Re: Language Sketch: Yargish Orkish

Thomas Wier wrote:
>
>Quoting Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:
>
> > INTRODUCTION
> >
> > I don't normally see myself as a particularly creative person, but
> > sometimes inspiration strikes quite irrespective of my conscious wishes.
>
>I don't know about that.  Your posts on your other projects
>seemed interesting enough.  I'd be interested to see more
>of them (including this one) in the future.
I never claimed that my self-perception is necessarily true to reality, but
it _is_ unusual for me to create so much new stuff in such a short time.
When I, some year ago or so, presented a similar sketch of Kalini Sapak,
that was the result of a couple of weeks of thinking.
>
> > The stress falls on the first syllable of the stem of the head word in
>each
> > phrase. Thus in _u-chash-yarga_ "the strong warrior (erg)" the stress
>falls
> > on YAR.
>
>Does this mean that the article and any modifiers are clitic?
The article _u_ is a proclitic. The adjective _chash_ could occur on it's
own (meaning "a strong one"). The second hyphen was introduced out of a
desire of having _yarg_ "warrior" visibly connected to _u_. I might very
well revise this point of orthography, particularly if people think it's
confusing.

It may be noted that nothing is yet done on a native script. I'm envisioning
a mixture of alphabetic signs borrowed from the langs of other races and
native-Orc logograms. In any case, it'll be markedly unneat in contrast to
the very regular Tairezan writing, if I ever get round to inventing it.
>
> > GRAMMAR
> >
> > Yargish is an ergative SOV language. Despite its interfictionally being
> > spoken by non-humans, it doesn't have any very alien features (this far,
>at
> > least).
>
>It would be interesting to do a poll (Peter, you reading this?) on
>how many people on the list have ergative-absolutive languages.
>There seem to be an awfully large number of them, far more than
>the statistical 30% of natural languages.  (This is, of course,
>not a critique of your choice:  Phaleran itself does, afterall,
>have a split ergative system.)
Well, my other langs are accusative, so I felt the need for some variation!
>
> > NOUNS
> >
> > The Yargish noun has four cases; absolutive, ergative, dative and
>locative.
> > The first three are about what you'd expect, while the locative is only
> > used in combination with postpositions (see below). The plural number is
> > indicated with a prefix _na-_, orginally an independent word meaning
> > "many". Taking the word _yarg_ "(Orc) warrior", the paradigm of a
> > regular noun then is:
> >
> > -     sg      pl
> > - abs yarg    nayarg
> > - erg yarga   nayarga
> > - dat yargu   nayargu
> > - loc yargiz  nayargiz
>
>Does Yargish have an antipassive? If so, which case marks demoted
>patients, dative or locative? (Presumably, the dative, if the
>locative is only used with prepositions.)
I don't know anything about that yet. Perhaps not, as I don't want huge
numbers of verb forms.
>
> > PRONOUNS
> >
> > Yargish pronouns don't have any gender distinctions, nor any
> > formal/informal distinctions, which makes for a neat pronoun
> > table with forms for three persons, two numbers and four cases
> > (again, the locative is only used with postpositions).
> >
> > -     1st.sg 1st.pl 2nd.sg 2nd.pl 3rd.sg 3rd.pl
> > - abs ang    nazur  zdi    naja   ach     nava
> > - erg nga    zura   zda    ja     acha    va
> > - dat ngu    zuru   zdu    ju     achu    vu
> > - loc ngiz   zuriz  zdiz   jayz   achiz   naviz
>
>Can you talk a little more about the suppletion here?
As soon as somebody reminds me what "suppletion" means!
>
> > POSTPOSITIONS
> >
> > Yargish has a largish number of postpositions, that combines with the
> > ergative, dative and locative cases. For spatial postpositions, the
> > ergative carries ablative meaning, the dative allative and the locative,
> > um, locative meaning. Taking _dir_ "forest" and _-zata_ "in, inside",
> > we then have:
>
>It's a little unusual that the ergative would carry that oblique
>spatial meaing, but possible if phonological sound changes collapsed
>two originally distinct cases.  Is this the case in Yargish?
Hm, the ergative typically denotes the _cause_ of something, and _cause_ is
pretty close to _origin_, so I thought the identification ergative=ablative
seemed reasonably natural. But if that's violently untypical, I might well
introduce some phonological justification.

On second thoughts, I already have a perfectly acceptable phonlogical
excuse. Originally, the abs, erg and dat ended in -a, -aH, -a'u ("H"
indicating a not specified post-velar phoneme, and "'" a syllable boundary),
with the a's part of the noun stem. The occured a'u>aw, loss of final
monophthongs, loss of final -H and finally aw>o>u. All this was actually in
place right from the beginning. Clearly, the allative was originally simply
the basic noun stem, and thus identical to the absolutive, but the final /a/
was shielded by the following enclitic postposition, which eventually caused
this form to look like the ergative. Now I only hope this scenario isn't
terribly unlikely for some reason ...
>
> > VERBS
> >
> > The Yargish verb has two tenses, present and past,
>
>[...]
>
> > The future is handled by the present form plus an adverbial signifying
> > "tomorrow" or "next year" or whatever.
>
>So, the "present" is really a nonpast, as in many Germanic
>languages.
Exactly.
>
> > Yargish has noun-like adjectives, that preceed the noun the modify.
>
>Presumably, these do not agree with the modified noun in case,
>or number, right?
Correct.

                                                       Andreas

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