Ka'ekala sketchbook

[Emily]

(what the h*ck is a scratchpad)

ka'ekala is spoken in the lorradine islands, which were created for a nationstates country several years ago (e: 14 years ago??? holy shit). the country's aesthetic is "tropical paradise pastiche" and i always sort of figured the language would basically sound like a polynesian language. well a couple of years ago i started working on it, and in the past month or so have finally made some progress beyond the phonology and orthography, including some good work this morning on noun phrases. so i'll use this thread to post thoughts and updates

the main influence is polynesian (specifically hawaiian, which i have an introductory textbook for), but also luiseño so it isn't just a complete hawaiian clone (luiseño is the traditional native language of the area i grew up in, and is also specifically helpful in being a mostly SOV model i can use to get some perspective outside of hawaiian, which is VSO). other influences taken from various sources. this is all a work in progress. do not taunt happy fun ball

[Emily]

phonology

consonants: /p t k ʔ s l r j w m n ŋ/

• /p t k ʔ s/ are often [b d g h z] intervocalically
• /r/ is always trilled word-initially after a pause, always [ɾ] in the cluster /sr/; in free variation elsewhere
• /w/ has "hard" (fricative) and "soft" (approximant) realizations ([β w] in northeastern dialects, [v ʋ] in southwestern dialects)
  • pronounced hard ([β] or [v]): when deliberately enunciating; at onset of syllable with primary stress; at onset of syllable with secondary stress (usually); more common than soft pronunciation in non-stressed word initials
  • pronounced soft ([v] or [ʋ]): in cluster /sw/
  • in free variation otherwise

vowels:

• short: /a e i o u/
• long: /aː eː iː oː uː/
• diphthongs: /ai ei oi ui au eu iu ou aːi eːi oːi uːi aːu eːu iːu oːu/

syllable structure: (C)V; nucleus is short vowel, long vowel, or diphthong; onset is option consonant. a word (not just any old syllable) can additionally begin with /s/ followed by any consonant other than /s/ or /ʔ/, and can end with any of the nasal consonants (/m n ŋ/). prefixes on sC- words or suffixes on -N words are inserted between this consonant and the rest of the root: nalu- "our (dual inclusive)" + skūra "shark" = snalukūra "our shark"; lungīn "iguana" + -pā (animate plural) = lungīpān "iguanas". (if a prefix beginning with /s/ or /ʔ/ is attached to a word beginning with sC, the /s/ or /ʔ/ from the prefix is not pronounced, but is still written)

primary stress is phonemic but only semi-predictable. (although writing this out reminds me i haven't made any minimal pairs yet for stress yet!) basically:

• if one of the final two syllables has a long vowel and/or diphthong, that syllable receives stress; if they both do, the penultimate syllable is stressed
• if neither of the last two syllables has a long vowel or diphthong, but one of the two syllables begins with /ʔ/, the stress falls on the syllable before the /ʔ/, unless the /ʔ/ is the first sound in a two-syllable word in which case the first syllable is stressed
• if neither of the last two syllables has a long vowel, a diphthong, or a /ʔ/, but the word ends in a final nasal, the last syllable is stressed

if a word does not meet any of these criteria, its stress is unpredictable and must be memorized word by word (though there is a strong tendency for long vowels and diphthongs to be stressed). secondary stress is more regular, working back from the stressed vowel; it falls on every second syllable, unless one of the "off" syllables has a long vowel or diphthong in which case it falls on that syllable instead. (all of these rules apply to single-morpheme words; compounds and other multimorphemic words have more complicated rules.) words borrowed from other languages typically have primary stress where the original language had it, but the secondary stress unwaveringly follows ka'ekala rules; the word for australia, Ōsetereiliya, has secondary stress on the first two syllables, the second of which doesn't even exist in english!

the native writing system was created in the 19th century and refined in the 20th. it's fundamentally a syllabary, with an acute-like diacritic for long vowels and separate glyphs for initial /s/ before a consonant and final /m n ŋ/. i've been thinking about changing those glyphs, as well as the second element in diphthongs, into diacritics rather than separate "top-level" glyphs, but i lost my font creator program crack so it'll have to wait. the romanization uses macrons for long vowels and <ng ' y> for /ŋ ʔ j/; everything else is written with its ipa value

[Emily]

nominal morphology

ka'ekala has three "genders" or noun classes: sentient, animate, and inanimate

• sentient nouns are people or people-like entities (gods, ghosts, aliens). nouns referring to a body of people (committee, crowd, congregation, government, company, audience) are also sentient. for cultural reasons the sun and moon are also classified as sentient as well. inanimate nouns may be "converted" to sentient for poetic effect (e.g. "fate smiles upon us"), and in stories with talking animals these become sentient as well
• animate nouns are things that move: animals, vehicles, fire, water and any other liquids, bodies of water, wind, rain, snow, clouds, stars, the heart, and the lungs (no other body parts). any machine or device that moves under its own power or has (visible) parts that move without directly being touched or manipulated is also classed as animate (so e.g. a typewriter is animate, because the hammers are moving without you touching them directly, but a pair of scissors is not animate because you are physically moving both of the components yourself). because clocks and watches traditionally have moving hands, they are classified as animate even if they're digital (though other displays are not). units of time (minute, year, etc.) are also classified as animate
• inanimate nouns are everything else, including things that are alive but don't move such as plants or algae. verbal nouns and abstract concepts are also classified as inanimate

plurals are marked with suffixes on the noun. the plural suffix for sentient nouns is -kū and the plural suffix for animate nouns is -pā. inanimate nouns are grammatically treated as mass nouns and do not have plurals; the former inanimate plural suffix was -pō and it may or may not show up in other parts of the grammar. inanimate nouns are counted using an elaborate system of measure words (obv inspired by chinese); i'm still working on the exact forms of these but the basic designations and range of meanings are here:

More: show

measure words can be grouped into different categories based on what they indicate
size and shape:

• GRAIN: grain (of rice, sand, etc.); drop of liquid
• BEAD: bead, pebble (bigger than a grain)
• COIN: objects bigger than pebbles but small enough to hold multiple in one hand; prototypically round and flat like a coin, but also used for many other similarly sized objects (e.g. bottle cap, flash drive, piece of bowtie pasta)
• SHEET: flat, thin object (paper, blanket, etc.; but not window or mirror, for which see below)
• BALL: globe, ball, sphere (does not have to be perfectly spherical; for example, an egg or a pineapple)
• HAIR: hair, string, filament, cable, noodle (long and very thin)
• SPEAR: long and thin, but not nearly so thin as a string (e.g. ruler, three-hole-punch, spear, pole, road, pencil)

foods:

• LOAF: loaf, roast, cake, etc. (a food that is cooked or otherwise prepared in one mass, usually but not necessarily with the intention of subdividing it before serving)
• SLICE: slice or portion of food (specifically referring to a portion of something that, before being portioned out, would be classified with loaf/roast)
• FRUIT: piece of food that can be held in the hand and eaten (originally used for fruits and vegetables; extended to other foods like sandwiches, burgers, ice cream cones; only refers to "ready-to-eat" foods that are generally hand-sized; unprepared foods use some other classifier, and foods that are different sizes use more appropriate classifiers [e.g. roast/loaf, or bead/pebble for small pieces of candy or popcorn or whatever])

specific objects or functions:

• CLOTHING: article of clothing (including shoes, glasses, etc.) or anything else affixed to the body (hair clip, bandage, nametag, etc.); also used to objects that typically get affixed to other (especially vertical) objects (postage stamps, picture on a wall, wall mirror)
• HOUSE: house, building, church, school (refers specifically to the *building*, not the *institution* of a school/church/whatever, which as a collection of people would be classified as sentient)
• PLANT: plant, tree (referring to the whole thing and specifically when it is still in the ground)
• CROP: plant, tree (separate form, referring to when it has been cut or harvested)
• BLADE: blade, knife, sharp thing (not used for "blade of grass", which would be PLANT or CROP depending on whether it has been cut)
• FURNITURE: piece of furniture
• TOOL: hand tools, cutlery, handheld musical instruments (violins, guitars, trumpets, but not pianos or drumsets, which get classified as furniture)
• FLOOR: floor/story, patio, sidewalk, walkway, plaza, (individual) stairs (but not road/street); can refer to a naturally occurring flat slab of stone but otherwise not used for natural features
• GLASS: glass (used for many, but not all, objects made of glass, particularly windows, mirrors, bottles, and cups)
• PLACE: geographical units (cities, provinces, countries, city blocks, etc.; also used for real estate, properties, land holdings, etc.; this is used for societally created and recognized geographical concepts, not natural geographic features)
• MOUNTAIN: hill, mountain, volcano; also used for large, immovable objects such as statues (including objects that might normally use another classifier, if the speaker wishes to emphasize their immovability); stairways
• MEADOW: used for fields, meadows, valleys, beaches, islands; units of land not classifiable under MOUNTAIN or PLACE
• CONTAINER: container (used when counting e.g. bags, boxes, envelopes; food containers are classified as DISH)
• DISH: plates, cups, dishes, pots, pans (objects that contain food or in which it is served or prepared; objects that manipulate food, such as cutlery or cooking utensils, are classified as hand tools)
• SHARD: a (broken) piece of something (that isn't "supposed" to break into pieces; e.g. a shard of glass, a piece of driftwood)
• PIECE: a piece of something (other than food) that is supposed to be issued in pieces broken from a whole (e.g. a piece of tape; but it does not refer to something that has been pre-broken or pre-divided; so a piece of paper wouldn't use this classifier, unless it's torn from a roll)
• MACHINE: machine or device (generally one that doesn't move and thus isn't classified as animate; e.g. a telephone, a TV set, computer)

verbs, actions, abstract concepts

• INSTANCE: instance of something (used for a lot of abstract nouns, e.g. "today at work was filled with a thousand frustrations")
• STRIKE: actions done with the body (bow, kick, punch, blink, step; but not anything that involves something coming out of the body, like spitting or shitting or breathing)
• EXPULSION: act of expelling something or being expelled from the body, from an object, or from a location (exhaling; spitting, pissing, shitting; departures from an airport; what those fish were doing in that fish tube video that was going around a year or two ago)
• INTAKE: act of entering something/somewhere (entering a building, swallowing something, an injection, etc.)
• BURST: a quick, sudden action or noise
• ACTION: a long, sustained action or event

other

• UNIT: unit (often deliberately generic, used when indicating an object whose nature is unknown, or when referring to multiple objects that would each use different measure words [but that would not be properly classified as a SET; see below]); frequently used in retail and inventory control or in legal writing; but also the standard measure word for things that don't easily fit into other measure categories (such as e.g. "lip") or for which the speaker doesn't know or remember the measure word; often used casually, similar to English "get me a thing of beer" etc.; taught to foreign language speakers as a "fall-back" measure word if they don't know the correct one
• DOLLOP: dollop, glob (a single contiguous portion of some spreadable substance like peanut butter or mud that isn't liquid enough to be considered animate)
• DOUGH: piece of something malleable, like dough (refers to a thicker substance, and usually but not necessarily a bigger portion, than "dollop")
• SET: a set of different but related items (e.g. a suit of clothes, a meal with entree and sides, a packed schoolbag, etc.; unless explicitly indicated otherwise, indicates a *complete* set)
• POSITION: positions, places (e.g. seats in a theater, number of seats at a table, positions in line, available job positions in an organization, slots in an office mailbox)
• PAIR: a pair of something (not just two but A PAIR; but not used for things like glasses or scissors or pants, which english calls a pair but are actually one object)
• TYPE: type, kind, variety
• LIMB: a limb or other anatomical extremity (including head, arm, hand, foot, leg, finger, toe, penis, tail, nose, breast, ear); also used for unusual growths on a body, or for protrusions or other items sticking out (typically perpendicular) from an object that is otherwise flat, round, solid, etc.
• HOLE: a hole, recess, crack, cave, divot, orifice (including bodily orifices such as the mouth, the nostril, the anus, the vagina; caves, pits, ditches; a hole in the wall, a pothole, a grave); a volcano would be [MOUNTAIN] but its crater would be [HOLE]
• HEAD: used in some contexts when counting animals or people; used especially (with animals) when taking stock of the number owned or in business transactions, or with giving headcounts of e.g. an army, a public rally, etc.; finds frequent use in describing members of "the enemy" such as during wartime; used for counting corpses and carcasses (human or animal); also used for statues of people or animals, dolls, stuffed animals, etc.

proper nouns aren't usually counted, but if they are they follow the above guidelines. for example, "two hawaiian islands" would use the measure word MEADOW because this is the standard word for island; but che guevara's famous speech about "two, three, many vietnams" would use INSTANCE because he is talking not about literal masses of land but a more abstract condition represented by what vietnam had done

sometimes reduplication can also act as a sort of plural (kind of) (in a way); i will write about that later

personal pronouns

• 'an: 1sg ("I")
• āna: 1du incl ("thou and I")
• ānau: 1pl incl ("ye and I")
• āne: 1pl excl ("me and him/her/all of them but not you")
• le'u: 2sg
• lēwa: 2pl
• teka: 3sg sentient
• teno: 3sg animate
• tero: 3sg inanimate
• tēkau: 3pl sentient
• tēnai: 3pl animate
• tērai: 3pl inanimate

other pronouns
haven't gotten these figured out yet. but i do know i want the demonstratives to have a three-way split like hawaiian (where the equivalent of "this" refers to something within the speaker's reach, but the equivalent of "that" is split into two words, one referring to something out of the speaker's reach but in the listener's reach, and the other referring to something out of reach of both the speaker and the listener), and the so-called correlatives (someone/something, no one/nothing, etc.) to have the same sentient/animate/inanimate distinction as nouns and the personal pronouns

possession
i'll go into more detail when i post about nominal syntax but possession is indicated with a set of possessive prefixes attached to the noun, which agree with the possessor rather than the possessee. these correspond pretty straightforwardly with the personal pronouns:

pronoun

'an

āna

ānau

āne

le'u

lēwa

teka

teno

tero

tēkau

tēnai

tērai

possessive prefix

'alu-

nalu-

naulu-

nelu-

'ulu-

walu-

kalu-

nolu-

rolu-

kaulu-

nailu-

railu-

[Emily]

nominal syntax
sentence-level noun phrase
idk if there's a "correct" term for this but what i mean is "top-level" noun phrases, that aren't embedded in some other phrase. they are constructed as follows:

• case particle (mandatory)
  • ye: subject (transitive) -- indicates the subject of a transitive verb (dixon's A)
  • li: subject (intransitive) -- indicates the subject of an intransitive or stative verb (dixon's S)
  • mo: object -- indicates the object of a transitive verb (dixon's O)
  • si: vocative -- used for direct address (god i love vocative case)
• determiner (mandatory for common nouns except in instances of vocative case or inalienable possession; NP can have a maximum of ONE determiner)
  • articles
    • 'ong: definite
    • kon: indefinite nonspecific (i'm looking for a tall man [any tall man, because i'm starting a basketball team]), also used for generics ("the whale is actually not a fish but a mammal")
    • pom: indefinite specific (i'm looking for a tall man [a particular tall man, who insulted my mother and ran away])
  • demonstratives/other pronouns (i don't have these ready yet, but they'll be the same as the pronouns: "no" will be the same as "no one/nothing", "any" will be the same as "anyone, anything", etc.; demonstratives will make same three-way this/that distinction as pronouns; other pronouns will have sentient/animate/inanimate distinction)
• number (optional; can be numeral or "few, many, all" etc.; if head is pronoun, means e.g. "two of them, the six of you", etc.)
• measure word (mandatory if using number slot with inanimate nouns)
• adjectives (ordinal numbers precede descriptive adjectives)
• possessive
  • possessive is a prefix on the noun, as described in the previous post
  • if possessor is a noun (common or proper), the head noun still takes the appropriate possessive prefix but is immediately preceded by the possessor: Pīta kalupe'a (Peter's house)
  • if a possessor noun is present, any adjectives are moved to follow the noun rather than precede it; they stay in the same order (ordinal numbers preceding descriptive adjectives)
  • ka'ekala distinguishes alienable and inalienable possession. if the possession indicated is inalienable (meaning most personal relationships such familial relationships, romantic relationships, friends, coworkers, bosses, etc; pets; someone's residence, workplace, school; permanent or long-term ownership like a house or a car; etc.) then the slot of determiner is deleted. if the possession indicated is alienable (not falling into one of the above categories), the determiner slot remains as normal
• noun itself

if the head is a pronoun rather than a noun, they cannot take determiners or possessives; they can take the other elements listed here. if the head is a proper noun, determiners are optional, though very common (for example, where an english speaker might say "a guy named steve" or "this guy steve" to introduce the topic of someone the speaker knows but the listener doesn't, a ka'ekala speaker would simply use the indefinite specific article followed by "steve")

one thing to note with all of this is that plurality is optional to indicate, and if it is indicated with a number word the noun cannot carry a plural suffix

embedded noun phrases
the measure word and possessor noun are embedded noun phrases, which are structured the same as the basic noun phrase except without the case particle. in practice, though demonstratives and other pronouns are common enough in an embedded phrase's determiner slot, articles are generally omitted if they would be the same as the article in the main phrase, and even when they differ they are still frequently left out of the embedded phrase if not necessary for clarity or emphasis. and of course embedded noun phrases can themselves contain embedded noun phrases

examples:
mo 'ong rīse tereng 'alukōri kalumalī'e māna
OBJ the six fruit my-father his-banana black
(I see) my father's six black bananas

li pom katam meika kōla tasi
SUBJ.INTR INDEF.SPEC two plant white flower
two white flowers (are blooming in my garden)

ye 'alu'ukimu
SUBJ.TRANS my-dog
my dog (bit me)

ye 'ong 'alungupō
SUBJ.TRANS the my-axe
my axe (cut me)

mo kon lo'angū
OBJ IND.NON pineapple
(I love to eat) pineapple(s)

si neluseānu
VOC our.EXCL-chief
(Welcome,) chief

[Creyeditor]

Great work
Is there a reason for not calling the measure words just numeral classifiers?

[Emily]

Great work

thank you!

Is there a reason for not calling the measure words just numeral classifiers?

i guess i'm not sure what the difference would be