Leima

[quinterbeck]

Lots of interesting things happening in this sentence! I’d like to ask some questions about it:

1. Is there any particular reason why the habitual is marked on the noun rather than the verb?
2. What does ‘ABST’ mean?
3. yeinoh-odu ‘too easily’ looks like an adverb, but is marked with the instrumental case — how does that work?
4. And a minor typo: you glossed ‘end’ as complete when surely it should be onnih.

Thanks for asking! For context, Leima's not a very naturalistic conlang. The role a language's verbs typically perform is divided between auxiliaries, a small closed class which are semantically light and can carry a lot of marking, and verbs, a large open class which have very limited marking. Auxiliaries are also required for most modifying phrases.

The allative auxiliary houh coordinates two arguments with the sense of 'X is oriented towards Y'/'Y is X's destination', and here it carries the habitual aspect. Yarhouha means 'I come to', 'I arrive at'.

ABST is probably a poor glossing choice - it's an abstract nominalizer for verbs, so ABST-end = ending, completion. Might update my conventions to NMLZ.

Instrumental gum is another auxiliary, 'X uses Y'/'X happens in the manner of Y'. Here it's the head of the adverbial phrase, modifying the predicate.

Leima uses a lot of nouns of quality, having no class of adjectives. By itself, yeinohodu is a quantified noun meaning 'too much ease', but placed correctly can mean 'too easy', for example, with PROP being the auxiliary of property:

Dalro yeinohodu

Dad-ro

PROP.PST-DIST

yeinoh-odu

ease-too.much

That was too easy

Typo fixed!

[bradrn]

Thanks for asking! For context, Leima's not a very naturalistic conlang.…

I’m not sure why you think this isn’t naturalistic, since I’ve seen this same system in quite a few northern Australian languages! Most famously, Jingulu has only three inflecting auxiliaries, ‘go’, ‘come’ and ‘do’, with all other verbal meanings being expressed by an open class of verbs (a situation sometimes inaccurately described as ‘having only three verbs’). If you translate your auxiliaries as ‘come’, ‘use’ etc. instead of ‘allative’, ‘instrumental’, your system looks very similar to that. (Though it’s interesting that you can have two auxilliaries in the same clause… I wonder if that qualifies as a serial verb construction?) The whole thing is also a bit reminiscent of the ‘verbal case’ system of Kayardild, though I wouldn’t know enough about that to say for sure.

Leima uses a lot of nouns of quality, having no class of adjectives.

Interesting — I thought my conlang was the only one which did this! (Though there do seem to be differences — whereas your ‘adjectives’ are nouns of quality, mine denote objects with that quality, an option which seems more common in natlangs.)