Re: Zaik! (Hi there!) - Description of Lyanjen

Matt McLauchlin wrote:

> >Welcome to the list, from a fellow gay Canadian conlanging linguist who
> likes
> >Montreal (I spent a semester hanging out in the linguistics department at
> McGill
> >a few years ago, working on Malagasy).
>
> Oy... you sound like my third boyfriend (the eccentric gay Canadian
> Esperantist of Scottish descent into conlanging too - although he doesn't
> actually conlang, he just reads other peoples').
Well, I'm neither Scottish nor an Esperantisto, but I think I've been someone's
third boyfriend...


> Malagasy, eh? Did you have Prof. Travis?
Well, I didn't 'have' Lisa Travis, but we did co-organize a seminar on Malagasy
while I was there.  The only course I sat in on was one by Mark Baker, who
isn't there anymore.  I was mostly there to do fieldwork with native speakers
and share ideas with Lisa and some of the grad students who were working on
Malagasy at the time.  This was about 3 years ago, right after I'd finished my
M.A.


> Here are some other usages:
>
> Iar   skici           clairan.
> I-erg break-past-prog window-abs.
> "I broke the window."
>
> Skici           clairan.
> break-past-prog window-abs
> "The window broke/got broken."
>
> There's no passive voice. Literally, you could say "clair staï r'skicand"
> (the window was being broken), but that would sound very very foreign.
> However, a similar construction "clair staer r'skicaband" (the window is
> [having-been-]broken) is possible.
Tokana works like this too, except that your absolutive and nominative
functions are both subsumed by the absolutive case, and what you call the
"ergative" I call the "nominative" (for irrelevant morphological reasons;
confusing, isn't it?)

  Ma    tsitsp-e-h         huiloi
  I-Nom break-Pst-the(Abs) window
  "I broke the window"

  Te       huiloi tsitsp-e
  the(Abs) window break-Pst
  "The window broke/was broken"

Like Lyanjen, Tokana has no passive:  Agent-denoting arguments are freely
omissable, producing passive-like constructions.  There's also a way of
deriving resultative adjectives (stative verbs, really) from event-denoting
verbs:  e.g., "tsitspa" = "break", "tseitspa" = "be broken, be in a state of
having been broken":

  Te       huiloi tseitspa
  the(Abs) window broken
  "The window is broken"

  Te       huiloi tseitsp-un
  the(Abs) window broken-Pst
  "The window was broken [but now it's fixed]"

Matt.