Warning: long, rambling, migraine-inducing post about syntax, and writing a grammar.
The languages of the Middle Seas are intended to feel quite foreign. They have a bit of a North American / Mesoamerican feel, and they don't really distinguish verb from nouns.
I'd also like to write grammars for these that don't skimp on syntax.
It turns out these two goals are fairly hard to reconcile!
As an example, I'll use Simbri, the language I've been working on lately.
A bit on typology:
- It's non-configurational: that is, word orders bears no relation to grammatical function. Instead, the focus is place first, and word order more or less follows an order newer information > older information.
- It's omnipredicative: basically, verbs or noun can indifferently function as predicate.
- For that matter, there's no real distinction between noun and verb. That is, words are translated either as nouns or verbs in English, but from a Simbri perspective, there's no good test for distinguishing the two.
Let's consider an independant sentence:
Ya xallo an etliqer am wannina an tlebaqo soma, taream.
Anyway, by following the tracks, we found out it was the beautiful panther that ate grandma.
- ya
- anwyay
- xallo
- beautiful
- an
- of
- 1.SBJ
- e-
-
- tl-
- ANIM-
- iq<e>r
- learn<PL>
- am
- of
- wannin
- panther
- -a
- -PRF
- an
- of
- tle-
- ANIM-
- baqo
- devour
- s-
- 1.POSS-
- oma
- grandmother
- tarea
- track
- =m
- =ABS
xallo,
beautiful , is the predicate: 'It was the beautiful one'. But it also modifies
panther (that relation could be explicitly marked but pragmatically, there's no need too).
etliqer is translated as a verb, 'we found out (about something animate)', though there's no reason why it couldn't be interpreted as the subject of
xallo: 'the one we found out is beautiful'.
wannin, 'panther' is fairly clearly a noun and
wannina an tlebaqo soma could be interpreted as 'the panther that ate grandma'. Except we're leaving something out:
wannin carries the perfect suffix
-a so the phrase is really a sentential object: 'we found out <it had been the panther that ate grandma>
taream is
tracks + the absolute suffix. It really modifies the entire sentence. More specifically it modifies both: 'it ate grandma (and left tracks)' and 'we found out about it (from the tracks)'
Another translation could be:
Anyway, it was the beautiful one, we discovered it, the panther that ate grandma, there were tracks.
Drawing a syntactic tree is kind of difficult.
Would it help to describe it in terms of transformations, or generative grammar?
I mean, I could describe as a series of transformations from the 'saner':
Ya etliqer wannina an xallo an tlebaqo soma, taream.
anyway we-found.out panther of beautiful of eat grandma, tracks-from
Which is a perfectly, normal, 'VSO' sentence to:
>
Ya wannina an xallo etliqer an tlebaqo soma, taream.
(Fronting 'beautiful panther')
>
Ya xallo etliqer am wannina an tlebaqo soma, taream.
(Leaving 'beautiful' alone in the focus slot)
But I feel that's cheating: it hides the complexity by pretending it's really an IE language underneath.
In fact there's no reason not to consider '
xallo' (beautiful) as the main verb.
Xallo,
it's beautiful, it's a beautiful one is a perfectly valid sentence. For that matter, it can take verbal inflections:
xalloa, 'it's been beautiful',
xanlo, 'it must be beautiful'.
Or would a different theory suit the language better?
Or maybe this really should be seen as a series of related sentences:
Anyway / it's the beautiful one / we discovered it / it was the panther / it ate grandma / tracks were left
That is, the real direct object of, say,
etleyiker is
tle 'something animate'.
an wannina 'it's been the panther' is really a different sentence that happens to be talking about the same thing?
Any ideas?
Another question: as I said, there's no fundamental difference between nouns and verbs.
wannin,
panther is a verb as well: 'to be a panther'. It's true in terms of morphology:
ewannin, 'I'm a panther',
winnin 'It wants to be a panther' as well as syntax.
Etymologically, it
is a verb;
wannin means 'he/she hunts' from
wanno.
"Nominal" and "verbal" morphology overlap quite a bit; but still wouldn't it make sense to describe them separately (noting when they overlap, of course). Or should I treat nouns as zero-derivations of verbs? Or the reverse, as the case may be?
Lexically, I could gloss
wannin as 'to be a jaguar' (or for that matter,
yiqor as 'the state of finding out about something'), but that feels artificial.
Syntactically, of course, there's little difference between noun phrases and verb phrases... So should I describe them as one? There are, still, more 'noun phrase-ish' constructions and 'noun-verbish' constructions after all...
None of this, by the way, is unattested in natlangs. For Nahuatl (which I've drawn on quite a bit for inspiration), there seems to be two approaches:
[*] Jettisoning all conventional ideas about language, and using an ad-hoc terminology and specific nomenclature. Very accurate, but you don't understand a thing. Plus it makes Nahuatl look like a language spoken by extradimensional beings and makes it look a lot more complex than it really is.
[*] Hiding the weirdness, under the hood. In reference grammars Nahuatl is described as being just like Spanish, and the weird stuff is kept for specialists in linguistics papers. The approach as the advantage of actually
working (you do understand how the language works!) but you know, writing a conlang grammar, I want to show the weird stuff!
Any ideas on what approach would work best?