Time to stop neglecting this thread. I haven't posted here in quite a while, but I guess that it is nonetheless worth saying that I am still working on Tantšak. Perhaps most obviously, the name changed from Tantšák because stress is not phonemic, despite being unpredictable, so I decided there's no need to mark it everywhere.
Tumetıęk, the parent language
This is
precisely what I've been working on over last month and half. As said in the first post, Tumetıęk is the ancestor language of Tantšak, developed for
2012/2013 Reconstruction Game, and it was for most part developed this August.
However, some two months ago I felt I needed a more solid base to derive Tantšak from, so I went on a endeavour to improve the grammar with better descriptions and tighten up some loose ends. This resulted in me reworking the
grammar (PDF, 28 pages) of the parent language to finally have a solid base from which to work on, complemented with a 400-odd word
lexicon (PDF, 15 pages). I'm quite proud of my clickable table of contents.
Let's head for a short description of Tumetıęk with snippets from the grammar.
Tumetıęk has a small vowel inventory which numbers only four distinct vowel qualities. These four phonemic vowels are organised into an imperfect square-shaped system [...]
Tumetıęk can be said to have a small consonant inventory which consists of only twelve constituent phonemes in total. [...]
This is pretty much the entire pholosophy 'bout the phoneme inventory. There are sixteen distinct basic phonemes which I list below.
- /m n/ m n
/p b t d k ɡ/ p b t d k g
/s z/ s z
/r j/ r y
/i e a u/ ı e a u
These four monophthongs can coälesce together to form a total of twelve diphthongs:
ae,
aı,
au,
ea,
eı,
eu,
ıa,
ıe,
ıu,
ua,
ue,
uı. Some of them are very infrequent and appear in only a handful of words.
Vowels can appear nasalised, in which case they are marked with an
ogonek (tail). This extends to diphthongs, of course, but nasalisation is not marked on the glide:
ąe,
ıų.
There is some fancy allophony, which makes words such as
kıayu and
nunıegıand be realised as [ˈcʰæ̞ɥʊ] and [nʊnɪ̯ɛˈʝæ̞nd]. It is explained in detail in the grammar under
1.1.1. Vowels and
1.1.2. Consonants.
The canonical syllable structure is (C)(C)N(C)(C), but there is only a moderate amount of legal consonant clusters, which are exceedingly rare in syllable coda. Strict rules govern which clusters are legal, and illegal clusters are resolved through complex rules described in
1.5. Moprohophonology.
Stress is weight-sensitive and governed by a set of three rules, described in
1.3. Stress.
Being a heavily agglutinative/fusional language, Tumetıęk uses rich inflection to convey various grammatical functions and add shades of meaning to words. Perhaps my favourite feature of the system is how verbs inflected with a secondary voice acquire an impersonal meaning when they take on the passive voice suffix
-un.
- Taneun zı̨rıu.
3-INE-live-PASS house
One lives in a house. (A house is lived in.)
Nouns inflect for pronominal possession, case and deixis, the latter two of which are marked with a set of fusional suffixes that encode both. There are three cases: nominative, genitive and accusative and three degrees of distance: proximal, medial and distal.
Combined case-deixis suffixes can render the root noun a bit hard to recognise: taking
psųdıebra “bridge” bridge as example and adding the proximal suffix
-·`tı we get
psųdıeprı “this bridge” instead of a hypothetical
*psųdıetı (← *psųdıebrtı).
The entire system of noun inflection is covered in
2.1. Nouns.
On a first glance, Tumetıęk has a very minimal pronoun system, with only three pronouns: the first person pronoun, the second person one plus the interrogative one. This is somewhat complicated by all of them having a pervasive number distinction, something not seen on nouns. Moreover, personal pronouns have distinct polite forms:
nı̨ru,
tęru,
nąru and
kıęru, as opposed to casual
tı,
sı,
nı and
grı.
Unlike nouns, pronouns can't take any possessive or deictic marking at all.
Verbs are very complex, inflecting for a total of six grammatical categories, displayed in the following template. They are described in
3. Verbs.
- -2 – subject, person and tense
-1 – secondary voice
0 – STEM
+1 – mood
+2 – primary voice
The voice system is best described with the following snippet.
The voice system of Tumetıęk is very large and as such it spans two slots in the verb template. Voice inflection is carried out on two tiers: the primary tier, which hosts two primary voices and the secondary tier, which hosts nine secondary voices.
Tumetıęk has a total of eleven voices including both primary ones and secondary ones, so the voice system is very large when compared with an average one.
There are only two voices on the primary tier. The active is unmarked while the passive is parked with
-un.
Also dubbed
applicatives, the secondary voices appear in the second slot of the verb template. They promote an indirect or otherwise oblique argument to direct object. They can only be used with intransitive verbs, except for the dative
-sa-. All secondary voice prefixes are listed under
3.3.2. Secondary Tier.
Let's close off the talk about verbs with a short description of the moods, again conveniently snipped from the full grammar. A list of modal suffixes is available under
3.2. Mood.
The first suffixal slot in the Tumetıęk verb template is occupied by modal suffixes. There is a total of four moods: realis, irrealis, imperative and optative.
The realis mood is unmarked, and as such it is usually left out from the interlinear glosses.
The irrealis mood is heavily used, and does not map exactly to English usage of irrealis modals such as “would”; an average speaker would use the irrealis to add even a slightest element of doubt to their utterance in all but most formal speech.
Verbs conjugated into the imperative mood accept only second person subjects.
There are several derivational suffixes, but they are in my opinion nor worthy of describing in this short summary, so let's carry on to
5. Syntax.
Starting with describing noun phrase syntax as I've done in the grammar, I should give its structure which, by the way, displays quite equally distributed left- and right-branching: (REL) (DET) (APP)
NOUN (PREP) (REL).
Honestly, there's not much to say about this besides the two following snippets about
5.1.1. Relative Clauses and
5.1.2. Determiners.
Tumetıęk employs the gap strategy to form relative clauses, and this is described in more detail under 5.3. Clause Linking.
Relative clauses can either precede or follow the head noun, depending on their weight. Relative clauses consisting of a single verb are counted as light, and all other relative clauses are counted as heavy.
Heavy relative clauses mandatorily follow the head noun; light relative clauses can either precede the head noun or follow it, with former being preferred.
Determiners constitute a small closed word class distinct from both verbs and nouns. This class includes quantifiers, numerals, and specific words describing size or age such as betre “old” and pı̨dre “big; large”.
Possession is a bit complex, and it comes in two flavours:
alienable possession and
inalienable possession.
Alienable possession is handled by placing the possessor in a prepositional phrase introduced by the preposition kı “of” and inflecting the possessor into the genitive.
On the other hand, inalienable possession is handled in a much simpler manner – the possessor is placed in apposition with the possessee.
Pronominal possession, regardless of alienability, is handled with possessive prefixes.
Moving onwards to word order, described in
5.2.1. Word Order.
The basic and most common word order in a Tumetıęk clause is
S Aux V O, and the language handles indirect objects through a double object construction. There is a modification to that, snipped from the grammar.
The most common variation on the word order is Aux V P A, ubiquitous in passive clauses because it gives the patient a greater prominence than to the agent.
Adverbial phrases immediately follow the last verb in the verb phrase, noting that
Tumetıęk productively forms adverbials out of verbs by nominalising the verb with the abstract nominaliser -rıa. The resulting noun is placed in a prepositional phrase introduced by the appropriate preposition, most commonly dru “in”.
The auxiliary verbs are as complex as they can be, so I've elected to solely use snippets to describe them.
Tumetıęk makes frequent use of auxiliary verbs to convey information which verbal morphology is not able to indicate, and they are often stacked next to one another to convey richer and more complex meanings.
They make the main verb non-finite, so it has to take the infinitive suffix •ta.
Auxiliary verbs do not constitute a distinct verb class – it is more that certain verbs, in fact eight of them, can be used both indepedently and as auxiliaries.
Auxiliaries are conventionally divided into four groups: modal, aspectual, tensal and polar auxiliaries, the distinction between which is based on the distance between the main verb and the auxiliary, as described below.
Tensals are closest to the main verb, and modals are furthest away. Aspectuals come in between these, so a general ordering of these three is modal-aspectual-tensal.
The sole polar auxiliary drık can come before any other auxiliary, or in the absence thereof, immediately before the main verb. It negates all verbs, both full and auxiliary, which follow it.
Tumetıęk employs several question-forming strategies which fall under one of two types of questions:
polar (yes-or-no) and
content questions. The strategies, one by one:
Tumetıęk usually forms polar questions using the particle gıa.
The particle is placed clause-initially to question the clause as whole, but it can also be placed before a specific constituent to inquire whether the latter is/was involved in the event described, in which case it is cliticised to that constituent.
There are two more interrogative particles, which can be used to add finer shades to meaning of the question. These can appear in same positions as
gıa.
- dra –The rhetorical question particle; indicates that the speaker is not really asking for information; may be associated with both doubt or support of the expected answer. Glossed RHET.
uk –The possibility question particle; does not ask for a statement about reality, but about the listener's assessment of likelihood of the described situation. Glossed POS.
Tumetıęk forms content questions by replacing the questioned constituent with the interrogative particle tın, which takes appropriate morphological marking if needed. However, the interrogative pronoun kıe and its inflected forms may also be used. There is no wh-movement whatsoever.
And now onward to
5.3. Clause Linking.
Tumetıęk strongly prefers coordination over subordination to the point that the only types of subordinate clauses are complement and relative clauses, both of which are formed using the gap strategy. Complement clauses take the place of an object of the matrix clause; placement of relative clauses is described in detail in
5.1. Noun Phrase Syntax section.
Other kinds of relation between clauses are expressed by simply juxtaposing them.
