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

On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 07:28:59PM -0500, Isidora Zamora wrote:

> At 09:50 AM 12/15/03 -0500, Amanda Babcock wrote:
> >
> >Well, it wasn't as bad as it sounds.  I drove down before the snow,
> >stayed overnight at my parents', and drove back up after the snow.
> >Note that the snow was only there for a few hours.  For this they
> >cancelled my final? :)
>
> Where do you live, Florida? :-)  I'd understand it if they overreacted that
> way in some place like Florida, but, if you live farther north, there's no
> excuse for it.
No, my university (and my parents' place) are in the DC area.  They're
crazy when it comes to snow.

> 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.)

> 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.

> (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 :)

> I have an entire degree in linguistics, and I never had a course in
> typology or in historical linguistics because they weren't offered.  That's
> where I get just a little disgusted.
How disappointing.

> 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.)

> 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.

> 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.

> 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 :)  So they're up there in
the north.  They're warlike, the men die young and the widows rule the
village.  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 see them by firelight, indoors
on a winter evening, 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.  Dogs underfoot, mead being quaffed.  They farm and
keep animals.  Their ancestors travelled with reindeer herds - perhaps
they have moved south since then.  They have metal.  Their mythology
is not Indo-European.  The Sun is the Moon's mother.  I don't know if
they write.

Amanda

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