Re: Tatari Faran update

>>>> H. S. Teoh<hsteoh@...> 12/6/2004 12:56:28 PM >>>
>It appears that the recent lack of status updates on Tatari Faran has
>left so much despair on the list that people (including myself :-P)
>have been driven to religious/political flaming. To counteract this
>sad state of affairs, allow me to bring you this latest news from the
>volcanoes of Fara. ;-)
LOL

>The latest major change to Tatari Faran was the addition of relative
>clauses and infinitive clauses.
Always a thorn in my side...

>As you may (or may not) know from previous updates, Tatari Faran NP's
>have 3 core cases: originative, conveyant, receptive. These are
>normally indicated by a case clitic appended to the end of the NP. For
>example, _kiran_ ["ki4an] means "young man", and _kiran ka_ is the
>corresponding originative, _kiran sa_ the corresponding conveyant, and
>_kiran na_ the receptive. The case particles inflect for gender; hence
>_amaa_ [a"ma:], which means "mother", has the forms _amaa kei_
>(originative), _amaa sei_ (conveyant), and _amaa nei_ (receptive).
>Now, because case marking is indicated by clitics rather than
>suffixes, this means that adjectives, demonstratives, and other
>modifiers appear *between* the head noun and the clitic. For example,
>_kiran kirat sa_ - the young man who is tall and swift (conveyant).
>This includes relative clauses.
kirat means 'tall and swift'? Nice!

>But if you think about it, that introduces potential confusion: if the
>NP's inside the relative clause use the same clitics to mark case, the
>result would be a jumble where it is very difficult to tell which
>clitic modifies which noun, and what is in a relative clause and what
>is in the main clause. Tatari Faran deals with this problem by
>introducing a *second* way to mark core cases. This I call the
>'auxilliary case forms'. We shall see in a moment how these are used,
>but for now, let's compare the possible forms of _kiran_, our young
>man:
>
>		Main clause	Relative clause
>				(Auxilliary case forms)
>Originative	kiran ka	akiran
>Conveyant	kiran sa	ikiran
>Receptive	kiran na	nikiran
>
>Hence, _akiran_ and _kiran ka_ both mean the same thing: "young man"
>in the originative case. However, the former belongs to a relative
>clause, whereas the latter belongs to the main clause.
Hmm, interesting.

>The structure of an NP containing a relative clause is:
>	<head_noun> <args ...> <relativised_verb> <case_clitic>
>
>The relativised verb is an inflected verb form which marks the case
>role of the head noun in the relative clause. For example:
>
>	kiran     ahuu        tsanan        sa
>	young_man AUX_ORG-1sp speak-REL_RCP CVY
>	The young man to whom I spoke.
>
>	kiran     nihuu       tsanakan      sa
>	young_man AUX_RCP-1sp speak-REL_ORG CVY
>	The young man who spoke to me.
>
>	kiran     ahuu        itsana        sa
>	young_man AUX_ORG-1sp speak-REL_CVY CVY
>	The young man about whom I spoke.
>
>	kiran     ihuu        tsanan        sa
>     young_man AUX_CVY-1sp speak-REL_RCP CVY
>	The young man to whom I was spoken about.
It took me two days to grasp what is going on here (I'm slow :) ). Marking
case on the verb...I like it! In my emindahken, if I ever get to verbs,
I plan on doing something vaguely similar by marking verbs for agent/patient, etc.
My plan is to require the nouns of an utterance to appear in some kind of
animacy heirarchy, and to mark their syntactic roles on the verb. Not sure quite
how yet...

I'm still struggling with your cases, although I think they're a great
change from the IE types.

[snip sentences]

>Infinitive clauses are formed in much the same way, except that there
>is no head noun, and the verb is inflected for the infinitive. The
>infinitive is formed from the bare verb by suffixing -i (for
>consonant-final verbs) or -'i (for vowel-final verbs). The arguments
>to the infinitive are inflected using the auxilliary case forms.
>Here are examples of infinitive clauses:
>
>	ihuu        tsana'i.
>	AUX_RCP-1sp speak-INF
>	To speak about me.
How is this different from 'To speak TO me'? Wouldn't you need AUX_RCP-1sp
(the receptive case) in in that case ('scuse the pun) as well?

>	nitse       ahuu        hamra'i.
>	AUX_RCP-2sp AUX_ORG-1sp see-INF
>	(For) you to see me.
>
>Infinitive clauses in Tatari Faran are actually nominalized clauses,
>since they inflect for case by having an appropriate case clitic
>appended. Here are some examples of full sentences containing an
>infinitive clause:
>
>1) huu na  hamra nidiru       abata'        tsana'i   so  aram.
>   1sp RCP see   AUX_RCP-girl AUX_ORG-chief speak-INF CVY COMPL
>   I see the chief speaking to the girl.
Here you use receptive marking on the girl who is spoken TO, where in your
above example the receptive case marks the 'topic' of the speaking. I'm
confused...

[snip the rest]
I like your language, some of it doesn't make sense to me yet, though.

James W.

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