Short questions for the Omni-kan project

[Vardelm]

These then form the ends of a continuum: perfective—habitual—stative—progressive...

I realize you're talking about a continuum in terms of what is marked/unmarked. However, if I just think about that continuum, in makes more sense to me to reverse the stative & progressive: perfective—habitual—progressive—stative. Maybe that's just me.

[bradrn]

These then form the ends of a continuum: perfective—habitual—stative—progressive...

I realize you're talking about a continuum in terms of what is marked/unmarked. However, if I just think about that continuum, in makes more sense to me to reverse the stative & progressive: perfective—habitual—progressive—stative. Maybe that's just me.

It’s not my idea — I got it from Comrie, though he phrases it in terms of a hierarchy:

comrie-aspect.png (2.23 KiB) Viewed 11909 times

I will admit to the same ‘feeling’ that progressive and stative should be swapped, though. I think the intuition behind it is that perfective events are ‘not ongoing’, whereas progressive events are ‘very ongoing’. Stative events (Comrie’s ‘nonprogressive’) are durative, but they’re not exactly ‘ongoing’ — they just are.

(Comrie talks about it in terms of ‘phases’, basically slices of activities — a progressive event has every slice of it slightly different, a stative event has every slice indistinguishable.)

[Qwynegold]

I've finished reading that thread now, and someone mentioned completive aspect. Maybe I should use that term instead?

Regarding the "I am lost" sentence (1SG PFV become lose), it makes a difference whether we consider the verb to be "get lost" or "be lost", right? I have not been making this distinction in Omni-kan, so there's for example no difference between "sit" and "sit down" or "stand" and "stand up". It's because I think often times this distinction is of no importance. Also consider this:

A PFV verb will typically denote a single event, seen as an unanalysed whole, with a well-defined result or end-state, located in the past. More often than not, the event will be punctual, or at least, it will be seen as a single transition from one state to its opposite, the duration of which can be disregarded.

"Lose" is a transition from "having" to "not having", right? So it's perfective. Though this is a moot point, if I just scrap the perfective idea completely and replace it with the completive aspect.

[bradrn]

I've finished reading that thread now, and someone mentioned completive aspect. Maybe I should use that term instead?

You can if you want. A lot of these terms aren’t particularly standardised.

Regarding the "I am lost" sentence (1SG PFV become lose), it makes a difference whether we consider the verb to be "get lost" or "be lost", right?

Yes, exactly. ‘Get lost’ is inchoative; ‘be lost’ is stative.

I have not been making this distinction in Omni-kan, so there's for example no difference between "sit" and "sit down" or "stand" and "stand up". It's because I think often times this distinction is of no importance.

That’s your prerogative — and systematic ambiguity between stative and inchoative is nothing new, even English does it — but I assume there is still some way to express this distinction periphrastically, right?

Also consider this:

A PFV verb will typically denote a single event, seen as an unanalysed whole, with a well-defined result or end-state, located in the past. More often than not, the event will be punctual, or at least, it will be seen as a single transition from one state to its opposite, the duration of which can be disregarded.

"Lose" is a transition from "having" to "not having", right? So it's perfective.

Yes, ‘getting lost’ is a punctual transition, so it’s a prototypical perfective event. (We can narrow it down even more by saying it’s ‘inchoative’, i.e. the initiation of a state.)

That being said, this doesn’t necessarily mean a language will have to place such an event in its perfective aspect, though I struggle to imagine one which wouldn’t.

Though this is a moot point, if I just scrap the perfective idea completely and replace it with the completive aspect.

Well, that will depend on the exact difference in semantics between your perfective and completive.

[Qwynegold]

Though this is a moot point, if I just scrap the perfective idea completely and replace it with the completive aspect.

Well, that will depend on the exact difference in semantics between your perfective and completive.

My perfective? If I go with the completive, there'll be no perfective. Anyway, this completive will just refer to an event that has been finished and fulfilled. It's different from the perfect aspect, because the perfect aspect refers to an event that was completed before some specific point in time. The completive aspect does not compare the time of the event to some other point in time. Hmm, I need to think a little more about this. One reason for having all these aspects was that they were supposed to help imply tense, which is not marked at all. But having just a perfect and a completive might not help with that.

[Qwynegold]

I'm wondering what are some common ways natlangs bring back the agent to a passive sentence? From what I can tell, marking it with a genitive, an ablative or an instrumental are some common methods. Is there anything that I've missed?

I'm not going to use the genitive for Omni-kan, so out of the ablative and instrumental, which one do you think is more "logical"? E.g. "man become bite from crocodile" vs. "man become bite with crocodile"?

[Vardelm]

I'm not going to use the genitive for Omni-kan, so out of the ablative and instrumental, which one do you think is more "logical"? E.g. "man become bite from crocodile" vs. "man become bite with crocodile"?

Coin flip, really. How much of a distinction do you want the language to make between agents & instruments? If you want them the same, go with instrumental. If you want them different, go with ablative.

[Chuma]

One of the few languages that have a specific masculine suffix would be Swedish (-e), but I guess you know that...

[Qwynegold]

Coin flip, really. How much of a distinction do you want the language to make between agents & instruments? If you want them the same, go with instrumental. If you want them different, go with ablative.

Aha, thanks for the input. I'll go with the ablative.

[Qwynegold]

One of the few languages that have a specific masculine suffix would be Swedish (-e), but I guess you know that...

Hmm, that's very rarely used on nouns, isn't it? Ideally the suffix should be CV or CVC.

[Qwynegold]

There are two details I can't make up my mind about. One is the masculine suffix. Again. I thought about maybe making it -nik, which is used in Russian and some other Slavic languages. But it seems like this suffix has some other uses besides being just a simple masculinizer. And it's not used just for animates either.

I've also thought about the Oromo masculine suffix -eessa, which has more of the usage I'm looking for. But the problem is that to European ears that sounds feminine. For example, if I were to borrow the word for prince from English, and added this suffix, the resulting word in Omni-kan would be eprinsesa...

The other thing is about alphabetization in the dictionary. Should the word the word yerei lo come before or after yere lo? I can't think of any reason why one way should be better than the other.

[Qwynegold]

I'm thinking about how to translate the sentence "the land is difficult to cultivate". I'm thinking about something like:

{cultivate_V land_DO}_VP NZ COP difficult

But there are two problems with this. One is that so far I've only used the nominalizer directly after a verb, not after a VP with an object. So I don't know if that should be allowed. The other problem is that a lot of the time you can't leave out the subject. But there's no reasonable subject I could put in that VP. There is an indefinite pronoun, with similar usage as English "one". But it doesn't feel like it makes sense to use "one" there.

The way I tried to form this sentence above is a bit similar to how Japanese and Finnish does it. The way English and Swedish does it feels syntactically complicated to me, and they both use a preceding infinitive marker which I don't have in Omni-kan. Does anyone happen to know other ways to do this?

For reference:
Japanese:
土地を耕すのは難しい。
tochi wo tagayasu no wa muzukashi-i
land OBJ cultivate NZ TOP difficult-PRS.FAM

Finnish 1:
Viljellä maata on vaikeaa.
viljellä maa-ta o-n vaikea-a
cultivate.INF land-PTV COP-PRS.3SG difficult-PTV

Finnish 2:
Maata on vaikea viljellä.
maa-ta o-n vaikea viljellä
land-PTV COP-PRS.3SG difficult cultivate.INF

Finnish 3:
Maa on vaikeasti viljeltävä.
maa o-n vaikea-sti viljelt-ävä
land.NOM COP-PRS.3SG difficult-ADVZ cultivate-PRS.PASS.PTCP

Swedish:
Det är svårt att odla jorden.
det ä-r svår-t att odla jord-en
it.N COP-PRS difficult-N INF cultivate earth-DEF.C