Re: What criteria do you have for your own or others' languages?

On Thu, 14 Dec 2006 15:31:54 -0800, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:

>On 12/13/06, Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...> wrote:
>> Is that a good answer to your question, or should I elaborate, or did I
>> leave something out?
>
>Yes. :-P
>
>What does "do something interesting" mean?
>
> - Sai
>=========================================================================
Several different possibilities.

I am especially interested in the formation of biclausal and multiclausal
sentences.  Many very uncomplicated sentences of the kind adults are
interested in require two or more clauses.  Just from the King James
English version of The Lord's Prayer, for instance, we have;
* Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name.
* Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.
* Forgive as our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Ordinarily, it is something like:
* Polypersonal agreement
* Use of a "trigger" system
* Transfixes, suprafixes, or circumfixes
* Clause-chaining or a switch-reference system
* Impositions (instead of prepositions or postpositions)
* "Odd" (to me) morphosyntactic alignments, such as hierarchical or
direct/inverse
* Demonstratives or pronouns that make distinctions I'm not used to making
* For instance, visible vs invisible
* Head-marking where I am used to dependent-marking or vice versa
* For instance, marking the adposition with the gender/number/person of its
object noun, rather than marking the noun with the case governed by that
adposition
* Use of a person, gender, number, voice, tense, mood, aspect, degree of
comparison, case, or whatever that I'm not used to
* For instance, "fourth person" (which can mean several things), paucal
number, applicative voice, hodiernal and hesternal past tenses, hodiernal
and crastinal future tenses, conjunctive mood, evidentials or miratives,
equative degree, perlative or translative cases

I tend to concentrate on the syntax, semantics, pragmatics, etc. rather
than on the phonology and phonetics etc.; though sometimes I am interested
because of an unusual sound.