Central Pomo (was: Re: The new Rinya thread)

Tal skrev:

> > As for now, I'm thinking of stealing large portions of the
> > Central and Eastern Pomo active system. Or at least that's
> > where I'd mostly get the ideas from.
> Pomo? Why do I associate that with Italian? How is that system
> then?
_Pomo_ not _Como_... :p

Seriously. I suppose I should've explained what Pomo is. It's
a group of Native American languages belonging to the Caddoan
language family and it's spoken in south western USA. Let me
snip in a bit from my thesis: (The Pomo examples may look a bit messed
up, but they're not that important. Look at the English translation
instead.)

"Central Pomo marks performers, effectors, instigators and controllers
as agents, and all the others (such as those who are sick, chased away,
fall and die) as patients. Thus the main distinction is based on control.
Situations which are performed, effected or instigated but not controlled
(e.g. predicates like 'hiccough' and 'sneeze') does not take an agent
prefix, but a patient one. _?a_ is the first person agent pronoun and _to_
is the first person patient pronoun. (All examples from Mithun 1991):

(19) ?a béda ?cháw         'I:AGT live here.'
(20) ?a ?e bané?t'awn      'I:AGT am lazy.'
(21) to lóya               'I:PAT fell.'
(22) to ?yáqan             'I:PAT remember.'

Two important features of Central Pomo activity are significant
affectedness
and empathy. If one possesses an inherent state such as 'tall', 'good',
'beautiful' and 'deaf', one receives an agentive pronoun. But if an
inherent
state is marked by an inchoative, the state suddenly becomes significantly
affected and so marked as a patient. Confer the sentences below:

(23) Yém ?e??a    'I:AGT am old.'
(24) Yémaq' to    'I:PAT have gotten old.'

Another thing that follows from this is that only human beings can be
marked
as patients, since non-humans cannot be significantly affected and one
cannot
feel empathy for them. Two examples will clarify:

(25) M'u· t?u ?a hk'úm       'I killed him:PAT.'
(26) Mu·l ?a hkúm            'I killed it:AGT (the bee).'

The same also holds for intransitive sentences:

(27) Q'aláw m'u tu     'He:PAT died.'
(28) Mul q'aláw        'It:AGT (the bee) died.'

Yet another fact based on empathy is that empathy (and thus the patient
case)
can only be assigned to first persons. One does not want to claim to feel
what
other people feel. Again some examples, to explain:

(29) Hó mt?'a to       'I:PAT feel warm.'
(30) Hó mt?'a mul      'He:AGT feels warm.'
(31) syac'a to         'I:PAT am afraid.'
(32) syac'a mul        'He:AGT is afraid.'

One more thing to notice about the active system of Central Pomo is that
one
can also choose to use the agentive, if one wants to just state a fact,
without
paying any attention to the affectedness of the person(s) involved in the
action.

To sum it up, this means that in Central Pomo a person is marked as a
patient
only if it is simultaneously out of control and significantly affected and
the
speaker chooses to express empathy with him or her (because he of she is
affected
in such a way.)"

> If you have so few words as you claim, I'm sure you can list all
> of them :) As for phonology; is it the actual sound-rules or the
> orthography that is the problem? I've changed the orthography,
> oh, at least four or five times since 1997, but the underlying
> phonology haven't changed that much.
Both. :)  Some time ago I realized that I thought /X/ was a very
nice sound. And /G/ too. So I wanted to have them in Rinya. And
also, lately I've been thinking that {j} for /j/ instead of {y}
isn't that bad. And {x}, I can't decide on whether it's a nice
grapheme or an ugly one. {Rinya} or {rinja}, that's the question...
And another thing. Should I have nasal vowels? Should I have
final diphthongs? Should I have final nasal diphthongs? This
could really go on and on...

Daniel