Re: THEORY: 'true' nature of nouns vs. 'illusionary' nature

Hi!

Danny Wier <dawiertx@...> writes:
>...
> > Ok, so the phonology is not influenced by Inuit-Aleut.  You said the
> > verb was influenced by the Geogian screeve system, right?
>
> I just posted Tech phonology and a wee bit on grammar for you and anyone
> else interested.
>
> The first ideas for polysynthesis came from Georgian verb grammar, which is
> polypersonal if not polysynthetic. The screeve system is still confusing me;
> it's a multi-dimensional system of tenses, aspects and moods that affect,
> among other things, the case the subject and objects are declined in. That's
> how Georgian is mixed-ergative.
I noticed that parallelism immediately in the feature list. :-)

> Tech will use ergative or accusative depending on not only tense,
> but (anti)passivity (Inuktitut is normally ergative, but becomes
> accusative with antipassive verbs).
Is it?  I don't have the grammar at hand, but I can't remember having
read that about Kalaallisut.  Interesting.  How does it show up, as
antipassive verbs should be intransiting taking the absolutive
argument of the original verb as an oblique and promoting the ergative
to absolutive, no?  Of does that promote to nominative then?

Kalaallisut is ergative only in exhaustives like 'all', etc., so it is
more or less a lexicalised feature of a few but frequent nouns (which
keep this feature even if modified by derivational affixes).

> But Inuit-Aleut languages are also incorporating, enabling it to
> make one-word clauses.
Yes, great thing! :-)

Yesterday, I produced my first sentence in Kalaallisut myself, and I'd like
to proudly announce that 'we want to go to Thule':

   Qaanaamukarumavugut.
   Qaanaaq + m-ut + kaq + Juma + Vu-gut
   Thule     ALL    go.to want   IND/1p

ALL=allative
IND=indicative
1p=1st person plural.

Allative is visibly 'm' + 'ut', 'm' being used for all oblique cases
except equitative.

In the same way transparent, IND/1p is indicative 'Vu' plus 1p 'gut'.
This is not so regular in other mood/person/number combinations.

Upper case letters are used in the grammar I have to indicate that
the letter involves some magic special rules that have to be used.

That's not too long a word for now, but I still hope I obeyed all
those fusion rules and applied correctly those that I tried to obey...

**Henrik

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