Test (Repost of ZBB Kyahida Post #2)
▲
0▲ 0 ▼ 0
This public article was written by [Deactivated User], and last updated on 3 Apr 2014, 21:25.
[comments] khd Basic Sentences
Before we can get to the juiciest strategies for plopping appositive phrases in sub-relativized whojamacallits while referencing referents three sentences ago, we're going to need three things:
-Some Kjáhida words, so we don't have half-glosses
-Some typological decisions, so we can be consistent going forward
-A basic, prototypical, descriptive-tone sentence
Some Vocab
So, with the caveat that these words could radically change if I muss with the phonology of Kjáhida (and that I'm not breaking my own rules already...), here are a bank of words I think should serve us well for now:
Joe, Jane, and Spot: Sakír, Ritá, Táti
Kinds: sal(person), nis(boy), nit(girl), tatíra(dog)
Inanimate props: tímitim(stick), rakási(potato), sjiráha(sriracha sauce)
Not really nouns, but why not: tína(hapiness) lídja(sadness) kirikinís(quickness)
Nice, active verbs: sam(go) lir(see/apprehend) dawi(throw) win(eat) mal(put/place)
Finicky, less-active verbs: rak(have/possess) nisír(feel) sja(be)
Fun multivalent verbs: sjim(give) dan(make/cause) mihya(tell/say)
Killer-P's that we'll determine later: ja, wi, sir, kja, liswá
Some Decisions
In order to break our own rules intelligently later with our interesting irregularities, we need to set down our regular themes first. I've always found typological decisions to be very productive in shaping how I approach the creation of structures in my linguistic doodlings, so here are some parameters I'll declare here:
-Head Initial phrase structure. We're gonna follow English's lead and have our prepositions, determiners, demonstratives, and so on come first in their phrase.
-VSO structure. Verb-first has always been something I've liked, and it appeals to the computer programmer in me. Further, I have plans for prepositions & verbs, so I want to echo the Head-Initial decision here to make life easier down the line.
-Pro Drop. Unless this becomes too cumbersome, we want there to be lots of dropped arguments to verbs so that we can imply their presence with agreement elsewhere in the sentence with fun anaphora and such.
-"As we go" morphological alignment. We'll see how interesting we can get word order to be, but I'm not focused on attaining a particular alignment: we'll likely be nominative-accusative with some lexically-determined switching.
-'Noun oriented'. If I could get away with it, we'd be having 'verbs' be a closed class; I want some flexibility here, though, so we'll just say we intend to convey most information through non-main-verb phrases.
-Serial/Phrasal Verbs. I want to make verbs really have to cooperate with each other and prepositions and clitics to get anything done. Not only are we going to do stuff like make "tell give in make" mean "to shame into charity" or whatever, but we're going to do it frequently.
-"Vague". By this I mean that we aren't going to be overly concerned with marking tense, gender of participants, aspect, or evidentiality in the creation process unless it is relevant and/or provides an interesting grammatical construct. Like any language, we'll be able to indicate these things, but I'm not gonna prioritize a 'declension table' early on, and the glosses will play a little loose with the distinctions when not relevant.
Basic Sentence
All that sounds real fun and all, but there are poor imaginary people who need to say things like "Spot is a dog", so:
sja Táti tatíra
be Spot dog
Spot is a dog
Verb-Subject-Object, yawn. I dislike that tatíra isn't associated with a killer preposition or verb. So, instead of being sad about that, we'll change it to:
sja Táti sja tatíra
be Spot be dog
Spot is a dog
We're gonna just plop another 'be' by 'dog' and use the magic of juxtaposition for "instance of" constructions. We say "Spot is." along with "Dogs are." and let the speaker assume for us that these facts are related: Kjáhidans of course see that "Spot is a dog" is the presumption.
Further, this makes for a more natural progression to other basic-styled sentences. Not only is Spot a dog, I'd like this imaginary canine to be psychologically fulfilled and have an appropriate balance of hopes and expectations.
sja Táti ja tína
be Spot characterized-by/of happiness
"Spot is happy"
"ja" attributes a quality to the main argument to the verb, because it was the first free word in our 'killer preposition' list, and we needed a word here. Note that, due to the semantics I have in mind here, we don't want to use it for our last sentence, as here:
sja Táti ja tatíra
be spot characterized-by/of dog
"Spot is doglike"
I had a cat as a child that was a dog in all behavioural respects but he wasn't in actuality, and so I might use this construction to describe him as 'dog-like' or 'has the characteristics of a dog' but it'd be inaccurate and unethical to use "sja tatíra" with him.
Taking this as a pattern, we're gonna let verbs all have a set of feasible prepositional arguments that may or may not appear in any given utterance (like just about every other language ever). Right this second, I'll say that we always put the most 'Agent-like' argument of the verb right after the verb... but I plan some complexity/flexibility once we get more complex 'verb-al' elements into our sentences, as well as some passivization ideas.
----------------------------
This post, however, has taken longer to write up than I had budgetted time for so I'll leave it at this for today. Feedback and such is welcome as always.
✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article
Comments
