Re: Vjatjackwa (the result of all those sound changes!)

>No, my university (and my parents' place) are in the DC area.  They're
>crazy when it comes to snow.
Well, DC, IMO, is a nice area to live in.  (Expensive, but nice.)  My
father-in-law owns an appartment in Bethesda very close to the District
line.  (Great view, too, seeing as he's got a penthouse, which is like a
giant sunroom with a small kitchen and bathroom off one side of it.  It's
always fun to visit him.)

> > Modern (but not proto)
> > Tovlaugadóis/Cwendaso is going to be a polysynthetic language and will be
> > incorporating nouns.  What does happen to the ditransitives?  If you
> > incorporate the direct object of the ditransitive into the verb, then you
> > end up with a verb which cannot take a direct object but can take an
> > indirect object.
>
>I'd be interested to know too.  I'm wondering whether polysynthetic
>languages with object-incorporation generally *have* ditransitives or
>not.  (The whole idea of using monotransitives only may have come from
>my Mohawk language tape, where they conjugate two separate verbs, "to
>tell (someone)" and "to tell about (someone)".  That doesn't mean they
>aren't necessarily ditransitive (the tape-book course doesn't go into
>real linguistics), but it does suggest ways that they could speak
>without needing ditransitives.)
Once I've studied enough basic typology, I think that the next step for me
is simply going to be getting ahold of grammatical descriptions of as many
polysynthetic languages as possible and seeing what conclusions I can draw
from them and what ideas I can grab from them.  In the end, though, I am
going to have to do unique things, because Tovlaugadóis didn't start out as
a polysynthetic language.  It started out as a heavily agglutinating
language with a full system of agreement markers on the verb (subject,
direct object, and indirect object) and a fully developed case system
for  the nouns.  Then it mutated into a polysynthetic language with an
overdeveloped case system.

I've come up with this idea lately that Tovlaugadóis could have extended
its case system over the centuries because it is a postpositional language
with case sufixes.  If there were originally an all-purpose case
corresponding to the Latin ablative or the Russian prepositional used with
most of the postpositions, then the postposition would find itself adjacent
to the case suffix, creating a redundancy.  The redundancy, in the form of
the postpositional case ending on the noun could be dropped and the
postposition attatched directly to the noun, thus creating an extra case
out of nearly every common postposition in the language.  A variation on
this would be for the case ending in question to be a non-low vowel and for
many of the postpositions in the language to begin with a vowel.  If the
postpositions became cliticized, then the non-low vowel of the original
case ending before another vowel would become devocalized, turning into a
glide.  This could eventually turn into a very overdeveloped case
system.  Kitchen sink syndrome, really.  Which is why I might choose not to
go with this idea.

> > That seems to be a sort of irregular situation to have an
> > IO but no DO.
>
>What was in that they were saying about African languages with two
>objects a couple of weeks ago?  Those verbs worked differently than
>English ditransitives.
Somehow, I don't remember even seeing the discussion, which is odd, because
I usually try to at least skim everything on the list, unless I absolutely
know that it is simply not of interest to me or too complicated to
follow.  Do you remember anything about it that would allow me to search
the archives for it?

> > (Not that I haven't had other irregular things show up.  It
> > seems that every time I want to play around with Tovlaugadóis grammar, I
> > end up by affixing an object marker to a linking verb, and that seems to be
> > a bit irregular, since I was taught that linking verbs do not take
> > objects.
>
>As an iron-clad universal, or just as a usually-done thing? :)  Maybe
>in Tovlaugadois, they can :)
In Tovlaugadóis, apparently they can, because, every time I turn around, it
is happening.  Part of it has to do with the newer method of subordinating
clauses, which marks the verb in the main clause with an object marker
indicating that the antecedant of that marker is an entire clause and not a
noun phrase.  There is also a similar subject marker, and maybe that was
the one I was using with the linking verbs.  I can't remember at the
moment, and my notes are buried in my e-mail correspondence.

> > I'm glad that you've found it interestsing.  I've come to realize lately
> > just how long this project is going to take, though.  The only right way to
> > do it is from the proto-language forward.  The syntax has changed a lot
> > between the proto and the modern language, but a good deal of the earlier
> > syntax is retained in the "ceremonial dialect," so I have to come up with
> > two modern forms of the language.
>
>Yeah, now that I have the beginnings of a language tree I feel the need
>to evolve everything exhaustively.  I keep reminding myself that
>language contains irregular changes as well as the regular ones!  (I.e.,
>to make sure to include neologisms, back-formations, changes that took
>place by analogy with other forms, and just plain unexplained things in
>my later language!  Not to mention much greater semantic drift than I'd
>include if left to my own devices.)
Yeah.  I have to keep reminding myself that there is going to be semantic
drift, and I wonder if I can really get creative enough to take it to a
realistic level.  I am pretty good at making some far-off semantic
connections in real life with real languages, but I have doubts about my
ability to do it artificially.

I've also realized that a lot of the words I make up are going to be
compounds of one sort or another, and that I am going to have to assign a
rough time frame to each compound that I come up with so that I know which
phonological rules to take it through and which it bypasses.  This may turn
out to be especially important for Trehelish, because word-final short
vowels were lost entirely and word-final long vowels became short.  You
*really* need to know whether this had already happened or not by the time
your compound was formed; otherwise the form of the word could be entirely
wrong.  I have also *got* to figure out the full list of sound changes for
the language and get them correctly arranged in the order in which they
occurred before it drives me nuts.  The order of sound changes seems to
matter more for Trehelish than it does for either of the other two languages.

Trying to put in the inconvenient little naturalistic, irregular quirks is
going to be murder.  I will have worked so hard to make the language
conform to the appropriate sound changes, phonotactics, etc. that I am
going to hate to go and put something messy in it.  Then there are the
things that shouldn't be exceptions and slipped through.  As we were
getting ready for bed last night, my husband and I were talking over a
certain Trehelish word.  The plural is "tefin."  The singular could be
either "tef," which he doesn't like, or "tefi," which he likes better.  We
turned out the light and got in bed.  He asked if "tefe" were possible as
the singular.  I told him that it wasn't, considering that there was an "i"
in the plural.  Then there was dead silence, and I got a look on my face,
which you couldn't see in the dark, and I said, "That violates vowel
harmony.  It can't be 'tefi.'"  I realized that the word had to be "tefe"
in the singular and "tefen" in the plural.  The (now defunct) vowel harmony
rule that creates that situation is not one that I can make this word an
exception to.  The problem here was that the word "tefin" has been in the
language for many, many years longer than the vowel harmony process has.

> > Then there's the problem of coming up
> > with the sound changes that took place in the 1500-2000 year interval
> > between the proto-language and the modern language.  Somehow, I'm not
> > looking forward to coming up with the sound changes and applying them.
>
>I never liked sound changes before now.  I didn't have the patience to
>try enough different changes to find one that I liked.  Hence the asking
>for help from the list, which came through marvelously.  It all depends
>on getting the *right* sound changes.
I really think that part of my problem with getting motivated on the sound
changes in Tovlaugadóis are that I start this knowing that this is a
completely oral culture (this will change within a generation) and that
practically all the sound changes will be lost to the speakers of the
language; they will never know that they have occurred.  I probably need to
throw in one or two sound changes capable of throwing off the meter of
poetry in a minor way, just in order to be realistic, but I need to keep
the number of syllables and the stress patterns within the words largely
stable.  They have a large oral corpus, a good deal of which is poetic, and
that needs to remain intelligible to them.

I guess I may have some ideas.  After reading the online article about the
chain shifts going on in the northern and southern US, it has occurred to
me that I could do a chain shift with all the vowels.  I could also start
the protolang out with long vowels as well as short and have the long ones
all turn into diphthongs, which the language seems to have a goodly number
of.  I could also have (short only) schwa and barred i in the protolang and
have them drop out entirely (early on, so as not to disrupt poetic meter),
leaving us with the very important syllabic sonorant consonants that are
all over the place.  I'm not certain exactly what to do with the
consonants.  The /x/ phoneme could, perhaps, be derived from some earlier
phoneme.  Is it possible or likely for /h/ -> /x/?  Or maybe /s/ -> /h/ ->
/x/, and /z/ -> /s/; then bring some surface-level [z]'s back into the
language by assimilating voicing from adjacent segments.  The problem here
is that /z/ -> /s/ implies several other changes of a similar nature.  I
would have to devoice all the fricatives, and I am not sure that I'm
willing to do that.  I really want to keep my /D/, and I think that I want
to keep it contrastive with /T/.  I suppose that I could solve that problem
by having a /S/ in the protolang and having /S/ -> /s/ instead of /z/ -> /s/.

I guess that all of this is something of a start.  How's it look to
you?  I'm going to have to find out what degree of change is necessary for
the 1500 year time depth that I am looking at for a language that remains
fairly isolated.  I will end up asking the list for help with the sound
changes, as you did, because they're just not going to happen, if I dont
get some help.  Reading a textbook on historical linguistics first might
also give me some decent ideas.  Put that in the queue to
read.  _Universals in Linguistic Theory_ arrived yesterday while I was
reading the list, and that will give me something to apply my mind
to.  It's not a particularly long book.  However, I'm in the middle of a
phonology book that is long, and I also *desperately* need to read some
typology books.  I suppose that there's no rush.  I am a little impatient
to get the language truly underway, but I very much need to do it right the
first time, because this is not a practice project that can be discarded if
I don't like the way it turns out; it's the language spoken by a conculture
that I really care about.  Same goes for Trehelish, though I'm having more
luck on the phonological front there.  (I was so proud of myself the night
that I figured out how to have an entire "gender" of nouns pluralize by
labialization of the final consonant.)

> > One of the confusing things with the lexicons of my three main conlangs is
> > going to be figuring out who borrowed which words from whom at what stage
> > in the languages' developments.
>
>Ooh, now that's depth.  If I do anything like that, it'll be random words
>on a whim.  I couldn't do the work necessary to have wholesale interaction
>between different languages in the family, even though it provides some
>of the most interesting semantic effects in real languages.
I'm pretty much forced to do this with the loanwords.  The Tovláugad were
absolutely a Stone Age culture before they came over the western
mountains.  They were unfamiliar with metal.  They had some experience with
agriculture, having domesticated amaranth and the khúno (essentially, an
angora guinea pig, domesticated for meat - they only figured out what to do
with the fur much later.)  They had never seen sheep or chickens.  They
didn't know how to spin or weave cloth, so they dressed in leather.  (They
may have had some rudimentary spinning techniques, and I'm sure they wove
baskets, but they had never thought of weaving cloth or of using a drop
spindle.)  They called themseves "People," not knowing that there existed
any other races of men in the world.  When the Tovláugad (a subset of the
People) migrated over the western mountains, they met other sorts of people
who possessed all sorts of things that they had never dreamed of
before.  And the Tovláugad happily adopted all sorts of novelties, such as
bronze knives, chickens, sheep, drop spindles, looms, cloth,  possibly
linen, hand mills (for grinding grain), wheat, yeast-raised bread, mead,
metal cooking pots, and the list goes on.  Some of these things they might
coin their own words for, but the words for many of these things would
simply have been borrowed, primarily from the Nidirino language, which has
a very limited phonemic inventory and constrained syllable structure,
making it very easy to borrow from.

*But* I will have to know what surface phonetic form Nidirino words took
over 1000 years ago in order to know how to properly borrow these words
into Tovlaugadóis.  I will also need to know what sort of phonological
rules Tovlaugadóis had at that point that might have had an effect on how
the loan words came out, especially if I do a chain shift.  (I just got a
cool idea.  I could time the chain shift so that it is happening during the
same period that the major borrowing from Nidirino is taking place so that
you do not get a one to one correspondance in the vowels of the borrowed
words.  That might be exciting.)  The chronology becomes really crucial
when we get to borrowings to and from Trehelish, since that language has
undergone some phonological change radical enough to turn *siotuni (or
maybe it's *siutoni) -> shohon [So?On], and it did it all in a particular
order.  (I know that the example that I gave is not as radical as your
Vjatjackwa, but it's still a lot of change, and it all has to get layered
in the right order and assigned an absolute time range.  For instance, had
Trehelish already lost all it's long vowels by the time it came in contact
with the other two languages?  For Tovlaugadóis borrowings from Trehelish,
it wouldn't matter, because, if Tovlaugadóis ever had long vowels, they
were already probably turned to diphthongs long before any contact with
Trehelish, but it matters for Nidirino, because Nidirino has short and long
vowels to this day.  (Oops, and it matters very much whether the long
vowels in Tovlaugadóis had become diphthongs before or after contact with
Nidirino and all those borrowings.)

Actually, it gets worse than that.  I believe that there are three major
dialects of Modern Trehelish: one which retains the long vowels, except in
word-final position; one which has lost all of the long vowels but retains
the stress patterns associated with them; and one which has lost both the
long vowels and the effect that they had on stress.  The last dialect is
the "standard" one (because of where it's spoken), and I am surprised if it
is mutually intelligible with the other two.  Poetry from the two more
conservative dialects would certainly lose its meter in the standard
dialect.  You know, the more I type, the more horribly complex things
get.  Maybe I'd better stop.  I would say that this is giving me a
headache, except that my migraine has been getting progressively better
since I started typing this :-)

BTW, Trehelish, Nidirino, and Tovlaugadóis belong to to three completely
unrelated language families.  I know of at least one sister language to
each of the three languages, and Trehelish has a whole handful of sister
languages and cultures.  Conculturing all of those should be interesting,
if I ever do it.  I'll have to take what I know about the earliest state of
shared common culture, including mythology, and project it forward taking
each culture in a slightly different direction than the other ones, taking
geographical proximity and contact with the other cultures into
account.  Right now, though, that's not a priority, since the story I am
interested in revolves entirely around Trehelan and the Tovláugad.

> > So, who are the speakers of Vjatjackwa, or was it simply an excercize in
> > turning Polynesian into Slavic? :-)  It's deifinitely cool.
>
>Well... I made up a word for "reindeer" early on when the Polynesian
>flavor was making me think coconuts too much :)
That's always a good antidote.

>   So they're up there in
>the north.  They're warlike,
Whom do they go to war against?  Themselves or other peoples?  Why do they
make war?  (e.g. Back before there were Tovláugad, when they were all
Éimikhad (the People), they all made war constantly against neighboring
villages in order to carry off booty.  They had (and have) no concept of
slavery; they were only after material goods.  It was basically armed
robbery on an large scale, and women and children did get hurt if they
tried to protect their belongings.  However, the style of warfare that the
Éimikhad engaged in did not generally lead to the extermination of entire
villages.  The Trehelish conduct war rather differently.  They waged a war
of conquest in order to have the rather extensive land that is now
Trehelan, and they did exterminate entire villages in order to succeed in
this.  But they also had no concept of slavery and were not looking for
captives, unless it was to sacrifice them to their chief god.  The
Trehelish were looking chiefly for land, not for goods.)

>  the men die young and the widows rule the
>village.
Are they matrilineal or matrilocal as well?

>   They have European-style circle folksongs (I want to translate
>a version of "The Rattlin' Bog" that I hunted down online after hearing
>it years ago at a Midsummer revels!)
I haven't given enough thought to dancing and music style in my
concultures.  Actually, it's not really that I haven't given thought to it,
it's that not much has come of the thought that I have given.  I know that
each of the three cultures needs a different style of music and dance, but
not one distinct style has popped out of my head, perhaps because I am not
familiar enough with folk dances of any tradition.

>   I see them by firelight, indoors
>on a winter evening,
What sort of structures do they build?  And out out of what sorts of materials?

>  wearing the Norse-type clothes (overdress pinned at
>the shoulders, necklaces of amber) that I know from the reenactors I used
>to hang out with.
The presence of amber (if it is of local origin) tells you something about
the region where they live, since amber is not found everywhere.  (Anyone
know just where amber is found?)

>   Dogs underfoot,
Reminding me, once again, that I need to give dogs more of a place in my
conworld.  They have sort of gotten mostly left out, since I am not that
much of a dog person.

>  mead being quaffed.  They farm and
>keep animals.
What sort of animals?  For example, Tovláugad keep animals, but it is
limited to sheep, chickens, khúno (or maybe I need to pluralize it as
khúnoma or khúnwad), perhaps donkeys, and, just maybe pigs, but probably
not.  (In addition to dogs and cats.)  That's not much of a livestock
inventory.  The peoples to the south of them keep a much wider variety of
livestock.

>   Their ancestors travelled with reindeer herds - perhaps
>they have moved south since then.  They have metal.
What sorts of metal and how advanced is their ability to work it?

>   Their mythology
>is not Indo-European.  The Sun is the Moon's mother.
What more do you know about their religion?  My Nidirino culture worships
the Sun, Moon, and visible planets.  I know some of the details on how they
worship, but haven't developed too much of the underlying mythology.  For
that matter, I haven't developed too much of the underlying mythology for
any of my cultures.

>I don't know if
>they write.
And, if they do, there is the question of whether they invented writing for
themselves or whether they got the idea from contact with a neighboring
culture.  Of the three concultures that I now have, only the Trehelish
figured out writing for themselves.  (They also figured out moveable type
on printing presses; they're very clever people.)  The Nidirino learned
about writing from the Trehelish, but then went and developed their own
syllabary.  Trehelish writing is alphabetical, and the Nidirino language is
well suited to a syllabary.  When the Tovláugad begin to write, it will be
with a modified Trehelish alphabet.

Anyway, this post is way more than long enough, and it is well enough time
for me to go heat up some leftover catfish for lunch.  It's nice to chat
with you about various stuff.  It's also nice to see another woman on the
list.  (Not that anyone ought to take offense at that remark; it's just
that males are statistically vastly overrepresented around here.)

Isidora