Can't stop agglunating, HELP!
From: | Paul Bennett <pbennett@...> |
Date: | Wednesday, June 16, 1999, 20:32 |
I know the advice is probably going to be "relax and go with the
flow", but I really didn't want my artlang (Wenetaic) doing what it's
started to do. It's supposed to be believably Indo-European, and if
possible relatively old. All help to get me back on track would be
appreciated.
The problem is:
I can't stop adding (fairly regular and "almost" free-order)
agglunative suffixes to the grammar. Almost every grammatic
feature I want or need to add can be expressed in in this way (ie in
terms of an OBJECT+QUASILOCATIONAL+DETERMINATIVE
(consonant+vowel+consonant/vowel pair) suffix).
For those of you who have read my first Wenetaic translation, even
in the time since I wrote that, the Past Tense "nge:" (and Future
"ha") have tentatively become determinatives instead of a seperate
lexemes, to allow the notion of Near/Far tenses. I can see this
trivalent logic thang doing horrible sick and twisted things as well.
(I currently have at least six new determinatives bubbling away in
my brain, and that's just from reading recent posts). Worse than
that, I may have completely banished the seperate morphology for
Verbal root forms (something else I wasn't planning on).
For an example of how bad it's got in a few short days:
For the phrase "Get your hands off me!" (my usual practice phrase
when congrammaring Wenetaic) I now have the word:
"tatki-sas'e":-moyi-kaha-s!"
[Hand(Noun Plural)-YOU.Near.Component-ME.Far.Direction-
ABSTRACT.Near.Future-YOU]
where I originally had:
"s'e":s tatkir (ha) inrimoyis!"
[Component.YOU Hands(Noun Plural).ANIMATE (Future)
travel(Verb Simple).ME.Far.Motion.YOU].
(Infact, I _originally_ had "taktimoyis!", which is still technically a
valid formation under the new, improved grammar!)
One thought that has struck me just now: I suppose the suffixes
could be thought of as seperate lexemes, with the final
"Person/Gender" marker acting as a kind of "end of phrase" marker.
I'd like to add that most of this messing around has been caused
by reading this durned list! (I even went so far as to postulate verb-
noun and verb-verb suffixes at one point.)
--
Pb
Phoks'esayim phos'kep makhmek