Re: Tatari Faran: volition, verb complements, phonology update, and more
| From: | H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, November 7, 2004, 4:29 |
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On Sat, Nov 06, 2004 at 10:22:28PM +0100, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> On Mon, 1 Nov 2004 17:12:24 -0800,
> "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...> wrote:
[...]
> > 1) The lexicon now has 211 entries. Lest you get the wrong idea,
> > however, it should be noted that verbs and verb complements are listed
> > separately, and I've entered some phonological contractions as
> > separate entries to prevent my own confusion in the future.
> > Nevertheless, this does show impressively fast growth compared to
> > Ebisédian.
>
> Or Old Albic, which still has hardly more than 300 words. I am indeed
> quite slow at inventing words.
I was really slow with Ebisédian, but with Tatari Faran, words just
seem to come to me for some reason. I do not know if this is because
of the conculture or the phonology. Having a Terran conculture
certainly makes it easier to coin words without fearing that it may
not fit in the concultural context. The phonology is much simpler than
Ebisédian's, too, although I'm not sure if that's necessarily a good
thing---for a while I was struggling with words that want an /l/ but
the language only has /r/.
> > 2) Ah yes, volition, the eyebrow-raiser in my subject line. ;-)
>
> Yeah! Volition! I have to comment as Old Albic also grammaticalizes
> degrees of volition.
Nice. :-)
> > I found out that due to the nature of Tatari Faran's core case
> > system, volitive and involitive meanings of the same verb referent
> > must be realized as distinct verbs. For example, in English we use
> > "smell" both in the volitive sense "smell this and see" and in the
> > involitive sense "I smell something burning". In Tatari Faran, two
> > distinct verbs are necessary:
[...]
>
> In Old Albic, the case markings are different but the verb is the same.
Right, it seems that Old Albic and Teonaht capture the volitionality
in the NP, whereas Tatari Faran does so in the verb, which then
determines the noun cases that are to be used. Quite the mirror-image
of each other, interestingly enough.
> The case of the subject is agentive if volitional, dative if not:
>
> Arachchasa a valchva.
> AOR-smell-1SG:P-3SG:A the:C-AGT wolf-AGT
> `The wolf smelled me (sniffed at me).'
>
> Arachama mana smalth nabenim.
> AOR-smell-3SG:P-1SG:A 1SG-DAT odor-OBJ unpleasant-OBJ
> `I smelt an unpleasant odor.'
>
> See also my post from July 27 on degress of volition in Old Albic:
>
>
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0407D&L=conlang&P=R15311