Re: Thoughts on my Gwr Language

Roger wrote:

<<It seems to be true that we don't
favor such languages (or do we, and I just haven't encountered many?); are
we so much in love with complexity?
Any thoughts or comments?  Any suggestions as to how an apparently
uncomplex language might be jazzed up?>>

I have a somewhat analytical language I haven't done much with (Njaama),
but I too have been bitten by the Southeast Asian-style language bug.   I
believe I even once posted something about the tonal system to the list 
(specifically,
how I derived the tones.   The proto forms are, just like yours, 
(C)V(C(V(C))).
I was inspired mainly by two things that I wanted to try out:

(1) An animacy system (with an inverse marker, and all that);

(2) A classifier system like Chinese, but stretching it to see what the 
possibilities are.

Along with that are some ideas I aquired from ASL.

Anyway, another reason I wanted to do this was to get back to my "roots" 
(sounds
peculiar to say that) and get back and do some syntax.   Starting with 
Zhyler, I sort
of lost my syntactic creativity as I experimented with all kinds of 
morphology.   Before
that I used to actually sit there and diagram sentences and try out syntactic 
ideas I
came up with.   This is where complexity and "jazzing up" can come into an 
analytical
language: Syntactic mazes.   Some things to look at might be...

(1) Island Constraints.   These invisible constraints prevent "movement", if 
you believe
in movement.   A good example comes from the Simpsons: "You know what I blame
this on the breakdown of?   Society."   The "what" comes from the PP headed 
by "of".
Anyway, if you look these up, there are certain things that are supposed to 
be absolutely
and totally illegal.   For example, think of the sentence, "You said you sent 
who what?!"
That works, but imagine if you wanted to say, "Who did you say sent what?"   
That's
grammatical, but not if it comes from the sentence above.   That's because 
there's
apparently some sort of island that the "who" can't be pulled out of.   This 
apparently
holds for a lot of languages.   What would be interesting is if a language 
broke one or
more of these island constraints, and *how* they broke them.

(2) Word order.   A linguist here at UCSD, Masha Polinsky, said that there is 
no such
thing as a purely SVO language.   There are SVO languages that behave like 
VSO languages
in some places, and SVO languages that behave like SOV languages in some 
places.
German would be an example of the latter.   I know that my language Njaama is 
an
SVO language that acts like an SOV language in certain places.   An 
interesting thing to
work on would be to work on a way for one of these other word order patterns 
to
arise in your SVO language.   For instance, where would it show up and why?   
What
implications would this have?   Based on the orderings you listed above, it 
seems like
your language is a head-final language, which would suggest that the buried 
word
order would be SOV.   This could mean that the verb in the second position 
could be
doing some interesting things, and that verbs could appear finally for some 
reason in
some places.

(3) Compounding and relative clauses.   Compounding is how my current SEA 
project
(the language is called Sheli) is going to build a lot of its vocabulary 
(well, that and
zero-derivation).   Compounding always seems to have a lot in common with 
sentence
structure.   One thing I've never had the chutzpah (sp?) to try is a language 
where
relative clauses are nothing more than complex NP's.   Inflection makes it 
easy, though.
Doing this with an analytical language would be *very* interesting, since all 
the cues
would have to be syntactic (or possibly supersegmental...?).

(4) Compounding again.   Another way to make things interesting would be to 
come
up with a bunch of crazy compounds.   So maybe "cloud stomach" is the word 
for
"sea-sickness".   Of course, in a relay you'd have to gloss the whole thing 
as "sea-sickness",
since you can't figure it out from "cloud" and "stomach", but still...

(5) Pronouns.   Zero-derivation does a lot of the derivational footwork in an 
analytical
language.   Why not make it do more?   Say you have a sentence like this:

Quick, brown fox jump head lazy, yellow dog.

Now let's say you want to keep talking about the fox.   Why not refer to him 
as "brown"?
Or "quick"?   Or how about "jump head dog" (e.g., "the one who jumped over 
the dog").
It's kind of like metonymy, but taken to an extreme.   Hey, that can lead to 
some fun
allegory--where you literally have two stories working right on top of each 
other.

Anyway, those are some ideas I had.   I've hit a little road bump with Sheli, 
but once I get
past it, I'll start posting on it.

-David
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"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/