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

At 09:50 AM 12/15/03 -0500, you wrote:
>On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 10:43:14PM -0500, Isidora Zamora wrote:
>
> > At 08:59 PM 12/14/03 -0500, Amanda wrote:
> > >Yay, more opportunities to write about this!  (I drove 3 hours to go
> > >take a final exam this weekend, and it was cancelled due to snow.  Real
> > >Life getting in the way of conlanging.)
> >
> > Ouch!  You poor thing.  That's a lot of driving in the snow for nothing.
>
>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.

> > In order that I may fully understand the solution that you came up with,
> > could you please explain applicatives to me?  Thanks.
>
>Well, I read about this the other day in Describing Morphosyntax, but
>I may have gotten it confused since then.  I hope someone will correct
>me if I get this wrong...
>
>Applicatives promote an oblique argument of the verb to the direct
>object position.  I do not think they are restricted to intransitive
>verbs, although the things I'm calling "applicatives" in Witicku will
>be.  Basically, they change the meaning of the verb in a way that in
>English would involve a preposition - changing "give (something)" to
>"give to (someone)", for example; changing "report (something)" to
>"brief (someone)", changing "go (somewhere, by some road)" to "travel
>(some road)".  This is done via a bound morpheme on the verb.
Thanks for the explanation of applicatives.  When I eventually get
_Describing Morhosyntax_, I'll see what it has to say about them.  I now
understand your idea about incorporating and then using an
applicative.  That's a very clever solution.  I wonder what sort of
situation I am going to be facing? 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.  That seems to be a sort of irregular situation to have an
IO but no DO.  (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.  Either I'm doing something very wrong, or, in Tovlaugadóis,
linking verbs can take objects.)  Do you have any idea how polysynthetic
natlangs deal with ditransitivity?

>I learned way more on this list than I did in my two linguistics classes
>in college :)
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.  I am learning a lot on the list,
though, and there is a lot that I can teach myself with the right books.

> > BTW, I've been having fun reading your posts lately.  Lots of cool stuff.
>
>Thanks!  After I got settled in at my new job up here, I started
>catching up on the September-October archives and was quite interested
>to see the birth of Cwendaso occurring on-list - I'd read the more
>recent posts about it first, so that was very interesting.
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.  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
suppose that, if I wait long enough, the mood will strike.  Most of the
vocabulary will need to be made up in the proto-language, and the
already-existing vocabulary will have to be reverse-engineered.

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.  I am going to have to develop a certain
amount of Nidirino simply for the purposes of providing loanwords to
Tovlaugadóis/Cwendaso, since the Tovláugad had a culture that was
incredibly materially impoverished when they came in contact with the
Nidirino (or whatever the Nidirino call themselves - Nidirino is a
Trehelish word meaning "tall people.")  The Nidirino borrowed a good number
of terms for things they had never seen before from the Trehelish, and the
Trehelish, in turn, did not bother to rename everything in their new land
but borrowed a lot of place names from the Nidirino and Tovláugad.

Then add to all of this the amount of basic stuff that I still need to
study and learn and the amount of time that I don't have to devote to
developing Tovlaugadóis, and you can see that this is going to take
forever.  But that's ok.  There aren't any time limits on it.

So, who are the speakers of Vjatjackwa, or was it simply an excercize in
turning Polynesian into Slavic? :-)  It's deifinitely cool.

Isidora

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