Re: Third report on Koni - some grammar

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

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