Re: Tatari Faran update

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. ;-)

The latest major change to Tatari Faran was the addition of relative
clauses and infinitive clauses.

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.

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.

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.

Here are some examples of full sentences containing a relative clause:

1) kiran     nihuu       itsana        ka  hamra huu na  aram.
   young_man AUX_RCP-1sp speak-REL_CVY ORG see   1sp RCP COMPL
   The young man about whom I was spoken to was seen by me.
   (Or, "I see the young man about whom I was spoken to.")

2) tiki   nijibin       hamrakan    sei tiras huinin.
   rabbit AUX_RCP-child see-REL_ORG CVY white pure-COMPL
   The rabbit that the child saw is (pure) white.


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.

	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.

2) samat sa  tapa itsan       no  nitsaritas     juerati  no  bata.
   man   CVY walk cinder_cone RCP AUX_RCP-monkey look-INF RCP COMPL
   The man walked to the cinder cone to look at the monkey.

3) huu ka  uenai  niparat        buaras       tapa'i   no  ia.
   1sp ORG desire AUX_RCP-crater volcano-PART walk-INF RCP COMPL
   I want to walk to the crater of the volcano.
   (Or, I like walking to the crater of the volcano.)

This last example shows that infinitive clauses can also act like
gerundive clauses.


T

--
This is a tpyo.

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