Re: ANNOUNCE: My new conlang S11

Hi!

"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...> writes:
> On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 11:47:53PM +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> [...]
> > Speaking of discoveries: when translating the Fukhian grammar from
> > German into English, I was surprised to see that by my current
> > analysis, Fukhian does not have verbs.  Just nouns and adjectives.  Or
> > better: nouns and verbs syntactically behave so similarly that, when
> > not knowing the meaning, it is impossible to tell from a sentence
> > whether a stem is a verb stem or a noun stem.  That's because:
> [...]
Just another comment: after having written this, I doubted again about
these findings and checked the original grammar (the German version).
But indeed, there's no distinction between noun stems and verb stems,
although throughout the grammar, these terms are used.

> Interesting! I also noticed that at least at the lexical level, Tatari
> Faran word categories may not be as clear cut as I make them out to
> be. For example, a sentence with a monovalent verb looks like:
>
> 	N <case> V COMPL
>
> where <case> is a case clitic. An adjectival sentence looks like:
>
> 	N <case> Adj COMPL
>
> and a statement of equivalence ("X is Y") looks like:
>
> 	N <case> N COMPL	(COMPL here == "ai")
>
> Now, if you saw a sentence in the following form:
>
> 	N <case> X COMPL
>
> where X is an unknown word, you have no way, at the lexical level, of
>...
Hehe. :-)

That's about the kind of stuff I noticed in Fukhian, too.  In Fukhian,
you can attach case endings to 'verb' stems and you can use the plain
noun stem as a predicate (there are not verb affixes, only clitics).
This led to my new analysis.

The basic structure of a Fukhian sentence is:

  N-<case>-<verbal_clitics> N-<case> N-<case> ... N-<case>.

The order of the N-<case> is free, however the focus changes depending
on order.  The grammar says that 'any constituent can be made the verb
by fronting it'.

E.g.:
   zam mis.
   eat man
   'The man eats'

   zamor    mis.
   zam-or   mis-0
   eat-COND man-NOM
   'The man would eat.'

   zamorhedl       mis.
   zam-or-he=d-l   mis-0
   eat-COND-it-ACC man-NOM
   'The man would eat it.'

But you could change the order of the constituents:

   misorhedl           zam.
   mis-0-or-he=d-l     eat
   man-NOM-COND-it-ACC eat
   'The man would do the eating.'

Thus for an X, an unknown stem, cannot predict whether it's a verb
stem or a noun stem.  The copulaless sentences look the same (and
after your description, it must be about the same in Ebisedian):


   mis      guxfed.
   mis-0    gux-f-d
   man-NOM  forest-LOC-'in'
   'The man is in the forest.'

   misor        guxfed.
   mis-0-or     gux-f-d
   man-NOM-COND forest-LOC-'in'
   'The man would be in the forest.'

   guxfedor             mis
   gux-f-d-or           mis-0
   forest-LOC-'in'-COND man-NOM
   'The man would be *in the forest*'

Funny enough, however, adjectives are a separate category.  Still
adjective stems can directly be used as verbs (but not vice versa...):

   dal  mis
   dal  mis-0
   big  man-NOM
   'The man is big.'

I now see that Fukhian is also polysynthetic, isn't it?  Very strange!
I should start an investigation project about good ol' Fukhian. :-)

> 	Verbing weirds language.
:->

> > Hmm, I still like it and find it very functional.
>
> It's certainly functional, just rather hard to become fluent in. :-)
Oh, it took me a very long time to translate some stuff into Fukhian,
too.  I did not have those nice tools, like Lisp, for that at that
time.

> Fluency, after all, is one of my goals in conlanging... even if I
> never actually attain to it. :-P
This is a difference: it's not a goal for me.  However, becoming able
to at least pronounce the langs is becoming a more and more important
goal for me, especially after listening to the impressive sound
samples that have recently be posted here.

> However, if there is no originative NP, the meaning becomes "to have".
> E.g.:
>
> 	fia nei kuini   bibi sei bunari kei dakat.
> 	Fia RCP acquire doll CVY woman  ORG COMPL
> 	Fia acquires a doll from the woman.
>
> 	fia nei kuini   bibi sei dakat.
> 	Fia RCP acquire doll CVY COMPL
> 	Fia acquires a doll. / Fia has a doll.
This is a bit strange to me: the aspect is totally different in
'acquire' and 'have'.  No perfect aspect marker necessary to derive
'have got' from 'get'?

> > wouldn't want to compose sentences myself, would I?  No!  Too many
> > sandhi rules!)
> [...]
>
> =-O  When I conlang, I do have the aspiration (if not the ability) to
> be able to compose sentences on the fly.
No, I don't have that.  I would feel too limited in conlanging with
this constraint. :-)

> Tatari Faran has quite a number of sandhi rules which I sometimes
> get wrong. But I'm learning.
Hehe. ;-)  Even in Da Mätz se Basa, I make serious mistakes, although
it's very close to my L1.  That's a language that has no Lisp
grammar yet...

> In fact, I composed the Tatari Faran examples above on the fly.
I copied most of the Fukhian examples and changed them a bit... :-)

**Henrik

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