house

this house (mentioned before)

So the answer to my question 2 appears to be ‘yes’.

[Kuchigakatai]

A couple of miscellaneous grammar questions which I couldn’t find an answer to anywhere else:

1. Is it plausible to mark number as well as definiteness in an article? (e.g. having four articles: DEF.SG, DEF.PLU, INDF.SG, INDF.PLU)
2. Is it at all attested (or at least plausible) to allow articles to co-occur with demonstratives? I imagine it’s not, since demonstratives are usually inherently definite. (Motivation: if it is plausible to have articles marking definiteness, allowing constructions like ‘DEF.PLU that’ seems like an easy way to avoid having to make separate singular and plural demonstratives.)

I'm... pretty surprised and mystified by question #1... In your reply to Pabappa, it sounds like you haven't yet looked at European article inflections. Most eurolangs with articles inflect them. Maybe it's one of those things that have mysteriously somehow escaped you...

#2 is attested in Egyptian Arabic, which uses the pattern article + noun + demonstrative (+ adjective / relative clause...).

ez-zuraar da ("the-button PROX") 'this button', plural ez-zaraayer da
ez-zuraar di ("the-button DIST") 'that button', plural ez-zaraayer di


While we're at it, a question for you. What is more attractive in this thread for you for these questions about natlangs, instead of something in the Languages subforum? I'm aware that de facto we don't care much about enforcing subforum differences in the random threads, but I'm still curious.

[bradrn]

A couple of miscellaneous grammar questions which I couldn’t find an answer to anywhere else:

1. Is it plausible to mark number as well as definiteness in an article? (e.g. having four articles: DEF.SG, DEF.PLU, INDF.SG, INDF.PLU)
2. Is it at all attested (or at least plausible) to allow articles to co-occur with demonstratives? I imagine it’s not, since demonstratives are usually inherently definite. (Motivation: if it is plausible to have articles marking definiteness, allowing constructions like ‘DEF.PLU that’ seems like an easy way to avoid having to make separate singular and plural demonstratives.)

I'm... pretty surprised and mystified by question #1... In your reply to Pabappa, it sounds like you haven't yet looked at European article inflections. Most eurolangs with articles inflect them. Maybe it's one of those things that have mysteriously somehow escaped you...

There’s no mystery about that — it’s simply that I have absolutely no linguistic knowledge whatsoever of most European languages. (Aside from English, of course.) It’s one of those areas which I’ve just never gotten around to learning about.

#2 is attested in Egyptian Arabic, which uses the pattern article + noun + demonstrative (+ article / relative clause...).

ez-zuraar da ("the-button PROX") 'this button', plural ez-zaraayer da
ez-zuraar di ("the-button DIST") 'that button', plural ez-zaraayer di

Thanks! As it happens, I decided just a few minutes ago to use that same order.

Also, if you can answer this question: what exactly are the semantic/pragmatic implications of using no article vs. the definite article vs. the indefinite article (if all three options are separate) with a demonstrative? I was mostly asking #2 to know whether I could move the number distinction from the demonstrative to the article, but I’m struggling a bit with figuring out the exact semantics of the choice of definiteness when a demonstrative is used.

While we're at it, a question for you. What is more attractive in this thread for you for these questions about natlangs, instead of something in the Languages subforum? I'm aware that de facto we don't care much about enforcing subforum differences in the random threads, but I'm still curious.

Honestly, I wasn’t too sure which subforum to post it in. But since I was asking questions along the lines of ‘is it plausible to use … in my conlang’, I figured that this thread would be better. (I honestly thought the answer to my question 1 would be something along the lines of ‘it’s not attested, but it sounds plausible enough for a conlang’, and was pleasantly surprised to find it wasn’t.) But for questions of the form ‘is … attested’, I would definitely be using the Languages subforum. And I’d be fine with moving this conversation to the Linguistic Miscellany Thread if you want.

(Admittedly, using this thread for linguistic questions isn’t too unusual for me… if you look back at the posts around December and January, you’ll see that I was asking a lot of linguistic questions — probably an excessive amount of them, actually — in this thread, mostly because I wasn’t quite aware of the Linguistic Miscellany Thread at that stage and I didn’t like the idea of making a new thread for each question.)

[Richard W]

Is it at all attested (or at least plausible) to allow articles to co-occur with demonstratives? I imagine it’s not, since demonstratives are usually inherently definite. (Motivation: if it is plausible to have articles marking definiteness, allowing constructions like ‘DEF.PLU that’ seems like an easy way to avoid having to make separate singular and plural demonstratives.)

Further examples for this 'ere question are the italicised phrase before (words on same side) and. more obscurely, the origin of the English word this, a double demonstrative of some form. In Old English both parts of thes were declined; English has sort of dropped the declension of the second part (plural these, replacing those) while the German cognate has dropped the declension of the first part.

[bradrn]

Is it at all attested (or at least plausible) to allow articles to co-occur with demonstratives? I imagine it’s not, since demonstratives are usually inherently definite. (Motivation: if it is plausible to have articles marking definiteness, allowing constructions like ‘DEF.PLU that’ seems like an easy way to avoid having to make separate singular and plural demonstratives.)

Further examples for this 'ere question are the italicised phrase before (words on same side) and. more obscurely, the origin of the English word this, a double demonstrative of some form. In Old English both parts of thes were declined; English has sort of dropped the declension of the second part (plural these, replacing those) while the German cognate has dropped the declension of the first part.

Both of those examples are double demonstratives, rather than a demonstrative+article. But it’s very interesting all the same!

As for the etymology of this: I’m not too sure I understand what you’re talking about. Your Wiktionary link says it originally came from demonstrative base *to- + definitive suffix *-s; is that what you’re referring to? But I’m not sure what you mean by ‘declining both parts’.

(And by the way, your link appears to be wrong; it’s going to verduria.org rather than wiktionary.org.)

[Richard W]

As for the etymology of this: I’m not too sure I understand what you’re talking about. Your Wiktionary link says it originally came from demonstrative base *to- + definitive suffix *-s; is that what you’re referring to? But I’m not sure what you mean by ‘declining both parts’.

I meant that both the base and the suffix were declined. Looking at what Wiktionary has, it seems to be either or - either the base has the case and number affix, or the suffix does.

The demonstrative base is none other than the ancestor of the English definite article.

[aporaporimos]

A couple of miscellaneous grammar questions which I couldn’t find an answer to anywhere else:

1. Is it plausible to mark number as well as definiteness in an article? (e.g. having four articles: DEF.SG, DEF.PLU, INDF.SG, INDF.PLU)
2. Is it at all attested (or at least plausible) to allow articles to co-occur with demonstratives? I imagine it’s not, since demonstratives are usually inherently definite. (Motivation: if it is plausible to have articles marking definiteness, allowing constructions like ‘DEF.PLU that’ seems like an easy way to avoid having to make separate singular and plural demonstratives.)

Articles are mandatory with demonstratives in Ancient Greek:

οὗτος ὁ ποιητὴς σοφός ἐστιν.

houtos

this-MASC.NOM.S

ho

DEF.MASC.NOM.S

poiêtês

poet-NOM.S

sophos

wise-MASC.NOM.S

estin.

be-3s.PRES.INDIC

This poet is wise.

Both the article and the demonstrative inflect fully for gender, case, and number. If there were no article, the demonstrative would have to be interpreted as an independent pronoun, and the most likely meaning would be "This (man) is a wise poet." (Greek has no indefinite article.)

Edit: I'd also note the order isn't fixed: 'demonstrative article noun" is most common, but "article noun demonstrative" occurs as well. I believe even other syntactic elements may occur between the demonstrative and the article+noun unit, but this wouldn't be common in prose (and poetry can omit the article).

Greek is of course also an example of your #1, as the article inflects for number (as well as for case and gender).

[bradrn]

A couple of miscellaneous grammar questions which I couldn’t find an answer to anywhere else:

1. Is it plausible to mark number as well as definiteness in an article? (e.g. having four articles: DEF.SG, DEF.PLU, INDF.SG, INDF.PLU)
2. Is it at all attested (or at least plausible) to allow articles to co-occur with demonstratives? I imagine it’s not, since demonstratives are usually inherently definite. (Motivation: if it is plausible to have articles marking definiteness, allowing constructions like ‘DEF.PLU that’ seems like an easy way to avoid having to make separate singular and plural demonstratives.)

Articles are mandatory with demonstratives in Ancient Greek:

Thanks! That’s pretty interesting.

____

Now, I’ve been thinking about my #1 a bit more, and I realised that the systems in Spanish, Ancient Greek etc. weren’t quite what I had in mind. In those languages, the article agrees with the noun in number, but number is primarily marked as an affix on the noun. But in the system I was thinking about, number is marked only on the article. So e.g. the systems I’ve been given do something like ‘DEF.PLU person-PLU’ for the people, but I was thinking about doing ‘DEF.PLU person’, where the only marker of plurality is the article. Does this system sound plausible as well?

[aporaporimos]

A couple of miscellaneous grammar questions which I couldn’t find an answer to anywhere else:

1. Is it plausible to mark number as well as definiteness in an article? (e.g. having four articles: DEF.SG, DEF.PLU, INDF.SG, INDF.PLU)
2. Is it at all attested (or at least plausible) to allow articles to co-occur with demonstratives? I imagine it’s not, since demonstratives are usually inherently definite. (Motivation: if it is plausible to have articles marking definiteness, allowing constructions like ‘DEF.PLU that’ seems like an easy way to avoid having to make separate singular and plural demonstratives.)

Articles are mandatory with demonstratives in Ancient Greek:

Thanks! That’s pretty interesting.

____

Now, I’ve been thinking about my #1 a bit more, and I realised that the systems in Spanish, Ancient Greek etc. weren’t quite what I had in mind. In those languages, the article agrees with the noun in number, but number is primarily marked as an affix on the noun. But in the system I was thinking about, number is marked only on the article. So e.g. the systems I’ve been given do something like ‘DEF.PLU person-PLU’ for the people, but I was thinking about doing ‘DEF.PLU person’, where the only marker of plurality is the article. Does this system sound plausible as well?

I don't see why not. You could easily see it arising from Spanish-type system which then for some reason lost plural marking on nouns (say, due to phonological change). Or, alternatively, a formerly separate plural-marking particle could have merged with the article to produce a new plural article.

[bradrn]

Now, I’ve been thinking about my #1 a bit more, and I realised that the systems in Spanish, Ancient Greek etc. weren’t quite what I had in mind. In those languages, the article agrees with the noun in number, but number is primarily marked as an affix on the noun. But in the system I was thinking about, number is marked only on the article. So e.g. the systems I’ve been given do something like ‘DEF.PLU person-PLU’ for the people, but I was thinking about doing ‘DEF.PLU person’, where the only marker of plurality is the article. Does this system sound plausible as well?

I don't see why not. You could easily see it arising from Spanish-type system which then for some reason lost plural marking on nouns (say, due to phonological change). Or, alternatively, a formerly separate plural-marking particle could have merged with the article to produce a new plural article.

I quite like that second idea, actually! My NP word order is currently (simplified) POSSESSOR ARTICLE NOUN DEMONSTRATIVE= NUMERAL CLASSIFIER ADJECTIVES, so it would be pretty plausible to say that there used to be a plural marker immediately before the noun which then merged with the article. (Especially since the language is generally moving from an isolating language to a more synthetic one — there’s lots of clitics, and it would make sense that a couple of more common ones might have fused.)