Re: Another new project and trigger languages

Sally Caves wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Amanda Babcock" <langs@...>
>
>>On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 06:15:29PM -0800, Garth Wallace wrote:
>>
>>
>>>For one of my languages, I'm using a generalization of this. Nouns are
>>>marked with affixes that roughly correspond to their "rank" of
>>>importance in the sentence (one of them is most important, although
>>>beyond that they're pretty much interchangeable), which I'm calling
>>>"ordinals". The verb is marked with the ordinals of its arguments,
>>>inflected to show role (agent, patient, recipient, etc.). Since
>>>adjectives are stative verbs, the possessive form of a noun actually
>>>derives a stative verb, and adverbs are replaced with a "manner"
>>>case-role, word order is incredibly free. Is this a workable system?
>>
>>This is beautiful!  I'm jealous.  I'm always casting about for original
>>ways to represent things, and I think you've found that here.
>>
>>Amanda
>
>
> I second that!  This sounds terrific.  Can you give a more detailed example,
> Garth?
If you mean an example of the language in use, I'm afraid not. Right now
the entire lexicon of Kulaqíl consists of one word: the name of the
language. I haven't even decided on what the affixes should sound like
(the phonology is still pretty much in flux). For playing around with
the grammar, though, I use English words with dotted, numbered suffixes.
For example:

dog.1 man.2 hat.3 wear(rel-pres/prog).2agt.3pat
bite(abs-past/perf).1agt.2pat

"The dog bit the man who was wearing a hat."

Plain numbers stand in for the ordinals. A number followed by a role
("agt" = agent, "pat" = patient, "ben" = beneficiary, etc.) stands in
for a verb suffix associated with the same-numbered ordinal. The
parentheses contain non-ordinal verb inflections such as tense and
aspect ("rel-pres" = relative present, "abs-past" = absolute past,
"prog" = progressive, "perf" = perfective, etc.).