Re: A few questions about linguistics concerning my new project

David J. Peterson wrote:
<<<<
(f) hopoko lamuto (palinok).
/man-ABS. pet-ANTI. (panda-OBL.)/
"The man's petting at the panda (but not very successfully or
intentionally)."

Then some linguists, based on examples like (f), go on to analyze
sentences like "He shot at the bear" in English as genuine antipassive
constructions.  Others remain skeptical.

For more info on ergativity/antipassives, go here:

http://dedalvs.free.fr/notes/ergativity.php
>>>>
Actually, I did read that/your article on ergativity. I do understand how
the antipassive works (and that it can apply in certain situations) but, I
cannot yet grasp why you would need an antipassive in an ergative-aligned
language to describe a 'passive' situation. Is it not possible to have a
passive by just marking it on the verb and using oblique like this:
/panda-OBL. pet-PASS./ ?

John Vertical wrote:
<<<<
Seems OK, altho there are a few issues. For starters, if your /ai oi/ have
become /E/-final when unstressed, /Ei/ probably wouldn't be exempt - but you
could restrict that to only occur as stressed; having merged with plain [E]
when unstressed. Also, /u/-final difthongs _not_ also becoming /O/-final when
unstressed (assuming that they even occur as that...) is a rather Latinate
thing to do, but maybe that is exactly what you were after here.

(...)

So yes, it's a perfectly working and plausible vowel system - you could
probably even keep unstressed /Ei/ if you insist... Also, while it does suggest
to me an older form with 2*2 basic vowels */i o E A/, it doesn't HAVE to be
so; I'm sure there would be several other naturalistic ways to arrive at a
system with these kind of asymmetries. This speculation was just to check
that there's at least ONE way, which is sufficient to proov plausibility. :)
>>>>
It is working AND plausible?! I had not expected that at all! To comment on
your advice: I think describing /A O/ as /a o/ with [A O] in unstressed
sylliables is actually more logical as you suggested in your text. But,
maybe that messes up your system where you analyzed /u O/ as a 'pair', would
that still work if I changed the phoneme to /o/? I'm glad you also approve
of those diphthongs and the issues you pointed out are very logical. I think
more allophones of the diphthongs ([E:], [AO], [EO] and [IO]) will make the
whole thing more interesting. But I'll see how that works out.


Thanks everyone else for their replies. Your advise makes me think more
about the stuff I've come up with :)


Nick Scholten

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