Re: Isolating languages

--- Caleb Hines <bachmusic1@...> schrieb:
> >How strange! I was working on a conlang called
> > Gi-nàin for a while, until it 'evolved' into my
> > current one, Nèm. Both were isolating, SOV and,
> > so some degree, tonal!
>
> Interesting indeed! The idea for the name "G'nan"
> came from my trying to remember the typology:
> GN/AN  G'nan. At one point I was going to have it
> be the opposite (NG/NA) and was tentatively calling
> it (you guessed it) "Nigna". But NG/NA is so
> heavily associated with type I (VOS) natlangs, such
> as Semitic and Celtic, that I decided to swap it
> around. How do you handle keeping S and O straight?
Both Gi-nàin and Nèm are ergative languages; I've
divided the roles up between Agent, Patient and
Undergoer, where the Agent is the doer of an action,
the Patient is the one acted upon and the Undergoer is
either the passive 'experiencer' of a state or the
unwitting/unwilling/unconscious doer of an action.

The morphology treated Patient and Undergoer the same,
generally. That was marked by the particle -s'a in
both languages. The Agent was either unmarked (in
Gi-nàin) or marked by the particle -o (in Nèm).

More accurately, the languages were topic-comment; 'S'
and 'O' are somewhat moot points here. Generally, it
tended to follow the word order of Agent -
Patient/Undergoer - Oblique - Verb, which can be
interpreted as SOV. But this order can be changed to
no end, since all parts are marked somehow.

Example (in Nèm):

Na-s'a kùol-i.
I.patient sneeze.perfect
"I sneezed (uncontrolled, unwilled)."

Na-o kùol-i.
I.agent sneeze.perfect
"I sneezed (willed; this generally would be
interpreted as 'I pretended to sneeze to some
effect')."

> For me, one of the problems arises because genitive
> constructs are consecutive nouns that have no case
> marking.
For closely-linked nouns, there tends to be no marking
at all, as in /na ama/ (I-mother) 'my mother'.
Generally, this is inalienable possession, which is
somewhat of a broad category. Basically, the
distinction is between long-term possession or
association (like one's house or family), and
short-term possession (like a pen or item of
non-durable clothing that has no sentimental value).

For less-closely linked nouns, I have a specific
genitive particle, /-an/, as in /méi-an gi-kài/
(city-GEN people-mass.counter) 'the city's current
population, the people who happen to be in the city at
a given time'. If this phrase is used without the
genitive particle /-an/, that is, if it's said as /méi
gi-kài/, it would imply the people in question are the
city's _stable_ population, those who have lived there
a while.

Sorry, sort of got long-winded there :p.

> Other problems I haven't quite solved yet arise
> when I want to treat a series of nouns as a list of
> items (without conjunctions) instead of a genitive
> construct, and when I want to state equality of two
> items (without a copula).
Hmm. I haven't put much thought into series, although
I know I want to keep conjunctions to a mininum, if I
can manage it. I haven't decided on how I'll handle
copulas, either.

> I've discovered that I have much less trouble if I
> introduce an ergativity particle for transitive
> verbs, although this won't solve everything. I'll
> probably have to either rely on context for
> disambiguation, or introduce more particles.
Are you trying to keep the inventory of particles to a
minimum? Typologically, your language seems to be
nothing altogether unusual. I suggest you go ahead and
look at these languages which you've been pointed to;
my best ideas came from looking at languages similar
in 'character' to what I wanted, namely, Southeast
Asian languages, and the resemblance is even more
obvious, since I am trying to finagle Chinese
characters to write a language that's grammatically
nothing like Chinese. But the Japanese managed it, and
so will I.


	
		
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