Re: Ishtalo grammar sketch

Keith Alasdair Mylchreest wrote:

> I don't know about Indian languages, but the way your articles are
> developing, they look very much like Bantu noun class prefixes, which
> are added to verbs, adjectives etc. in agreement.
Indeed, I firstly got the idea from Bantu languages.  Then I saw
a few Avar examples where the same pronominal element was prefixed on
some nouns (to mark gender) and to the predicate (as agreement with
the S of intransitive and P of transitive verbs).

At the time when I dropped the idea of multiple gender classes
(the Bantu way), I also planned a much simpler scheme of agreement
(in the line of Avar, plus the inversive for first and second
person Ps), so I forgot about Bantu...  I must admit that the
final result is much Bantu-like, though.

> The "definitives" in Saprutum are similar, but not as Bantu-like as
> your articles. see :
>
> http://home.clara.net/saprutum/grammar.html
URL noted.  Will look at it as soon as possible (this evening, I
hope).

> I'm still writing this up, so forgive me if I don't comment on your
> sketch in detail for a while, I want to finish writing up my grammar
> before I lose the "feel" of it.
That's a mood I know very well.  You need no apology...

>>  /ch/ and /sh/ are prepalatal
>> (I know no ASCII-IPA for them);
>
> [tS] and [S] where "S" is standing in for a "long-s"
Mmmm...  Perhaps I have a terminology problem here.  I'd say that
[tS] and [S] are "alveopalatal."  I'm sorry, but, although I have
some knowledge of linguistic terms in English, my textbook of
phonetics is in Italian.

The IPA sign for which I need an ASCII equivalent vaguely resembles
a lowercase sigma.  Perhaps, the closer choice on a keyboard is
the number 6.

>> [6] nechokma n'oka
>>     ne    =chokma ne    =oka
>>     3D.F.S=good   3D.F.S=young.person
>>     "The girl is good" or "The good girl"
>
> When the verb comes first in the sentence, then natlangs tend to
> have the adjective and genitive follow the noun. You could then
> distinguish
>    nechokma n'oka - the girl is good
> from
>    n'oka nechokma - the good girl
Thanks for the suggestion.  Both forms may in fact occur in the
language, and the second is not ambiguous (unless one wants to also
consider ungrammatical forms).

As of language typology, verb-initial natlang do tend to have
head-initial order at the phrasal level;  but natlangs with case
systems, agreement of verbs and nouns and possessor
cross-referencing also tend to be rather free in their word order.
Of the two tendecies, the latter is stronger in Ishtalo...  This
is a direct result of my preference for free over constrained
word order.

I think that, in spite of the grammatical ambiguity, context
will in many cases provide enough clues to get the intended
meaning...

> In Saprutum the word forms are different too, stative verb
> -XYuZ-, adjective -XaYiZ- (from abstract noun XaYZ-), so from the
> root TWB (to be a good person) you get : tawbum - goodness;
> tawibum - good (adj.) and letwubi - to be good.
So, Saprutum has semitic-like morphology, isn't it?  I like it!

> The sentences are then :
>    wetwubu webnatum
>    we       twub       u       we  bn    at   um
>    3.human to be good present  3.h child fem. subject
>    The girl is being good
>
>    webnatu.tawibum
>    we  bnat u    tawib um
>    3.h girl nom. good  nom.
>    The good-girl
Nice samples.  The latter reminds me of Heichi, where adjectives
are stative verbs, and most adjective + noun phrases (in the
English equivalent) are encoded as verb + noun compounds.

> Anyway, that will have to do for now.
>
> Keith
Feel free to come back to the topic when you have the time.
And I could have more comments or questions about Saprutum when
I look at your website.

Tommaso.