Re: Ancient conlang

Gary:

Instead of telling you why you're mistaken :-), I thought I'd explain
briefly what my project looks like. Miapimoquitch is meant to be the
language of a preliterate puebloan society living in the Four-Corners
region. The language comes to us via the journals of an early Mormon
missionary to the region; he was in contact with an elderly Paiute man
who, as a young man, lived with the Miapimoquitch. That's the backstory
anyway. I've found that in some areas I've gone way beyond what can be
reasonably gleaned from a journal of this period (1850s). The journal
was kept in the Deseret Alphabet, like several other journals of Mormon
missionaries of this period (Isaac Bullock, Thales Haskell, Marion
Shelton); this provided a much better idea of the pronunciation of the
language than could have been determined from documents using the
standard Latin alphabet.

Miapimoquitch has a relatively small basic inventory of sounds:

consonants:

p       t       ts              k
                s                       h
m       n                       ng
        l
w                       y

vowels:

i       1       u
        a

There are several phonological alternations of interest; the most
prominent is lenition, in which the voiceless stops /p, t, ts, k/ and
/l/ become voiced fricatives [B, D, z, G] and the tap [4], respectively
between a stressed vowel and an unstressed vowel (roughly).

There is no formal distinction made between nouns and verbs; all
content words are inflected alike. Number and aspect (roughly; the
precise nature of the aspect-like category is still being worked out,
but it also includes (in)definiteness) are marked by altering the
prosodic shape of the stem:

        /pit1/     'have seen'
        /pitt1ka/  'be seeing'

        /tukana/   'the thrush'
        /tukkana/  'a thrush'

        /pipit1/   'have seen a few (times)'
        /pit1pit1/ 'have seen many different times'
        /pikit1/   'have seen many at the same time'

All predicates are marked for transitivity: predicates are either
intransitive (unmarked), transitive (marked with n-), inverse (marked
with l-), or causative/applicative/benefactive (marked with nga-).
Person is marked by proclitics: wa= '1st person', ku= '2nd person', l1=
'1 > 2 (1st person acting on 2nd person)'.

Predicates can be combined with lexical suffixes to express a wide
range of derivational meanings. These lexical suffixes encode notions
like 'house, enclosure', 'with the fist', 'berry, fruit', etc.
Predicates of motion are obligatorily accompanied by suffixes
indicating direction. Predicates can also be combined with adverbial
elements or other predicates to form complex predicates which are often
non-compositional in meaning.

        /lupa-/     'walk'
        /lupa-si/   'walk towards speaker'
        /lupa-hu/   'walk away from speaker'
        /lupa-wea/  'walk around'

        /anai lupa-si/   'walk up towards speaker'
        /nuu lupa-si/    'walk down towards speaker'
        &c.

Subordination is marked by a series of proclitics which can also have
deictic force. These are divided into two groups: those which mark
subordinate clauses as coreferential with the subject of the main
clause and those which mark subordinate clauses which are not
coreferential with the subject of the main clause (this "switch
reference" is common in many native American languages, including the
ones I work on professionally).

So that's a glimpse of how Miapimoquitch grammar works.

Dirk

On Wednesday, January 14, 2004, at 05:04  PM, Gary Shannon wrote:

> Suppose someone where interested in creating a conlang
> for a conculture that was somewhere in the timespan
> between hunter-gatherer and early "civilized", say
> 5000 BC to maybe 2000 BC, with maybe a primative
> writing system like the Indus Valley script.
>
> How would such a conlang differ from a modern, or even
> classical period conlang.  Obviously the vocabulary
> would be very "rural/pastoral/practical" as opposed to
> "urban/philosophical/academic", but what about the
> grammar.  Assuming a non-IE language, or even a
> language of an alien culture on a planet far from
> Earth, would such a conlang necessarily have a
> simpler, less developed grammar than more modern
> languages like Latin or Ancient Greek?
>
> --gary
>
>
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so
simple we couldn't.
- Lyall Watson