Re: Terkunan: rules for deriving nouns, verbs, adjectives

Hi!

First of all, let be move one thing to the top.

R A Brown writes:
>...
> Henrik wants his GMP, he also wants a language with a morphological
> structure at least as simple as Afrikaans. The criticism have been
> constructive' ones trying to suggests ways in which Henrik might
> achieve his goals.
>...
This is exactly how I read this thread.  So far you already gave
valuable hints of how to improve my conlang, both in structure, and
presentation on the web site.

And the post I am replying to now is very helpful again.

>...
> I agree - I have little problem with the nouns (except, as I have
> already pointed out, the 4th & 5th declensions simply did not survive
> in Vulgar Latin *here*)
The 5th did not survive.  The 4th may have left some traces, yes --
I'm very fond of -u-. :-)  I added a remark that it might be more
prominent in VL *there*.

>...
> Yes, it might indeed be better termed the perfect participle stem.
>...
I agree.  Should I change it?  I used the term 'supine stem' because
that's what I've usually found in books, not because I think it's a
particularly good term.

>>>I'd rather use something like the 3rd person singular present
>>>indicative as the starting point. ...
>>
>> Definitely.  But sometimes the perfect participle felt more prominent
>> and typical for the verb in Modern Romance.
>
> Examples?
I checked my Italian word list, and a few examples I found were
acquistare, conquistare, diventare, voltare.  Also, I think English
example do count, because it fits for a creole or developped auxlang
approach that I might adopt.

>...
> But these are learned _borrowings_ - they are not derived
> diachronically from Latin or Vulgar Latin.
*You* told me a creole might be some explanation! :-)

>...
> Actually, this is found in the Classical language. Such verb were
> originally frequentatives, e.g.
> cano, canere, cecini, cantum = to sing
> canto, cantare etc, = to keep on singing
>
> But in late Latin the frequentatives frequently loose their special
> meaning and come to have the simple meaning, so even in late Classical
> texts we find _cantare_ simply means "to sing", as it still does in
> modern Italian.
But then, that stems *did* survive.  This is an explanation, is it
not?  But you suggest I should not confuse you and talk about
frequentatives instead of supine stems, right?  That's probably a good
idea.

>> I tried to formalise which stem part would be the most likely to
>> survive under the assumption that one *one* form survived.
>
> But you have not indicated how this might happen.
That's because the historical development is secondary -- the
resulting set of verbs looked nice and it felt like there could be an
explanation, so I was satisfied.

> It certainly did not happen *here* as the verb 'to do/make' in the
> Romance languages are all derived from _facere_.
>
> The only plausibly explanation that I can envisage would be a dialect
> of Vulgar Latin in which the marked Latin fondness for compound verbs
> was carried to extremes, so that _facere_ died out and only forms like
> _afficere, eficere, inficere, perficere_ etc survived and that at a
> later date a form, as tho from *ficere, arose as a back formation.
A vaguely similar train of thought let me judge 'fik' plausible and I
preferred it over 'fak'.  If you agree, I could offer this possible
explanation in a history box.

>>>Why these little-used forms?
>>  The *stem* is in very common.  That it is called 'supine stem' is a
>> convention, and that I mention the future participle stem is because
>> some verbs lacked the perfect participle in Classical Latin.
>
> Only the verb 'to be' IIRC.
Ok.  I also only knew that one -- I wasn't sure whether my knowledge
was complete...

> [snip]
>>>>with the reduced stem vowel found in  compounds (for facere, use fic-,
>>>>not fac-).
>>>
>>>Why?  This looks rather implausible to me.
>>
>>
>> Because it is what survived in Modern Romance.  Many isolated forms
>> where lost because the verbs without prefix were often lost.  And the
>> regularised forms are usually modelled from the compound stem.
>
> Examples? Tho I have suggested this as a possibility in a Vulgar Latin
> dialect *there*.
For the first part (survival): 'quaerere' did not survive, 'inquirere'
did.  'Quatere' didn't, 'discutere' did.  I added those examples.

For the second part (regular modelling): Errrm, I don't know what I
meant. :-/  Sorry.

>>>>If the supine stem is a regular extension (+ optional vowel + t)
>>>>of the present stem, neglecting a possible stem vowel change and
>>>>neglecting a possible drop of stem-final glides, and if no consonants
>>>>fuse (for vidēre, use vis-, not vid-), and if the present stem vowel
>>>>is followed by at least a consonant (for īre, use it-, not ī-), then
>>>>the present stem is used including a potential vocalic/glide ending.
>>>
>>>This is a rule of the sort that is used in auxlangs to extract roots
>>>from verb paradigms, but doesn't resemble the way languages change
>>>naturally.  Sound changes are *insensitive to the morphological
>>>structure of the words affected*.
>
> I agree. This is very auxlangish. Not a problem, of course, if one is
> designing an auxlang or a fauxlang.
Yes, the construction is very auxlangish!  The result it produces does
not seem to be bad, however.  It seems to produce verbs that don't
look implausible.  Each single verb looks ok to me.  So it feels like
something I could use as a conlanger to implement my blackbox, while
the conhistory does not know about this.  Since the result looks
romlangish, why do it manually?

>...
>> This rule is modelled this way in the hope that the result is close to
>> what could have happened.  I believe it would be overly simplistic if
>> I mechanically used the 3rd person singular present indicative form.
>
> Why? Isn't that what we in fact find in the Romance languages? By all
> means use forms derived from frequentatives, if you will, but the rule
> as stated would IMO be very unlikely in a diachronically derived
> language.
Ok, I see.  There won't be much difference in the result, but the
construction would looks more plausible.  Sounds good.  I'm also fine
with a few verbs changing.  Did you spot a verb that looked
particularly strange?

>>>>To the resulting stub, an /-əm/ ending is added, and this is then
>>>>sound shifted with the GMP.
>>>
>>>This is an artificial process that doesn't look like a plausible
>>>development in the language.
>>
>> This is a technical trick again to produce a good GMP input.
>
> Yes, but if one has to resort to a 'technical trick', does it not
> suggest that there is a problem.
I don't think it can be judged that generally.

> If you used frequentatives instead of the bare supine stem,
> i.e. derived say "to see" from _visare_ (which actually occurs in
> Latin), then no technical trick is needed, as....
That does sound like an improvement, yes!

>...
>>>analogy often steps in to restore regularity.  But your method
>>>doesn't look as if it properly simulated that.
>>  I hope it does.
>
> Maybe it does - but the role of analogy - which clearly operated in
> the Romance languages *here* is not IMO made clear.
Ok, I'll rephrase that, too.

**Henrik