Re: First Post and Proto-Conlang rough sketch

Take a look at W.P. Lehmann's "From Topic to Subject in Indo-European",
Chapter 14 page 445 of "Subject and Topic" edited by Charles N. Li,
Symposium on Subject and Topic", U of Cal Santa Barbara, 1975.  It's only 11
pages long; and it shows some of the things that can happen, especially to
relative clauses, when the word-order shifts, in addition to what can happen
when the language changes from topic-prominent to subject-prominent.

---In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Yukatado <yukatado@...> wrote:
>[snip]
>Here's a rough sketch of what I would like to do for the Proto-
>Language itself:
>[snip]
>That's all I really have for now
Hi.  The stuff I snipped was interesting, I just didn't intend to reply to all of it.
Your "sketch" is a lot less sketchy than any of mine, or most others I've seen;
it's well-worked-out compared to even my most-worked conlang.
I like some of the things you did a lot, for instance the list of possible roots.

>but I need a little info before I can continue:
>I really can't decide which way to have the syntax go. If I go OV,
>then I can go from Isolating to agglutinating post-positions, to
>inflections fairly easily. However, I'm having trouble seeing it do
>the same thing if the language is VO. Call it my Anglo-centric bias,
>but I happen to like adjectives and genitives that precede their
>nouns, and I know that they're technically independent of the VO/OV
>structure, though typically influenced by it.
1) Are you committed to having a verb-phrase that has the O more tightly
bound to the V than either is to the S?
1a) Are you committed to a rule that nothing else can come between the V
and the O?

>Do relative clauses typically take a relative pronoun if the clause
>precedes the noun it modifies, or do they typically dispense with it
>as in Japanese?
2) According to Lehmann and some other famous-ish IE-ists, it's between
possible and likely, that changing the "word-order" from VO to OV or from OV
to VO, makes the language get really precise about what happens with
embedded clauses, particular the "open" or non-sentential clauses.  I'm not
sure whether does or doesn't make a bigger difference with relative clauses
(clausal adjectives) than with complement clauses (clausal nouns) or adjunct
clauses (clausal adverbs); but I expect it does, since the others don't have
to "adhere" to a noun and so don't have a Rel-N or N-Rel order question to
answer.

There are three strategies for indicating the shared participant of the matrix
clause and the relative clause; and many languages use tow of them, often
depending on how many clause-boundaries are crossed.  The filler-gap
strategy is one method; the resumptive-pronoun strategy is another; and the
relative-pronoun strategy is the third.  As far as I know, the relative pronoun
always immediately precedes the relative clause; (do you know of situations
where it follows the relative clause instead?)  It makes sense, to me, to have
the RelPron between the RelClause and the head noun; if that's the way it is,
that would imply that the orders are N-RelPron-RelClause or RelClause-RelPron-
N.  Of those two only N-RelPron-RelClause has the RelPron before the
RelClause.

>I want to make the Proto-language into two stages of development: an
>"Old-Proto-Language" that is as isolating as possible
>(grammaticalized words, rather than agglutinations or inflections),
>and a "Late-Proto-Language" that has garnered some innovations that
>will be shared by the daughter languages - perhaps a set of
>agglutinations which are degraded forms of the grammaticalized
>words.
Take a look at W.P. Lehmann's "From Topic to Subject in Indo-European",
Chapter 14 page 445 of "Subject and Topic" edited by Charles N. Li,
Symposium on Subject and Topic", U of Cal Santa Barbara, 1975.  It's only 11
pages long; and it shows some of the things that can happen, especially to
relative clauses, when the word-order shifts, in addition to what can happen
when the language changes from topic-prominent to subject-prominent.

>Anyway, any thoughts on the project, advice, help, whatever, is
>welcomed and appreciated!
>Jason
I don't know if this counts as help or advice.