Polysynthetic Conlang

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Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:How is a situation where a locative has to be attached to a verb handled?
What kind of expression are you thinking of?

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

What kind of expression are you thinking of?
I was inside it-fly-to-the-stars. That sort of thing.
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

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Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:
What kind of expression are you thinking of?
I was inside it-fly-to-the-stars. That sort of thing.
'Inside' in this case would be the root, as it-flies-to-the-stars+inside+I.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

Heres what I did:

K?st?u?ks?tq?ft?nitski ksaama.
K?-st?-u-?ks?-tq?-ft?-ni-tski ksa-a-ma.
hab.-star-plural-at-movement.toward-fly-3SSA-inside is-past-1SSA
I was inside it-flys-to-the-stars.

I reused a locative as a verb inflection.
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

jburke

Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:Heres what I did:

K?st?u?ks?tq?ft?nitski ksaama.
K?-st?-u-?ks?-tq?-ft?-ni-tski ksa-a-ma.
hab.-star-plural-at-movement.toward-fly-3SSA-inside is-past-1SSA
I was inside it-flys-to-the-stars.

I reused a locative as a verb inflection.
Cheyenne doesn't have, nor have a use for, a copula. That's one of the things that makes it intertestingly different from English.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

I'm working aon a complex pronoun system that will fix this problem. Here it is now:

K?st?u?ks?tq?ft?ni nlatskiksaama.
K?-st?-u-?ks?-tq?-ft?-ni nla-tski-ksa-a-ma.
hab.-star-plural-at-movement.toward-fly-3SSI 3SI-inside-is-past-3SSA.
I was inside it-flys-to-the-stars.
Image
"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

Do Mohawk and Cheyenne have something like a locative for "to someone" or "for someone"?
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

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Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:Do Mohawk and Cheyenne have something like a locative for "to someone" or "for someone"?
I assume you mean something like "X going to Y." If so, yes, both languages use directionals indicating notions like 'toward speaker' and 'away from speaker' or some other fixed point.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

What about "He made a house for me."?
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

jburke

Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:What about "He made a house for me."?
A couple different ways you can do that. First, you can say something like "He made my house," which expresses the same thing. Or you can do a ditransitive, which an expression with both a direct and indirect object. These are used to some degree in Cheyenne; but the agreement is too complicated to get into here.

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Post by Neek »

Eddy the Great wrote:What about "He made a house for me."?
Nahuatl would gloss that as

ōmitschiw?li? in c?lli
ō-mits-chiw-ili-? in cal-li
Past-me-make-appplicative-preterite this house-absolutive
Lit, he made a house for me. (This is known as an applicative construction, where -ilia is suffixed to the verb, giving it the ability to take a benefactive object.)

Addendum: A reverential form of verbs is constructed by a reflexive pronoun and the applicative, therefore:
nich?wa :> ninochiw?lia, -no-...-lia literally means 'for myself.'
Last edited by Neek on Fri Sep 26, 2003 9:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

What kind of number system does Mohawk or Cheyenne use?
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

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Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:What kind of number system does Mohawk or Cheyenne use?
Both are base-5; 6=5+1, 7=5+2, etc. Higher numbers are formed via multiplication, e.g., 40=4x10. But in Cheyenne are two kinds of numbers, the "times" numbers and the "quantity" numbers; times numbers best correspond to out counting system.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

I haven't gotten to the number system yet. I'll have to work on it. Do they have something like 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.?
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

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Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:I haven't gotten to the number system yet. I'll have to work on it. Do they have something like 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.?
There's no cardinal/ordinal distinction, no.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

There's no cardinal/ordinal distinction, no.
So "the 1st rock" and "the 1 rock" would be the same? It would actually work well for later numbers, like "the 5th rock" and not "the 5 rock*".
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

jburke

Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:
There's no cardinal/ordinal distinction, no.
So "the 1st rock" and "the 1 rock" would be the same? It would actually work well for later numbers, like "the 5th rock" and not "the 5 rock*".
Something like neshe xaone 'two skunks' can also mean 'the second skunk (of some series)'. This uses quantity number, as opposed to times numbers (nexa is the times number, neshe the quantity number).

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

How regular are Cheyenne and Mohawk in general? Do they have irregular verbs, plurals?
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

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Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:How regular are Cheyenne and Mohawk in general? Do they have irregular verbs, plurals?
We've gone over this before. No, neither have "irregular verbs" in the IE sense; and while Cheyenne has several different pluralizers, use of them is pretty consistent.

All languages have irregularity in them; but most people are only acquainted with the irregular verbs of IE languages. No such things exist in Cheyenne or Mohawk, though. All Mohawk and Cheyenne verbs are formed with the very same pronominal affixes; this makes sense when you consider that words in these languages are more akin to sentences (in fact, they pretty much render the traditional notion of a "word" obsolete). Where you will find irregularity is in the morphophonemics: morphemes tend to have large numbers of conditioned allomorphs. These allomorphs arise historically, usually in response to changing phonology. Worrying about IE-style irregular verbs in a polylang is nonsensical; they'd never have the chance to form. And worrying about not having irregularity in what amounts to a conlang is even sillier; if a language is created in the internal context of a world, you'd expect it to be regular.

One of the most famous examples of Mohawk irregularity lies in its transitive pronominal prefixes. The intransitive prefixes are fairly regular--made up of discernable parts like person, number, etc. But the transitives are whacked out crazy by comparison--they've been evolving as fused units for centuries, and now semantically related prefixes often bear no obvious phonological relationship with one another.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

We've gone over this before. No, neither have "irregular verbs" in the IE sense; and while Cheyenne has several different pluralizers, use of them is pretty consistent.
So compared to IE langs, they are rather regular? Are numbers regular or does something like twelve or eleven occur?
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

jburke

Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:
We've gone over this before. No, neither have "irregular verbs" in the IE sense; and while Cheyenne has several different pluralizers, use of them is pretty consistent.
So compared to IE langs, they are rather regular? Are numbers regular or does something like twelve or eleven occur?
Each has its own irregularities; Mohawk in particular has a complex sandhi system that inspired Noyatukah's. Morphemes in Mohawk have many different allomorphs, depending on what other morphemes they combine with. And Cheyenne sound changes (like /sh/ backed to /x/ before /o/) disturb some of its symmetry. So, while all verbs use the same sets of affixes in both languages, there's often more to changing a verb's form that just changing its pronominal(s). (And for Mohawk verbal nominals, you sometimes have to shift much more than the pronominal; if there are possessives in the word, e.g., they will have to be dualized or pluralized if the nominal goes dual or plural.)

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

How flexible are words in those langs? Didn't you say that a word ment a general concept like a bridging?
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

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Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:How flexible are words in those langs? Didn't you say that a word ment a general concept like a bridging?
Lots of words in both exhibit a striking degree of polysymy. A word can have a fixed meaning but refer to several different things.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

How are names formed in Mohawk and Cheyenne? Are they verbs, too?
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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

jburke

Post by jburke »

Eddy the Great wrote:How are names formed in Mohawk and Cheyenne? Are they verbs, too?
Like personal or place names? They're usually just ordinary words in the language.

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