Re: Native Grammatical terms

Isidora palsalge
>I am gathering opinions on what amount of native grammatical terms would be
>present in a conlang which is entirely oral (i.e. whose speakers are a
>pre-literate culture.  I, the conlanger, obviously have created a
>transcription system for the language.)
There are probably terms for parts of speech and function in a phrase. You
don't need special grammatical terms, though; in Sturnan, I have solids
(nouns), motions (verbs), modifiers, and prepositions as the four parts of
speech. Subject could be called topic, doer, actor, and so on; you get the idea.

>The language in question is Índumom Tovlaugadóis, also known by its Trehelo
>name, Cwendaso.  In the near future, the Trehelo alphabet will be adapted
>(by dropping a lot of characters and inventing at least three new ones) for
>use in writing Tovlaugadóis, but, as things stand now, the Tovláugad are an
>entirely oral culture.
Hm. Then the Tovláugad don't know as much about historical linguistics as
the Trehelo. (If that's an awkward sentence arrangement or ungrammatical,
well, I find myself losing bits of English grammar, even though it's my L1.)

>I am wondering how much grammatical terminology the Tovlaugad would have,
>being an oral culture.  Language is terribly important to them.  They have
>a poetic corpus spanning at least one and a half millennia, and this corpus
>is very important to them.
They probably have detailed vocabulary relating to stylistic things, such as
(provided these are applicable) passiveness, emphatic modes of speech,
tenses and moods, and so on. Things that are stylistically frowned upon
might be used as insults: "You use a past progressive imperfect passive to
describe sunrise!" "Oh, yeah? Well, you use passive constructs when you
should promote the subject!"

>What I am wondering is whether they are likely to have much native
>grammatical terminology, and, if so, how complex it would be.  When writing
>is introduced, it is through a Trehel who has a great deal of knowledge
>about the grammar of his native language and his wife who is a Tovláug who
>has nearly the entire poetic corpus memorized and is a poet herself.  Was
>grammatical terminology for Tovlaugadóis already in existence before
>writing or was most of it invented by the couple who adapted the alphabet?
As I suggested, a fair amount dealing with style (which probably includes a
good deal of morphosyntax) and little with phonology, historical
linguistics, that sort of thing.