Re: A few questions about linguistics concerning my new project

David J. Peterson wrote:
<<<<<<<<<
I never suggested that you'd use an antipassive to describe a
passive situation.  You use an antipassive to describe an antipassive
situation.  But here's a question: why you need to describe a
passive situation in an ergative-aligned language?  It seems that
there would either be no need, or that the morphology as it is
would provide you with a way of doing so without resorting to
any special construction.
>>>>>>>>>
Well, okay. Er, I went through your article again and I think I'm almost
there. In an ergative language would using the absolutive with a transitive
verb automatically mean kind of a passive? I'll try to explain what I mean
(with cases). Does:

/woman.ABS dance/ mean: the woman dances

/woman.ABS push/ mean: the woman is pushed

/woman.ERG push/ mean: the woman pushes (something)

/woman.ABS push.ANTI panda.OBL/ mean: the woman pushes (the panda), but
well, antipassive.. so not intentionally (maybe when she was pushed herself
by someone else?)

/woman.ERG push panda.ABS/ mean: the woman pushes the panda (intentionally)

Okay I really hope I got it right now... Say this is the way it works, does
an ergative language sometimes require a a way to mark that a verb is
transitive to avoid confusion?

John Vertical wrote:
<<<<<<<<
AND your difthongs worked well together with the rest of the system - did you
really design them this way at the age of 11? A lot of beginners will end up
with either a perfectly regular or totally random system (I went with the
former back in my day) - but yours is in-between, and in a good way.
>>>>>>>>
Well, no. I designed this system about 3 years ago. It was my 4th sketch or
so that I started working on and around that time I already knew some things
about phonologies. Basically I didn't want to go with /a e i o u/ because at
the time, some of those vowels felt 'long' to me. (I now know that's because
of Dutch /a: ei o:/ etc.) Also, I wanted /I/ because that just felt good
together with the /A E O/.

John Vertical also wrote:
<<<<<<<<<
A falling [IO] sounds pretty neat. :) Having a single phonetic long vowel
however, and as an unstressed allophone even, might look a bit weird - but
then again, weirder things are kno'n to happen.
>>>>>>>>
Yes, it does :). [AO] [EO] [IO] sound very logical (at least to me)
allophones of [au] [Eu] and [Iu] in unstressed sylliables. Also if I want to
keep [Ei] I have to make an allophone for unstressed or it has to go. This
is because stress is not phonemic in this language (ultimate in 1/2
sylliable words and penultimate in more sylliable words) and so the stress
can shift with suffixes. I think [E:] is very nice and does not seem out of
place in this language. This gives me [KEi] versus [KE:Ga] (definite affix
absolutive sing.) and so forth.

The whole thing now looks like this:
Vowels: /a E i I o u/ with [A O] in unstressed.
Diphthongs: /ai oi ei au Eu Iu/ with [AE OE E: AO EO IO] in unstressed.

Thanks again for your help, maybe I should post something about my
consonants soon to check if that needs some work ;)


Nick Scholten

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