Re: Just for you, Wiz (Super Long)

> From: David Peterson
>
> In a message dated 5/4/01 2:05:54 PM, dbell@GRAYWIZARD.NET writes:
>
> << " I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition
> which this margin is too narrow to contain"
> - Pierre de Fermat >>
>
>     Did you think I was lying?
No, nor do I have any reason to believe that Fermat was lying either. I think you
missed the point.

================================

And now, introducing Tuentimin, a language _sketch_ produced in twenty minutes or less.

General Info:
Agglutinating, but not completely so. I won't explain in what ways it is not fully
agglutinating as that would take me longer than twenty minutes. The preferred
word order is OVS, I haven't figured out what the _nonpreferred_ word order
might be, nor the effects of pragmatic considerations like topic or focus, nor
intraphrasal constituent order. What about cleft constructions? Dunno. So word
order is OVS in main clauses, but what about prepositional, adjectival, and
relative clauses, genitives, comparatives, inflected auxiliaries, or questions?
I dunno. I haven't specified whether Tuentimin is dominantly head-marking or
dependent-marking, but that's just detail. Tuentimin is an ergative language.
Whether it is merely morphologically ergative or syntactically ergative as well
is... well just another detail.

Phonology:
Vowels: a e i o u
Diphthongs: maybe?
Stops: b p d t c g
Fricatives: v f dh th s z
Nasals: m n
Approximants: w y r l h

Not quite sure why I called this section _Phonology_ since I just listed a bunch
of letters with no phonetic details, but details are..., well just details.

Phonotactics: Syllable structure? Haven't specified, but I have worked out all the other
phonotactic details of Tuentimin. I haven't presented them here cause the
margin is too narrow. Suffice it to say that that 'nt' is a valid consonant
cluster.

Stress: If this were a tone language, it would have stress, but since it isn't, it doesn't.

Words: Yes, Tuentimin has words and they are all derived from roots. Haven't worked
out the derivation rules, but you remember that detail thing, don't you?

Articles: 'i' is the definite article and 'e' is the indefinite article. There probably
ought to be all kinds of spatial and temporal deictic determiners and
demonstratives as well as genitive, interrogative and quantifying determiners,
but we won't bother with explaining how this is accomplished. Not to mention
degrees of distance for spatial or temporal deictic. Hey we got 'the' and 'a'
covered, what more could you want?.

Nouns: Although I won't specify the distributional properties of nouns in Tuentimin,
I do have all kinds of suffixes for just about every combination of sentient,
animate, inanimate, active, passive, verbal, instrumental, human, vegetable,
mineral, locative, mass, count, constituent, shoes, ships and sealing wax. A
derivative language Thirtimin even has noun classes for cabbages and kings. How
all these suffixes interact with the root nouns phonologically is anybody's
guess. Whether these noun classes are strictly morphological or have syntactic
effects like agreement in Swahili hasn't been determined. And what about
gender? Dunno. And what about compounding (noun-noun, noun-verb)? Are there
productive compounding rules and what are they? How about denominalizations
(noun -> verb, noun -> adj, noun -> adv)? Dunno. And what of predicate nominals
expressing proper inclusion, equation, attribution, location, existence or
possession? Can't say. Are tense, aspect and !
mood restricted for these clauses?  Dunno.

Pronouns:
        Sing    Plu
1st     ni      nil
2nd     yin     ayin
3rd     tie     tid

No demonstrative, impersonal, reflexive, or reciprocal pronouns, I guess you
can't express these concepts in Tuentimin.

As you can see, nouns and pronouns form their plurals in -l except when they
don't. Nominals ending in a vowel take -l as a pluralizing suffix unless the
preceding character is also a vowel in which case they take -d to form their
plural. If the nominal ends in a consonant that would form a ill-formed
consonant cluster (I haven't defined what this is yet), then the nominal takes
a- as a pluralizing prefix. Tough to remember, but boy is this cool. Is number
marking obligatory or optional? Dunno.

Adjectives and adverbs: Adjectives are formed by adding -ig to any word, thus from
'mas'=cement we get 'masig'=? Well, almost any word. I haven't specified any
required sequencing of adjectives, quantifiers or demonstratives in multiple
adjective phrases so 'brown quick three the foxes' is just fine. How are
predicate adjectives formed? Dunno. Do adjective agree with their heads in
number, case or noun class? Dunno. Adjective degree and order of standard,
marker and quality? Haven't gotten to that. What of numbers and other
quantifiers? Do numbers agree with their heads? I dunno. Adverbs are formed by
adding -as to words that it makes sense to make an adverb from (huh?).
Adverbial degree, sentential adverbs, disjuncts and degree modifiers are too
complicated and give me a headache. Where do adverbs occur with respect to the
verb is undecided.

Case: Cases include Ergative, Absolutive, Dative, Genitive and Instrumental. I won't
specify when to use which case, just take your best guess. Semantic roles,
syntactic relations? I dunno. Tuentimin also uses adpositions, but what they
are, whether they are pre- or post-nominal and how prepositional clauses are
formed or whether they govern case hasn't been decided.

Verbs: Lots of different suffixes for all combinations of stative, action, process,
action-process, transitive, intransitive, ditransitives, weather verbs,
involuntary processes, bodily functions, motion verbs, positional verbs,
factives, and verbs of cognition, sensation, emotion, utterance and
manipulation. Lots of suffixes for tense (past, pres, fut) and voice
(active,passive, antipassive). Not sure how the latter affect the arguments of
the verb or what semantic roles are involved. Ditto with aspect which I
conflate with modality just to keep things interesting. How do tense and aspect
interact? Do these affect case marking? Dunno. Is voice the only valence
altering operation? Can't say. Is there an applicative or middle voice? What
about dative shifting? Dunno. Verbal agreement will remain unspecified, but
what about noun incorporation? Dunno. How about nominalizations? Can't say.
What about active and passive participles, auxiliaries or gerunds, you ask? !
 Are causatives lexical, morphological or periphrastic? What about epistemic
and deontic modalities? Is there an nonfinite verb form and what is role? I
dunno. Is there a copula and if so, what is its function? Is it used to form
predicate locative? Dunno. What of polarity? How does the language control the
scope of negation, i.e. negating a proposition vs. negating the modality of a
proposition? Dunno. Are there serial verb constructions, and if so, which verbs
participate? Can't say.

Correlatives: Since this is an IAL, we must have the obligatory table of regular
correlatives. If your interested, I'll explain these, but this email is getting
too long.

Relative clauses: Even though I haven't defined a relative pronoun above, let's pretend
that I did and use it. Take for example the sentence; "I saw the rat that was
chased by the cat that was bothered by the dog." This would be expressed...,
wait...maybe I should try a simpler example. What kinds of relative clauses
does Tuentimin have? Prenominal, postnominal, internally headed, correlative?
Dunno.

Clauses: Haven't really thought this category through. What are the rules for clause
combination? What kinds of complement clauses are there (subject, object or
both)? How are adverbial clauses formed? Does the position of an adverbial in a
sentence affect its semantics? What about conditionals? How about clause
chaining? If supported, in what direction does the dependency go? What about
coordination? Can you express conjunction, disjunction, or exclusion? If so,
how? I dunno. What about interrogatives? How are they formed? Where does the
question marker occur? Dunno.

Boy, at the rate of one language in twenty minutes, I could create 3 languages an
hour or 72 languages a day or 504 languages a week or....
=============================

Of course, all of the above was written with my tongue firmly imbedded in my
cheek. In fact, I rather enjoyed reading David's IAL _sketch_. It's quite
interesting. But, I maintain that it is no more a language than the CliffsNotes
for "War and Peace" is a novel. It is, however, a great start. Maybe by the
time David's sister is old enough to appreciate it, it actually will be a
language.

Keep up the good work, David

David

David E. Bell
The Gray Wizard
www.graywizard.net

Wisdom begins in wonder.

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