Re: I'm back (OurTongue)

Hello again, Christophe,

> OurTongue is based on the so-called "proto-syllables", isn't it? If so, those
> proto-syllables looks damn IE to me! Nothing against OurTongue, it's an artlang
> after all ;)) . But it makes this whole "proto-syllables" stuff pretty not
> serious to me ;))) .
Well, have you looked at Mr. Ryan's website, particularly his inventory of Proto-Language
monosyllables?  There are many ways that they can be used morphologically.  In other words, one is
not bound to come up with a language similar to IE by using the monosyllables; they can create
something completely different if they'd like.  Indeed, Mr. Ryan uses them primarily to connect
different languages with each other.

Yes, the personal inflections look rather IEish, but they look even more similar to Uralic.  This
was rather intentional.  I would even dare to suggest that Finnish's ancestor (Proto-Finno-Ugric?)
had a 3sg inflection in -sa: where ":" stands for an umlaut (analogous to the 3sg pronoun);
however, the 3pl was formed analogically from the plural active participle sooner or later.  The
sound law s > h is common in Finnish, and a: seems to be such a weak vowel that it could easily
assimilate into the stem vowel with compensatory lengthening, thus giving rise to the modern 3sg
inflection (e.g. sanoo 'he/she says').  But enough about reconstructive linguistics ;) .  Yes, it
is true that OurTongue is something of an artlang; however, it's also (an attempt at) a
naturalistic conlang through use of the Proto-Language monosyllables.  One of the main design
concepts was to make it look like it (or something similar to it) could actually have existed in
the past.  So it looks related to IE, Uralic, Altaic, and (to a lesser extent) Kartvelian
languages.

Here is the development of the OurTongue pronouns from the PL monosyllables:

PL *me 'tongue, speaker' > OT me 'I'
PL *tho-$e 'accompany-ing' > *t@i > OT te 'you' (the idea here is that the listener accompanies
the speaker)
PL *she(-$e) 'one(-like)' > OT se 'he/she/it'

PL *me-no 'speaker-basket=group' > men@ > OT men 'we'
PL *tho-$e-no 'accompany-ing-group' > t@in@ > OT ten 'y'all'
PL *she(-$e)-no 'one(-like)-group' > sen@ or s@in@ > OT sen 'they'

The ergative suffix is -e; it was originally a particle so its vowel quality was preserved through
the initial stage of evolution from the Proto-Language (where unstressed vowels became schwas).
the following sound law then occurred: e+e > e: (long e) > ei > i.  Thus the singular ergative
(later nominative) forms are:

me-e > me: > mei > mi
te-e > te: > tei > ti
se-e > se: > sei > si

In the plural ergatives, the suffix became -i by analogy with the singular forms.  Thus:

men-e > mene > meni
ten-e > tene > teni
sen-e > sene > seni

Personally, I like this system because it shows a more ancient inflectional paradigm with the
pronouns - such a distinction between nouns and pronouns is common in natural languages.  However,
do you think that ergative/nominative mi vs. absolutive/accusative me is insufficiently
distinctive?

In addition, Ryan makes note on his website to an ancient system of verb differentiation between
momentary and durative: in original CV-CV forms, stress on the first syllable conveyed a durative
meaning, while stress on the second syllable conveyed a momentary meaning.  I assume that OT had
not diverged from the Proto-Language before this system was in effect.  Thus:

t?a'-rha 'hand-flies' > dar@ > dara- 'tremble'
t?a-rha' 'hand-flies-repeatedly' > d@ra > dera- 'fear'

The idea for the second one is trembling repeatedly for some amount of time, as from fear.  The
schwa in the second derivation became e due to its medial position in the root; subesquently the
stress-accent retracted to the first syllable.  Do you think there is a sufficient distinction
between "dara" and "dera" for rather disparate meanings?

The conditional in -le is from PL *nhe, which can mean 'little, fragile, come apart.'  My rational
for this is that adding that to the verb adds the meaning of 'fragile' to the action, so the verb
loses 'stability' -- i.e. it no longer expresses a concrete statement of fact.  Does this seem
reasonable to you?  Oh, and the etymology for the conditional suffix is actually different from
that for the allative suffix; the latter comes from -nha-hhe 'move-back-and-forth-go-to.'

In my view, the preterite (< perfective) tense formant -i is the most basic, and is appended
directly to the inflectionless verb stem; any other formants are added *after* it.  Thus, there
are four participles: present active, present passive, preterite active, and preterite passive.
There are also two basic masdars, one for the present stem and one for the preterite stem.  I
think this is a simple and elegant solution.

Here are the participles and masdars for dara- 'tremble'

darava 'trembling'
daraiva 'having trembled/having been trembling'
darata 'trembled'
daraita 'had trembled' (?)
darama 'to tremble/trembling (activity)'
daraima 'to have trembled/having trembled (activity)/having been trembling (activity)'

Perhaps there could also be masdars and participles formed from the conditional stems, e.g.
daraleva 'possibly trembling' or darailema 'having possible been trembling.'  Yet another idea is
using -le as a hypothetical marker, and using something else as a conditional.  What do you think?

- Rob

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