What kind of expression are you thinking of?Eddy the Great wrote:How is a situation where a locative has to be attached to a verb handled?
Polysynthetic Conlang
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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.
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.
"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."
Cheyenne doesn't have, nor have a use for, a copula. That's one of the things that makes it intertestingly different from English.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.
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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.
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.
"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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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.Eddy the Great wrote:What about "He made a house for me."?
Nahuatl would gloss that asEddy the Great wrote:What about "He made a house for me."?
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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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.Eddy the Great wrote:What kind of number system does Mohawk or Cheyenne use?
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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*".There's no cardinal/ordinal distinction, no.
"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."
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).Eddy the Great wrote: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*".There's no cardinal/ordinal distinction, no.
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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.Eddy the Great wrote:How regular are Cheyenne and Mohawk in general? Do they have irregular verbs, plurals?
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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So compared to IE langs, they are rather regular? Are numbers regular or does something like twelve or eleven occur?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.
"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."
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.)Eddy the Great wrote:So compared to IE langs, they are rather regular? Are numbers regular or does something like twelve or eleven occur?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.
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