Re: CHAT: Nakiltipkaspimak

* Daniel Andreasson <daniel.andreasson@...> [001011 15:20]:
> I wrote:
>
> > *grmpf*! One more incorporating language... You're all
> > thieves! :) What is it with this new batch 'a 'langers... all
> > incorporatin', all active-systems... Not that you are a newbie
> > Daniel but geeez...
>
> :) Well. Rinya has been an active language for about two years,
> i.e. from the beginning, so you can't say anything about that. :)
>
> Actually I've been on this list for more than two years now.
> (I subscribed on Sept 17, 1998.) And I can't remember ever going
> nomail. (Which in turn implies that I haven't had vacation for
> more than a week in a row for two years. :( ).
Just looked through the archives; found the first post with
my current email-address. Hmm... complaining I only had about
200 words, seems vocab's always been difficult, especially
considering there's only about 500 now ;)

> As for the incorporating stuff, I've been inspired by the langs
> I use in my BA-thesis, Telek and the fact that one of the langs
> we talked about in class yesterday was noun-incorporating. So I
> thought I'd give it a try.
Heh, yeah, Akan sure did nasty things to my linguistic world-view
and that is a very good thing. Too bad the linguistics insitute at
my uni. is primarily a pragmatics/semantics/phonology-place.

> It's also a kind of reaction against Rinya which is very analytic.
>
> Oh, and Tal, don't be sorry. It _is_ possible that I've subconsciously
> _might_ have stolen something from târuven. Happy now? ;)
*sniff* But... you haven't completely stopped working on Rinya
have you? Start a new thread to answer it 'kay?

> I've heard (or should I say "I heard-li" :) that Inuktitut (or
> something like that) has obligatory evidence markers. The default
> one to use is "hearsay". So when sentences are translated they
> come out "I've heard..." or "It is said..." And that's not what
> I wanted. I also don't want the 1-hand-info marker everywhere.
> So I guess when it's not marked at all, you can't really know
> if it's hearsay or personal experience. That's up to context.
Reason I asked is târuven has evidentials too but I'm not quite
sure how they work. Since all verbs have an implicit 1st person
singular subject, a default, unmarked "hearsay"-evidential,
translated as above, would seem rather weird... "I heard that I
did x...", "It is said that I did X...". So far I've pretended
that there aren't any evidentials to avoid the issue.

> > Strange though that such hurried sketches can be so much more
> > complete than langs one has worked on for years. Instant
> > Language(tm), almost instantly usable.
>
> Yeah. That's what frightens me the most about Nakiltipkaspimak.
> This took me about two hours to do. OTOH, there's _so_ much more
> to be done on Nakiltipkaspimak (or Pimak for short). It just
> seems more complete than it is because I've worked on the syntax.
You actually have *morphemes* for the bits of syntax you've
worked out, guess that makes it look more complete than it
is. Place-holders suck, global multi-file replace or not.

> > The amount of k's and t's sure gives it a special feel...
> > inspired by eskimo languages I assume?
>
> Yes, I think so. I've made some small attempts before with
> polysynthetic langs, but they've become impossible to pronounce.
> -pt-, -kt- and -tk- I can handle. Plus, it sounds really cool. :)
> piktinaktuptiktin, tanuktakut. I like it! :)
Mine solves that through internal sandhi, but it isn't visible
in the orthography. If I ever get around to making that
târuven2SAMPA-filter I can show the pronounciation in the
interlinears... *appends to huge TODO-list*

> Haven't got any /q/s though.
And thank you for that, I always think of q as /N/ these days
since that's how it is in târuven. Gets somewhat confusing at
times.

> > And btw:
> > ycavvayrge fales
> > y-     cavvayr            -ge       fal   -es
> > "they" move.into.position causative water locative
> > `"they" are putting something into the water-supply.'
>
> Where does the "something" come from? Does it have something
> to do with the transitivity of the verb or?
cavvayr (hmm I'm not sure whether {ay} is a diphthong or not...
*grepping brain*) is intransitive, made transitive by the
intransitive-to-transitive ("causative" for short) suffix -g(e)
(The e prevents the g from devoicing), and all transitives (made
with -ge or not) have an implicit 3rd person unknown number (aka.
something, someone) object, so there. </deep breath> Should have
marked it in the interlinear though.


t.