Re: A Conlang, created by the group?

First of all, welcome into the project!

The case system we've almost settled for so far comprises:

agent (THE DOG bit me)
patient (the dog bit ME)
undergoer (THE DOG sleeps)
theme (I see THE DOG)
modifier (RED dog, to look CLOSELY)
determinant (THE RED dog, THIS dog, THE dog THAT BIT ME)
predicate (the dog BIT me)

The difference between patient and undergoer is more or
less the same as my proposed "accusative" and "unergative".

Note that the case implies also part of speech. We're not
sure if we'll distinguish PoS apart from that. It's possible
that we'll have some inherently nominal stems and some
inherently verbal stems; most stems will be both (i. e.
"to bite / a bit"). Adjectives will be used "verbally"
(as predicates) as in Japanese, for copulas; and
as modifiers or determinants when directly modifying
a "noun" or a predicate.

"An ANGRY face", "His face IS (=looks) ANGRY", "He looked ANGRILY at me"
would all use the stem for "angry".

Following is a "voting form" posted by Mathias. Please answer it
(if you want to). Not to influence your vote, but I'll mention
my opinions (because they're explained). I prefer

case_tag + root + screeve_tag   (postposition)

("screeve" is a term from Georgian grammar, a unique combination
of aspect, tense, etc., all the inflections you can put on a
verb or a noun or whatever PoS).

The case tag could be separated and used as a resumptive
pronoun (ask Mathias about this if you have doubts; he had the
idea on the first place). This would be useful given the SOV
order.


------------ BEGIN ---------------

Pablo wrote :

> It's  case_inflection + root + other_inflections.
> We would use postpositions, not prepositions, for (non-existant)
> locative, ablative, allative, etc.
OK, here we are (at last ! :-)

Don't you think we should vote now on cases ?

I don't like to claim for anything but I think we should vote at least on these points :

(sorry for this 'directiveness')

1. Cases :

want cases ? : yes/no

if yes :

prefixed tag ? : yes/no

suffixed tag ? : yes/no

infixed tag ? : yes/no

separable tag ? : yes/no

2. Parts of speech :

want tag ? : yes/no

if yes :

prefixed tag ? : yes/no

suffixed tag ? : yes/no

infixed tag ? : yes/no

separable tag ? : yes/no

if same position for case and speech-part tags :

both tags combined ? : yes/no

if no :

tag opposit end of word ? : yes/no

3. Genders (lexical classes) :

want 'genders' ? : yes/no

if yes :

prefixed tag ? : yes/no

suffixed tag ? : yes/no

infixed tag ? : yes/no

separable tag ? : yes/no

in crossing events :

combined with speech-part tags ? : yes/no

combined with case tags ? : yes/no

4. Pre/post-positions :

want pre/post-positions ? : yes/no

preposition ? : yes/no

posposition ? : yes/no

postcase+postposition ? : yes/no

preposition+precase ? : yes/no

precase+postposition ? : yes/no

preposition+postcase ? : yes/no

Nota : no comment here on nature of prepositions as :

adverbs = meanwhile
suspensive verbs = during
nouns = outside
'true' prepositions = before

------------ END ---------------



>I vote for having no fixed number per se; I mean, we shouldhave some affixes, but the use
>of them should, at least at first while
>we're getting things going, be more or less optional.
I agree on that.

>As I said, I think aspect would be more interesting, but, hey, it's agroup decision. :)
Propose something to the list if you have an idea about aspects.
We're not even beginning to discuss it.

>> * Grammatical gender: none, logical, or arbitrary? Proposals:
>> 1. masculine, feminine, neuter (extensible)
>> 2. north, south, east, west
>
>I'm not sure what you mean by this.  Do you mean what physicalorientation a person or
>thing has with respect to the earth?  If so,
>are you talking about absolute or magnetic directions? That could
>make a difference.
Don't try figure it out. The NSEW gender is from one of Herman's
conlangs, and almost completely arbitrary, just like masc-fem-neut
in German (if I understood well).

>> 3. thought, feeling, material phenomenon, action, physical state, yellow
>> strawberry, conlanger (*very* extensible ;)
>
>I think I really like this idea of thought, but it itself has given meanother idea:  we
>could base it on metaphysical realities of the
>world!
[snip]

We considered some rather complex classificatory schemes and
dropped them. I took one of Carlos's proposals and simplified
it to

Gender  -  Evidence

person  -  actually perceived/done (actual)
animate -  idem
thing   -  idem
concept -  perceived thru results (conceived)
speech  -  heard or guessed (heard)

Gender is for "nouns", and evidence is for "verbs".
>> Rhyme, rhythm and alliteration are easier with agreement.
>> This is important for me -- I like singy-songy sentences and
>> spontaneous (as well as planned) rhyme. Do we have a poet in
>> this group by any chance?
>
>WELLLL, you might call me one, but I'm not very good at it. I might
>be able to help you here.
You're probably our only hope :-)


>I don't like the idea of too much harmony of stuff going on.  It seemsto me that for most
>people these represent those capricious
>irregularities they hate so much (like German final devoicing and stuff).
The voice harmony would only apply to affixes; it'd be
more like regular assimilation.


>> 1. Vowels: i y e a o u (agreed so far I think)
>
>Sounds good to me, but what about diphthongs?
Not defined yet. Probably descendent except /wi/.
I'd prefer avoiding diphthongs other than /w/ and /j/
combinations.

>> 2. Consonants:
>> stops   p b t d k  g  q qg
>
>I think that rather than having uvular stops like this (arethey that? missed the previous
>posts), we might want to
>think about having an aspirated stop series, or maybe
>even a glottalized one.  That would make it really cool, I think.
It would. But we're keeping a low profile... Aspiration is
something no-one thought of so far. Glottalization... well,
you're probably getting a comment on that.

>> frics   f v s z kh gh       h
>> nasals  m   n   ng
>> approx  w   j
Forget /h/. We'll have <kh> for [x | h],
<qh> for /G"/, <nh> for /N/.

>
>Purely orthographically, I like <y> for  [j] better, but we can do whateverwe want, I
>suppose.
I prefer <y>, but there's the vowel <y> /y/! (We have avoided
diacritics, tho I prefer u-diaeresis.


--Pablo Flores