Re: Ke'kh
| From: | dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, September 19, 2000, 20:31 |
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Hey.
A little while ago, David reminisced about the days when we would
exchange grammatical sketchlets and comment on each other's work. I
also think back fondly to those times as well. However, the thought of
working through a whole sketch -- no matter how concise -- seems a bit
daunting, especially with RL time demands. So when T sent along his
"fact of the day", I thought, "Here we go! This is what we need; a
short, nifty grammatical point that won't take a long time to work
through." So in an effort to encourage this kind of post, I thought
I'd send along some comments.
On Tue, 19 Sep 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Random fact of the day about my conlang... ;-)
>
> Physical verb, Ke'kh /k<h>Ex/ (Kirsh), "to harm", "to injure", "to hurt".
>
> Incidental forms: "to (unintentionally) hurt or injure"
> Inceptive: Ke'kh /k<h>Ex/
> Progressive: k3Ki'kh /kV"k<h>ix/
> Perfective: Kuu'kh /k<h>u:x/
> Deliberative forms: "to deliberately hurt or injure"
> Inceptive: uKe'kh /uk<h>Ex/
> Progressive: kuKi'kh /kuk<h>ix/
> Perfective: Ku-u'kh /k<h>u?ux/
> Consequential forms: "to be caused to hurt or injure"
> Inceptive: aKe'kh /ak<h>Ex/
> Progressive: kaKi'kh /kak<h>ix/
> Perfective: Kau'kh /k<h>a?ux/
The categorization of 'incidental', 'deliberative', and
'consequential' reminds me of the Salish feature of 'control', which
encodes precisely the same kind of information. I've usually seen it
as a basic two-way distinction, but there are reports of more finely
articulated "control-space". Very nice! I also am a big fan of non-
concatenative morphology a la Arabic/Hebrew, etc.
A question about the transliteration. Do you also have voiced stops?
If not, perhaps the transcription system could use those symbols for
the plain voiceless stops; that way you could use the voiceless stop
symbols for aspirates. Thus the Incidental Progressive <k3Ki'kh>
becomes <g3ki'kh>. Or not. I've always felt it to be somehow inelegant
to have to rely on capitalization for phonetic quality distinctions,
but that's my personal preference.
> Points of interest:
> 1) Kuu'kh and Ku-u'kh differ only in the fact that the former has the long
> vowel u, while the latter has u split into two short vowels. The
> glottal stop is the only thing that differentiates between "to injure
> unintentionally" and "to injure deliberately"!
This might also be creaky voice, or glottalization of the vowel rather
than the splitting of a long vowel by a glottal stop. This is another
cool feature.
> 2) The sound of the word in each of its forms conveys its meaning (well,
> at least to me!) Especially if you pronounce K as the ejective /k'/
> instead of (merely) the aspirate /k<h>/, which is also a valid
> pronunciation of K. :-P
Interesting. Aspiration and glottalization involve opposing laryngeal
gestures: for aspiration the vocal folds are spread, while for
glottalization they are held together while the larynx is raised. Yet
both gestures can encode the same phonological distinction.
> 3) The accent marks (') indicate syllables of high pitch.
So stress is realized primarily by high pitch? Or are stressed
syllables louder than unstressed syllables as well?
> 4) Example sentences:
> i) bii'l3n0 Kuu'kh mangu'
> boy(org) injures(incid,perf) horse(rcp)
> "The boy (probably unintentionally) injures the horse."
Ah. So there are voiced stops. Okay. Ignore the transcription
suggestion above then.
> ii) bii'l3n0 Ku-u'kh mangu'
> boy(org) injures(delib,perf) horse(rcp)
> "The boy deliberately injures the horse."
>
> iii) bii'l3n0 Kau'kh mangu'
> boy(org) injures(conseq,perf) horse(rcp)
> "The boy injures the horse (because he was asked to or made to)."
This is very nice stuff! I hope to see more "facts de jour" posted
here; I'll try to find a nice little tidbit about Tepa that hasn't
been mentioned before. Or maybe I'll make something up. :-)
Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu