Zompist Bboard Again

I just noticed the Mei grammar. Is this new? I can’t recall seeing it before, but the date is May 2023…

(Making this a new thread in case I or anyone else want to say comment further about Mei.)

(Also, hah, it’s an interesting coincidence that the Mei grammar should be dated to May, isn’t it?)

Yeah, I'm not great at publicizing new things.

It was posted on the Patreon, and now it's public (and html-ized).

The excerpt from Koi Ɣanai... was that a stand-up comedy routine that he or a friend wrote down?

BGMan wrote: ↑Tue Mar 25, 2025 9:45 am The excerpt from Koi Ɣanai... was that a stand-up comedy routine that he or a friend wrote down?

It is rather written like stand-up comedy, yes. No bio yet for the man, though.

Transitive bodily actions on another person are nominative-accusative; but if they’re done on oneself (i.e. they’re reflexive), they’re ergative.

Koi tezaɣu. Tezaño.
Koi shave-past.1>3s / shave-past.ø>1s
I shaved Koi. I shaved (myself).

This looks like it might be described in terms of a middle voice from what I know of middle voices. Is that fair? There is a patient but no known/specified agent.

evmdbm wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 6:42 am This looks like it might be described in terms of a middle voice from what I know of middle voices. Is that fair?

Originally I was going to say ‘no’, on the basis that there would be no verbs where the putative ‘middle voice’ alternates with a non-middle form. But in fact there are: it has the effect of a passive on transitive verbs. So I guess you could call it a ‘mediopassive’, as in IE. It’s a weird one, though, because for transitive verbs it’s only passive, with no more prototypically middle meanings like reflexivity.

Another analysis is that this is a split-S system: there are some intransitive verbs where S aligns with A, and others where it aligns with O. (In Mei the latter class is small and closed; this is similar to natlangs like Arikawa.) Although there is again weirdness: usually stative verbs are prototypically S=O, but in Mei that category includes no stative verbs at all.

A third possible analysis is that these verbs really are underlyingly transitive, with a dummy subject. Such things are widely attested, as ‘involuntary state constructions’ (if you’re a Papuanist) or ‘transimpersonals’ (if you’re an Americanist). Typically these have weird subjecthood properties; I don’t know enough on subjecthood properties in Mei to comment.