Re: CHAT: Nakiltipkaspimak

* Daniel Andreasson <daniel.andreasson@...> [001011 20:59]:
> Tal skrev:
>
> > Heh, yeah, Akan sure did nasty things to my linguistic world-view
> > and that is a very good thing. Too bad the linguistics insitute at
> > my uni. is primarily a pragmatics/semantics/phonology-place.
>
> The good thing is that Stockholm is a functionalistic uni with its
> main interest in typology. The bad thing is that they don't really
> make much of it.
Ooh typology! Me wanna! Morphology too? How good is the
library? The one here is much too light on typology and
morphology for obvious reasons. Maybe if there's such a
thing as inter-scandinavian library loan...

> > Reason I asked is târuven has evidentials too but I'm not quite
> > sure how they work. Since all verbs have an implicit 1st person
> > singular subject, a default, unmarked "hearsay"-evidential,
> > translated as above, would seem rather weird... "I heard that I
> > did x...", "It is said that I did X...". So far I've pretended
> > that there aren't any evidentials to avoid the issue.
>
> Well, that _would_ seem rather odd. Since you have an implicit
> 1sg subject on the verb, the unmarked evidential should be the
> "personal experience". But what do I know. Uncommon to have the
> 1sg be the unmarked form of the verb instead of the 3sg, isn't it?
> If you let the 3sg be the unmarked form, having the hearsay
> particle as the unmarked evidential would make more sense.
Maybe personal experience when the subject is implicit and
hearsay when it is overriden (made explicit that is)? Most in the
spirit of the culture however is to let the default be: "the one
who says <x> does not take a stand as to the validity of said
<x>, the listener be the judge." Especially since not mentioning
something (dropping tenses, making existence, 1s subjects and 3
unknown objects implicit etc.) is so widespread: "Now I won't
bother to mention when it happened or whether it's true or
whodunnit 'cause it ain't really relevant, you see."

> Hamlet: 1sg or hearsay, that's the question... :)
Can't do that 'un yet, no free-standing word for "to be" :)

> > Mine solves that through internal sandhi, but it isn't visible
> > in the orthography. If I ever get around to making that
> > târuven2SAMPA-filter I can show the pronounciation in the
> > interlinears... *appends to huge TODO-list*
>
> Couldn't you include the pronunciation (written by hand) when
> you give examples from târuven? I thought I'd gotten those
> diphthongs into my head, but apparently not. It's _really_ hard
> to remember what those accents do. :)
Ah but that's no fuuun... b'sides can IPA actually handle those
diphthongs?

> > cavvayr (hmm I'm not sure whether {ay} is a diphthong or not...
>
> See? Even _you_ are having problems with the diphthongs. :)
Heh, problem here is that "ay" is a special case, because in
ISO-8859-1 there's no y with accent grave... Both aÿ and åì
are used elsewhere, I haven't standardized on one of 'em yet
(suggestions?). It probably is a diphthong though, strong a weak
y (a+ygrave) because "cavva...yr" doesn't sound right and this is
one of those lucky words that just spontaneously materialized in
my mind one day.

> > y-     cavvayr            -ge       fal   -es
> > "they" move.into.position causative water locative
> > `"they" are putting something into the water-supply.'
> >
> > *grepping brain*) is intransitive, made transitive by the
> > intransitive-to-transitive ("causative" for short) suffix -g(e)
> > (The e prevents the g from devoicing), and all transitives (made
> > with -ge or not) have an implicit 3rd person unknown number (aka.
> > something, someone) object, so there.
>
> Ah. Of course. Silly me. I should have thought of that.
Whoa, actually managed to write it down! And now to structure it...
*shudder* :)


t.