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

>> Phonology. Consonants: /d/, /dj/, /Z/, /r/, /s/, /z/, /b/, /k/, /p/, /t/,
>> /n/, /nj/, /g/, /S/, /m/, /l/, /lj/.
>
>Interesting -- you have quite a few palatals here. Is there any reason for
>this diachronically?
Let me take a look at my notes...

I've got voiced and unvoiced alveopalatal frics and approximants, and an
alveopalatal nasal, as well as the three palatalized consonants. Is that a
lot? Maybe it just looks like a lot because I don't have any dentals or
labial fricatives.

><c> for /S/ does have precedents -- Onondaga uses that.
Yyyyyyyeah, I know and that's why I did it. Right. That's the ticket.
Sure. :)

>Is this supposed to have onomatopoetic effects on the language?  It would
>be rather interesting to posit a society where "masculine" vowels undergo
>different historical shifts, or pattern differently, than "feminine
vowels", because
>the male members' speech in that society shifted when the females' didn't,
or
>vice versa -- hence the name.
Oo, that's an interesting idea. I thought of it more in terms of lexical
content - women's names often end in -e or -i, and -e is a feminine suffix;
vice-versa for the masculine vowels. (Izado = husband; izade = wife; izad =
spouse.)

I was originally going to call them "weak" and "strong" vowels, but then I
thought it was sexist that women's names would end in a "weak" vowel and
men's in a "strong", especially for a society whose Abraham Lincoln/John A.
MacDonald was a woman.

>R. M. W. Dixon's _Ergativity_ in the Cambridge Linguistics series,
>Chapters 2.2 and some about split ergativity in Chapter 4.
Thanks, I'll look it up.

>> Verbs: All adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions are verbs. Verbs'
>> transitivity is determined by the noun cases used with them. For example:
>> I-nom RED = I am red.
>> I-erg RED = I make (something) red.
>
>Presumably here, you would have to have a rule that allowed you to omit
>some NPs.  Is there anything more specific to this?
Please be nice to the first-year linguistics student who's taken two survey
courses and a socio course and that's it. :) (Translation: I'm not quite
sure what you mean. Could you clarify?)

>> RED I-abs = I become red.
>
>Is word order free?  Why the change from the above SV pattern?
Well, because in this case the absolutive is sort of the object of the
sentence. (A more literal translation would be "[something] reds me." But
word order is freer than in English, for the same reason as Esperanto.

>> In the case of prepositions, they are also moving verbs depending on the
>> case:
>> I-nom UP = I am up.
>> I-nom UP TOWN-loc = I am above the town.
>
>Semantic case is typologically usually optional, but here you seem to
>have to use the locative case suffix for "up". If it's not used, you get a
>different reading, namely, "I lifted the town" or something like that.
Right, you need to use a dative/genitive/locative to make a noun the object
of the preposition. I guess if "town" didn't have a locative, it would
be "I, the town, am up". ("I lift the town" would be "iar spaa ceblan", I-
erg UP TOWN-abs, as below.) (Note that a noun with no suffix is nominative.)

>Is there no distinction in voice (syntactic movement of an NP to a
>different place to emphasize some thematic role's part in the action)? You
>*can* get around having morphological voice by free wordorder. Free
>wordorder allows you to manipulate wordorder for thematic effect instead
>of for syntactic requirements.
That's a thought. I guess "Ian spaa" (I-abs UP) could be "I ascend" (on my
own steam) and "Spaa ian" could be "I am lifted" (by someone else).

Oh, here's something: note that there's nothing wrong with completely
omitting an ergative noun.

Oir tanati bóbalan = something killed the bobal (large domestic ruminant).
Tanati bóbalan = the bobal was killed. but compare:
Bóbal tanati = the bobal died.


>This seems a little like "quirky case", where case is specified lexically
on the
>verb.  What you really have to do here is posit two distinct verbs, SELL[1]
>and SELL[2], for "sell" and "purchase" respectively,  which are simply
>homophonous.
Not really; I was thinking sort of like the German verb "kauf". I don;t
speak German, but if I'm not mistaken, "ankauf" ("on-sell") means "to buy",
and "verkauf" ("away-sell") means "to sell". I just take those prepositions
and transfer them to the noun. I see this as a case just like being able to
omit the ergative noun to make a passive. Compare:

Ger rodzi traikcan eim. (She sold a pastry to me.)
    Rodzi traikcan eim. (A pastry was sold to me.)

Then, by your suggestion of "active-izing" the noun by putting it in front:

Eim rodzi traikcan. (I bought a pastry.)

>> Correlatives:
>> To say something like "I believe that you are mistaken," say, you say I-
erg
>> BELIEVE THIS-ONE-abs, THAT YOU-nom ERR.
>
>So... is THIS-ONE-abs the subject or the object?  Perhaps I'm being
>confused by your terminology.
THIS-ONE-abs is the object of the verb BELIEVE. It basically is, "I believe
this: that you are wrong."

>How many conjunctions do you have so far?
Suffixes: three. -uj = and; -aut = aut (tee hee), -el = vel (tee hee again).

Náruz'dya malpuj = an earthsun and a malp (types of flower).
Náruz'dya malpaut = an earthsun or a malp, but not both.
Náruz'dya malpel = an earthsun or a malp or both.

Between clauses or more complex NP's, though, you use the standalone
conjunctions ju (and), tau (aut), le (vel). (Compare Klingon conjunctions.)

>> There are tu and vos forms for both plural and singular second person.
>
>Do you mean by this that you have both neutral and honorific forms for
>your pronouns?
Only second-person.

>I take this to mean that you have four second person pronouns.
Right, just like Madrid Spanish.

za = tu (2nd p. singular informal).
sac = usted (2nd p. singular formal).
bua = vosotros (2nd p. plural informal).
bec = ustedes (2nd p. plural informal).

The difference being, of course, that unlike usted/ustedes, all of the 2nd
person pronouns are conjugated in the second person. That's because they're
just melded forms of the second person plus an honorific. (Contrast the
Spanish "usted", which had to be the third person because it originally
came from "vuestra merced" (your grace).)

Can you tell I've got a Spanish exam in eight hours? :)