Re: An unusual incorporation scheme

On Thu, 2005-12-08 at 23:03 +0100, Steven Williams wrote:
> --- tomhchappell <tomhchappell@...> wrote:
>
> > P.S. I think English is primative/secundative, too;
> I suppose that
> > makes me one of those people who think English is
> > dechticaetiative.
>
> Ach! What are all these big words I've never seen
> before? Primative/secundative? 'Dechticaetiative'?!?
> How do you even *pronounce* that last monstrosity? [dEk.ti.k@.E.ti.@.tIv]?
The normal rules of the English orthography demand that "cae" is
equivalent to "cea" (i.e. the "ae" is a long e and causes the c to be
soft), as in "Caesar", and normally, particularly in words from
Greek/Latin, "tia" in an unstressed syllable is /S@/. Thus, I'd
guess /dekt@si:S@tIv/. Speakers of non rabbit-abbot merging dialects I
suppose would make the second syllable something like /tI/ or /ti/. (I
would've thought in American English it would be "dechticetiative", but
Americans have a tendency to retain "ae" and "oe" in learned words,
another example is "coelacanth" pr. /si:l@k&:nT/ based on an American
dictionary on the web... (OTOH it isn't always true... "Apn(o)ea" is
another learned word, and the o-less spelling even rules in Australia
nowadays.)

In orthography, it'd be something like "DECK-ti-SEE-sha-tive", I think.
Exactly how you interpret that's up to you, but it might be easier than
converting Australian English IPA into one for your own dialect. Or it
might be misleading, I'd interpret it wrongly...

Wikipedia is kind enough to have an article on dechticaetiative
languages, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechticaetiative_language>. By
the looks of things, they treat indirect objects the same way as they
treat direct objects of verbs with no indirect object. that is, (I
think) they're the direct object/indirect object equivalent of
subject/object ergative languages. Something like: ...

        I threw the baby his bottle.
        I threw his bottle.

where "the baby" (IO) and "his bottle" (DO) both appear to be taking the
same spot in the sentence, and thus both "marked" in the same way. That
seems relatively convincing, but having skipped most of this thread I
knew nothing about them till I started writing this message ... I would
suppose arguments against English's dechticaetiativity (bwahaha!) would
go something along the lines of: "his bottle" is being marked in the
same way in both phrases, as the last non-prepositional noun phrase in
the sentence. Paul's observation that English can also do it differently
as "I threw the baby's bottle to him" probably means (to me and, I
spose, him) that English isn't dechticaetiative, but rather has the
capacity to express sentences dechticaetiatively.

I hope that's right, but I look forward to any corrections/additions!

--
Tristan.

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