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Re: Third report on Koni - some grammar

From:Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@...>
Date:Friday, March 28, 2003, 21:20
Emaelivpeith Daniel Andreasson:
>> Vep'Jessica emaelivpeith Daniel Andreasson: > >What does that mean? "Wrote Jessica according to Daniel"? :)
"Because of Jessica, Daniel wrote." |vep'| introduces a "reason" clause; if that reason is a person, it can also be translated as "for", ie "For Jessica, Daniel wrote." The breakdown of |emaelivpeith| has been discussed over in the Personal Conjugations based on Closeness thread. :)
>If a language has pronominal affixes (like Quenya or Guarani), then >they are actual pronouns, which are just put on the verb instead of >being free-standing. They don't show up if the subject is a full NP. >And if the subject is a pronoun, then the affix itself is the actual >subject, which an agreement affix isn't. I hope that made sense.
Yes, that makes sense. Thanks! But what if a language can do either? That is, you have a choice between a free-standing subject but no agreement affix, an agreement affix but no free-standing subject, or both at once? Is there a linguistic term for this? And what are some anadewistic examples? :P
>Questions, questions. :)
I do believe you asked for questions. Questions you shall have. ;)
>This is all AFAIK, but syllable stress is >always on the penultimate. If it isn't (as in the case of the >language name itself) it's marked with an acute accent.
This also looks suspiciously Spanish-influenced; I'm quite guilty of the same accent-usage. :) Except I didn't like having quite so many accents, so I introduced semi-complex stress rules. I actually finally wrote down the hierarchy of stress-determiners: - accent-marked vowel is ALWAYS the primary stressed syllable - any syllable with <gh> is stressed - any syllable with <ae> (but not <ei>, both /ei/) is stressed - any syllable with <ille> is stressed - a double-initial word's stress is on the first written vowel - a verb's normal stress is on the last syllable; suffixes don't count - any other word has normal stress on the penultimate * an apostrophe breaks a word in half, and stress rules then apply only to the second half, unless an accent mark is present * if a word requires an accent in the singular, it will retain the accent in the plural, even though the plural suffix makes the stress on the penultimate; this is contrary to Spanish
>ASCII, so it would be Koni' on this list. I can recommend reading >the pdf-file I uploaded at http://home.swipnet.se/escape/koniphon.pdf.
Nice page. ObLaTeX: Have you tried using the TIPA/vowels package(s) to typeset the vowel chart?
>> Why hasn't she joined the list herself yet? :) > >I don't know! I think she's a bit overwhelmed just by the fact that >she's found out that *I'm* a conlanger. But I think I've convinced >her to at least join the list and go nomail, so she can read and >answer messages specifically about Koni.
She'll certainly be welcome whenever she decides to join. :)
>prior to her taking Linguistics and Spanish at uni.
(Note: I am _not_ trying to start YAEPT!) Is this an example of British English requiring less nouns to use an article? My Linguistics 101 class claimed that this existed. In AmE, I would say "at an uni(versity)" (I'd say the full word, too, or else use "college"). Just curious. :) -- AA

Replies

John Cowan <jcowan@...>
Joe <joe@...>