From: "Garrett Jones" <conlang@...>
Subject: Re: Oldvak - something to figure out
> i'll try a crack at this too.
> > "Egeltas piabaya, egenelt dvalderas, nur egirelt ati."
> > "When I am at the meadow, I am not in the woods, but I may be on my
way
> > there."
> Eg-elt-as piabay-a
> 1sg-be.at-when meadow-at
All good except the analysis of "elt". It's just "be", not "be at".
> eg-en-elt dvalder-as
> 1sg-OPP-be.at forest-in
An interesting idea with "en", but I'm afraid it's just a negative marker.
> nur eg-ir-elt at-i
> but 1st-CHG-be.at there-to
"Ir" means that the action is not known to be true or false.
> > "Egireltyeu dvalderi. Dvalder aleltu egi."
> > "I am not stopping my going to the forest. The forest stopped
> > coming to
> > me."
>
> eg-ir-elt-ye-u dvalder-i
> 1st-CHG-be.at-NEG-stop forest-to
As I just mentioned in another message, "ir" here should have been "en". My
fault, though I must say, I'm impressed that some of the solutions have
worked around this anyway!
"Ye" is not negative. I think I'll need more examples to make its purpose
clear.
> dvalder al-elt-u eg-i
> forest 3sg-be.at-stop 1st-to
All good here!
> i decided to gloss 'ye' as negative and 'en' as opposite. it didn't seem
> right to have two negative morphemes.
I'd agree about two negatives not being useful.
> > Same verb being used in these two sentences as in the other example.
> >
> > Anyone think they know how this works?
>
> it seems like if there was just one more morpheme in any one of about
three
> sentences, it would all fall together really easily. For the analysis I
> chose, the verb in the last one would have to be "al-ir-elt-u". I really
> need more examples to do a better analysis.
>
> It looks like the only differences between my analysis and mike's analysis
> were the -ir- morpheme and the -en-/-ye- morphemes.
All told, a very good analysis given the limited data there were to work
with.