Re: New Language - WIP

Jim Grossman wrote:

> I wish I had thought of your case system myself.
I played around with the idea of an absolutive/ergative case system,
but decided I wanted something really offbeat.

>CASES:  You've mentioned these cases so far:  dative, accusative,
nominative.  Do you have other cases as well?   What are they?

Two other cases: genitive and ablative. However, since prepositions
agglutinate, I may be ditching the ablative case as well.

>CASE NAMES:   I think you need new case names.  "Nominative,"
"accusative," and "dative" just don't fit your scheme, which, if I
understand it correctly, goes like this:
[snip]
yep, that's how it works. I just used nominative, accusative, and
dative because those are the cases I'm familiar with, and in a
complete, ditransitive sentence, they fulfill the roles they play in,
say, latin.

>My suggestion:  rather than an endless search for arcane terms
that a) end in "-ive," and b) probably haven't been invented yet,
name the cases with initials that stand either for a) the grammatical
roles the NP in the case can play, or b) the types of clauses in which
NP's in the case can occur.

>Your "nominative" could be "s-case"  (i.e. subject case) or "d-case"
(i.e. ditransitive-clause case).

>Your "accusative" could be "sd-case" (i.e. subject & direct object
case) or "md-case" (monotransitive clause & ditransitive clause case).

>Your "dative" could be "sdi-case" (i.e. subject & direct object &
indirect object case) or "imd-case" (i.e. case that occurs in all
three clause types).

>Alternatively, you could number the cases, according to how many
grammatical roles they can play.   So ....

>"nominative" could be "case-1."    "accusative" could be "case-2."
"dative" could be "case-3."

Interesting idea. Right now, the case names are just place holders for
the final names, which I haven't decided upon just yet.

> INFLECTIONS: How exactly do you inflect for case? Do your case-endings also convey, for
> example, gender or number?
The inflection conveys both gender and number. The noun stem is the
masc. nom., which has no inflection. Go to
http://www.efn.org/~kgowen/declension.html for the complete
declension.
Right now, I've got it set up so the stem aerd- means person, so
aerd=man, aerda=woman, aerdyn=person.

I'm not entirely sure how to do plurals yet... for the time being you
just append -n or -un(if the word ends in a consonant) to the word. In
the future, I might add another declension for the plurals. Everything
is subject to change at this point.

>AGGLUTINATION:  What grammatical affixes have to be piled onto
prepositions and adjectives?

Nothing. Just attach the preposition onto the beginning of a noun of
the ablative case, and you're good to go. Adjectives... probably the
same, haven't really decided yet. Possibly a small, 1- or 2-letter
particle...

> TENSE:   How do you encode tense?
verb conjugation.


> EXAMPLES:   I don't recall seeing case or tense morphemes identified in your examples.
There were, I just didn't explain them all ;)

[snip]

>DIACRITICS:   What are those diacritics for anyway?   Do they mark
stress?  Do they mark phonemic tone?   Do they mark phonemic contrasts
in length?   Or do they just allow you to transcribe eighteen
different vowel sounds with only six letters, "a," "e," "i," "o," "u,"
and "y"?

They originally denoted a different vowel sound, but have since been
ditched as well.

>IN CLOSING:   You have many more details to flesh out.  How many
depends on the scope of your project.   Are you writing a grammatical
sketch?   A concise reference grammar?   A full-blown history of the
language?   A complete grammar, lexicon, history, and 500 page epic?

Something between the "concise reference grammar" and "full-blown
history". ;) This just started as a hobby project and has developed
somewhat.

>I wish you the best of luck, and look forward not only to your posts,
but to others' responses to them.

Thanks, I hope I can manage to make it work (I've given up twice before).

Ian