zompist bboard

As my latest attempt to create/explain Rawàng Ata, I've decided to do some lessony things. They're not really lessony, in that you won't become a fluent speaker, but they sort of show things off one bit at a time. There will even be exercises!

They'll probably peeter out in the near future, but there should be at least twelve of them, since that's how many I've written.

http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/201 ... roduction/

http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/201 ... g-ata-1-1/

http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/201 ... g-ata-1-2/

They're both pretty short lessons. Side effect of going topic-by-topic: some lessons are a lot bigger than others.

Other lessons for the near future include: Number; Animacy, Gender, Verb Agreement, Intransitives, and the Ergative; An Exercise; Transitivity, and Animacy Barring; Counters and (More) Number.

It should also be mentioned that the vowels may appear with ácúté accents above them. This affects the pitch and intonation of the word in ways that will be discussed in a later lesson, but does not affect the quality of the vowel. They may also be written with mācrōns written above them: these indicate that the vowel is to be pronounced with the same quality, but with greater length.

And yet the first word in the vocabulary is lutà ; ball.

Are the graves equal to macrons? to acutes? something else entirely?

Also, if Continental Values for the vowels mean those of Madrid Castillian, your <s> is too easily taken for [S] (or whatever realization of <s> people from Spain have... I find it to be something like a lightly retroflex [S] or something)

Are Ata speakers neolithic?

Also, looks nice

BUGGER.

Yes, 'acute' should be 'grave'.

Why would anyone think that /s/ is /S/? Most people reading it won't be Castillian. Not that it really matters anyway, so long as it's an apical coronal fricative.

No, they're not neolithic. Why do you get that impression?

Thank you.

xD lol

I'm not spanish, and that's what I thought at first.

I dunno, maybe the intersection between my prejudice and it's sound, and maybe the part about them living in the coast because the inner areas are strange and misterious; bronze-age [or later] to me means agriculture [or tech import, I guess], and agriculture means demand for land and critical mass; none of those seem too coherent with high coastal concentration of population.

You're welcome, man, good stuff.

I like the idea of incorporating descriptions of specific words, it really makes the culture come alive. I'll have to try that sometime. So do they really really hate foreigners? Or maybe there's a nicer way of talking about a foreigner that you like?

Torco wrote:I dunno, maybe the intersection between my prejudice and it's sound, and maybe the part about them living in the coast because the inner areas are strange and misterious; bronze-age [or later] to me means agriculture [or tech import, I guess], and agriculture means demand for land and critical mass; none of those seem too coherent with high coastal concentration of population.

I think Japan's a real-world example of this situation, though I'm not knowledgeable about the underlying factors (land use, etc).

they still don't regard the interior as misterious and unknown, right?
[or do they?]

It's not unusual for people to find unexplored interiors frightening. The classic example is the role of "the forest" in Grimm's fairytales, which dates to the time before the internal colonisation of the inland areas - previously, most inhabitation was of the coast and the waterways.

And in this case, there are not major waterways, because it's an island. A big island, but not with a lot of room for rivers (it's also got a hilly ridge through the middle). And they're a traditionally waterborne people, so their fear of the interior is increased. They've never had to colonise it, other than the odd mining town, logging camp and border fort. At first, they had enough arable land on the coasts - and more recently, they've got crops that are so high-density that they can support high populations without masive amounts of land. It's also economic: when the money comes from a) fishing, b) trade from overseas via ports, and c) trade in general, which occurs in cities, which are on the coast for reasons a) and b)... they don't want to be inland in the hills and forests. There's nothing to gain. They don't even like being in the countryside anymore - they're a very urban population for their time-period.


Regarding foreigners: they're xenophobic, yes, but it's not so much hatred as mistrust. Their society is structured around 'concord' - the agreements by which law and custom can operate; they know that foreigners do not abide by their concord, so they fear them. How can they trust them? They can try to impose laws on them, but they know that the imposition of laws cannot enforce legality: only having concord in the heart can ensure that people do not become criminals. Given that even natives can become criminal, what hope do foreigners have?

They also have a split attitude toward outsiders: they historically, and recently, have been underdogs bullied and sometimes invaded by foreigners, so they fear them. At the same time, not that long ago they had a great empire of their own which was gained with remarkable ease. Together, these create a picture of the foreigner as somebody who is servile and controllable when subject to force, but is bestial and malignant when free.

Cool. I like the format of discussing words that express key cultural concepts instead of just giving a random vocab list. I don't know if I've seen it done that way before. It certainly livens up the example sentences!

It's a shame that mere vocabulary lists are so common. In a really alien culture (even human-alien, not even alien-alien), concepts will be so different that they're not going to be easy to translate with a single word.

If I were doing a proper lexicon, I'd also be giving 'see also' links to similar words - what things are like a hàni but not quite, and so on. This reminds us that the distinctions aren't always put where they're put in English.

Anyway, next lesson up:
http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/201 ... g-ata-1-3/

It's on noun number: plural, singular and perplural.

Salmoneus wrote:It's a shame that mere vocabulary lists are so common. In a really alien culture (even human-alien, not even alien-alien), concepts will be so different that they're not going to be easy to translate with a single word.

Agreed. I like that you've attempted to give clear outlines of the semantic boundaries of the words. I try to do that myself, in my dictionary, although it's a hell of a lot of writing though, and I confess, I'm often a little lazy. Sometimes I have it all mapped out in my head but don't write it down.

Torco wrote:Also, if Continental Values for the vowels mean those of Madrid Castillian, your <s> is too easily taken for [S] (or whatever realization of <s> people from Spain have... I find it to be something like a lightly retroflex [S] or something)

Saying that the vowels are pronounced in a similar way to the vowels of Spanish doesn't mean you have to adopt a Spanish accent and pronounce the consonants that way too.

Lesson 4! Animacy! Gender! Verb Agreement! Intransitives!

http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/201 ... g-ata-1-4/

Salmoneus wrote:Lesson 4! Animacy! Gender! Verb Agreement! Intransitives!

http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/201 ... g-ata-1-4/

This is great stuff. Rawàng Ata looks like a nightmare to learn, but fascinating! I really like the cultural information your putting up about each of the vocabulary items.

Have you thought about sound files??

Also, "the sailors each strike the women". These example sentences kind of remind me of example sentences I came up with years ago to show a friend of mine one of my conlangs. To make him laugh, I made all of the example sentences either incredibly violent or heartbreakingly sad while just talking about the grammar as though these were perfectly ordinary examples. They were all something in the vein of "The soldier murders the orphans" or "The abandoned kitten starves to death"

Also, I don't understand the ergative suffix -ya. If it's used on the subject intransitive verbs but not transitive verbs, is it really "ergative"? Isn't it kind of the opposite? I'm not sure what you'd call it though. An intransitive-subject-marker?

Can't do sound files, sorry. Partly because I have no microphone, but mostly because... long vowels? Pitch accent (will be covered later)? No way. Plus I haven't worked out the details of the allophony yet.

On the ergative: ahhh, but you've only seen ONE thing it's used for! Further uses will be introduced in lessons five, six and seven. For now, suffice to say: I'm not using 'intransitive' as a synonym of 'univalent'.




EDIT: And now... an exercise for the attentive reader!
http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/201 ... g-ata-1-e/

I'm going to leave off for now: next unit will probably begin on Monday. Plenty of time for people to finish the exercise...

Well, not Monday, but if anyone's still interested, here's Lesson 5. It deals with transitivity, and with animacy barring.

http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/201 ... g-ata-2-1/

Oh this is very good.

(The business about low-transitivity verbs giving special case-marking to their subjects is way cool. I can't bring myself to call them "intransitive," or the subject case "ergative," but whatever, it's a neat idea. )

nebula wind phone wrote:Oh this is very good.

(The business about low-transitivity verbs giving special case-marking to their subjects is way cool. I can't bring myself to call them "intransitive," or the subject case "ergative," but whatever, it's a neat idea. )

it's attested in linguistic literature to talk of a sliding scale of transitivity for verbs, even ones with direct objects. See e.g. Tor Tveite's analysis of object marking in Livonian (and other Baltic-Finnic languages), where he uses 'transitivity' as a designation for a combination of different facts about the verb - only very transitive verbs in Livonian permit an accusative object in the negative.

Specifically, differential marking of the subject to encode 'transitivity' in this sense of the verb is attested in Austronesian. Admittedly, I'm only aware of cases where the intransitive is the unmarked, but I don't think that's a big problem. Tongan, iirc, is an example. More generally, distinguishing transitivity from valency is common in analysing north american languages, which sometimes even have distinct morphological markers for the two.

The real bizarro-bits of the language are yet to come.

this is good. makes me want to work on my conlangs, especially their cultures and philosophies.

Salmoneus wrote:Specifically, differential marking of the subject to encode 'transitivity' in this sense of the verb is attested in Austronesian. Admittedly, I'm only aware of cases where the intransitive is the unmarked, but I don't think that's a big problem....

Oh, I wasn't calling it a problem! I like it a lot! No need to defend it.

Well, I think there IS some need to defend it. Because I'm trying for a vaguely realist style of conlanging, yet Rawàng Ata is in many ways... really, really weird. So weird that many people might think it impossibly so. So when there are things that seem weird but that ARE attested, I feel I should fill the breach, as it were.

Oh, and Lesson Six:
http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/201 ... g-ata-2-2/

...a short lesson, wherein may be found information on counters, and a brief mention of collective number.

Thanks! I tried to study Rawang Ata a while back, but descriptions were incomplete and contradictory.

really, really weird

The weirder, the better IMO, as long as it makes sense in context.

Lesson Seven Now Up!!!!!

http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/201 ... g-ata-2-3/

This one's on the simple passive, natively passive verbs, and binative verbs. Next we'll be getting into some things that can modify nouns!