zompist bboard

All right, I'm back home and took a look at my Kazakh textbook--it only has the "correct" (non-Russified) structure for possession ("Mening mysyghym bar = I have a cat).

The other form I was thinking of was that for expressing need--with either nouns or verbs. With nouns, the needer is in the dative, and the thing needed in the nominative, followed by the word kerek, indicating need, or kerek yemes, indicating lack of need:

Maghan nan kerek (yemes).
I-DAT bread-NOM need (not)
"I need (don't need) bread." (literally, "To me bread is (not) needed."

...which is the same structure as in Russian (Mne kleb nyzhen/ne nyzhen).

With verbs, on the other hand, the possessive form of the verbal noun (which also serves as the infinitive) is used with kerek, and the verb itself is negated:

Mening baruym (barmauym) kerek.
I-GEN [to go]-1p/POSS ([to go]-NEG-1p/POSS) need
"I need (don't need) to go"; literally, "My going (not going) is needed."

However, I have definitely also encountered the dative structure used with the verb as well:

Maghan bary kerek (yemes).
I-DAT [to go] need (not)
"I need (don't need) to go" = "To me going is (not) needed."

...which matches the Russian (Mne nado idti).

[Somewhere I was also taught about attaching personal endings to kerek: keregim "my need," kereging "your needed"--but I don't recall where they were used.]

The reason I make a big deal of this is that it's a clear case of one language lifting a piece of grammar from another, which is something I didn't think much about previously or know how to handle. I knew that Kazakh had borrowed many words from Russian and created Kazakh calques of Russian words (temir zohly, or "iron road" for railway, from the Russian zheleznaya doroga, which means the same thing), but I hadn't realized that there were grammatical borrowings as well (although I did notice the similarities).

This is something I'll have to keep in mind as I have my conlangs influence each other (although it might be difficult, seeing as how thus far my two most important language families are different in almost every way: VSO vs. SOV, prepositions vs. postpositions, head-first vs. head-final, gender vs. no gender, etc.). Any idea how two languages like that might mix?

p@,
Glenn

Some ideas:
VSO~SOV: Welsh-Old English.

pre-~post-: Hungarian-German (postpositions, cases, doesn't really matter.)

head.first-head.final: no ideas yet

gender-no.gender: Hungarian-German

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Formerly known as Drydic.

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I've got a little tidbit that I was reminded of by the discussion of Turkic languages. (Though maybe everyone knows this but me? Linguistics is not my foremost area. Evo-bio is my real strength, but i'm trying to catch up on the linguistics.)

You know how some dialects of English use a double negative: "I don't got no book", but of course standard English disallows (or even ridicules) that. For other languages however that's the standard construction.

In formal French, for example, "Je n'ai pas de livre": I neg.-have not of book. (Though the "ne" is often dropped these days in normal speech).

So, it turns out in Turkish double plurals aren't allowed. Saying "the two books are on the table" is incorrect because it marks the plurality three times: with "two", "-s", and "are". (Sorry, I don't know the actual words at the moment, I just remember the concept.)

Instead you say "the two book is on the table" or "books is on the table". There's a plural form of the noun, but you can't use it if you are also specifying the number, it's redundant.

It would probably sound like there are two sets/types of bookness on the table, just like English speakers try to analyze both negative seperately.

p.s. Unfortunately, just as I joined this board, which created a link to my website, my server went down. This isn't a normal state of affairs.

I'm going to break my pledge and insert a reply...

In studying Kazakh (a Turkic language), what I was taught is that a noun following a number is always singular ("two book"), which is what the discussion above is about. In addition, some expressions that are plural in English would be singular in Kazakh, i.e. "in the mountains," meaning within a mountain range, would be "in the mountain" (tauda), with "mountain" effectively acting as a collective noun.

p@,
Glenn

I just realized there's another interesting point to be made about the French negative. It is "I don't have book", not "I don't have books" as we say in English. In a conlang you could say "I don't have book" meaning that you have zero books, and "I don't have books" meaning that you have only one.

Reminds me of The Simpsons...

Kid: This is the "No Homers" club, you can't come in.
Homer: But you let Homer Smith join!
Kid: It's "No Homers". We can have one.

;)

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