Re: A really odd language: Tolborese

Quoting Nihil Sum <nihilsum@...>:

> Agrau si "Thomas R. Wier":
>
> >Well, his system *is* a case system. It marks grammatical
> >roles quite explicitly. It just does so in a way quite
> >unlike most human languages.
>
> I suppose so. Any noun marked for an agent is a patient; any
> noun marked for a patient is an agent. Difficult to mark for
> any other cases though. For example, would a noun in the dative
> -- say, a recipient --be marked for the agent of the transaction,
> from which it was receiving the patient, or for the patient of
> this transaction as received from the agent?
I don't think you have to mark all cases in such a switched
around fashion.  You could do so only with the core cases,
and have perfectly normal oblique case marking.

> >I tend to favor head marking languages, so all my languages
> >have verbal cross-reference.
>
> Surely you don't use the same structure for every project! I
> remember seeing something like this in that site about the
> "conlanger's code", where it asked questions like which kind
> of phonology or structure you "prefer". As if one would use
> the same phonology for every language, or the same
> grammatical structure! Well, maybe someone would -- but not me.
No, I don't.  Even though Phaleran and C'ali tend to be head-
marking, C'ali is far more dependent marking than Phaleran.
Also one must consider one's conculture.  Phaleran and C'ali
exist in a putative universe where they have existed for many
hundreds of years in coexistence.  Such conditions in *this*
world typically lead to the spread of features throughout an
area in the form of a Sprachbund (those in the Balkans and in
the Pacific Northwest are perhaps the most famous).  Therefore,
Phaleran and C'ali will naturally share some features that are
most likely to spread, like phonology.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637