Kjáhida - Sakir's New Language

[Sakir]

Ahoy!

It's well past the point where I should post something about my new language of the past month. I've recently moved to China again, and (as seems to be a symptom) learning another language makes me want to retreat into conlanging. I'll be using this topic to present an unordered creation of the grammar of a language that is provisionally named 'Kjáhida'.


Concept

The goal is to make a language that exhibits a high degree of syntactical depth: to have a syntax that is well-detailed and presents several interesting structural features, without becoming a kitchen-sink of strategies. I don't care overly for phonology or morphological processes, so will be aiming for simplicity there: the language will be highly analytic and I'll not be investigating much phonological nuance.

An important point of interest for me is to have 'killer prepositions': I want a robust class of adposition-verb-thingies that fly around sentences acting as coverbs, relativization strategies, semanti-clitics... all sorts of stuff.


Obligatory Phonology

Languages need sounds, so I cobbled together a relatively simple phonology that is sufficiently simple and 'edgy' at the same time. Where I dont' explicitly mark // vs. [], I mean //.

Its main unorthodox feature is a Two-Vowels system:

V = /i a/

The front vowel /i/ is prototypically unrounded and reduces in fast speech to the neighborhood , whereas the back vowel /a/ tends to be rounded and moves towards schwa. Roundedness is determined by vowel-height as far as I am concerned for now, and I don't imagine speakers tend to care about it much, particularly for more 'central' vowel allophones.

Consonants are pretty tame, and my analysis splits them into 'front' and 'back' consonants.

C_front = /j t s m l/ "j t s m l"
C_back = /w k h N R\/ "w k h n r"

Words in Kjáhida follow this regular expression for now:

(K_j or K_ii or K_aa)⁺(dksmNlr)
where
K_j = dksh(jw)
K_a = C_frontkhr
K_i = C_backdsm

Stress is determined lexically. Stressed syllables acquire a higher volume and round the vowel when its pitch is low. I mark it orthographically with an accent on the vowel for now.

Allophony is only somewhat laid out at this point, and mostly is a basic set of rules about what the actual allophone of the two vowels should manifest as based on context.

The openness/height of the vowel is centralized if the frontedness of the vowel matches the class of consonant: C_backa shifts /a/ towards [o], and C_front shifts /i/ towards .

Pitch is prominent in the sound of the language, but is not featural. It has three general levels: high, mid, and low. It is determined per-syllable, and follows directly from the phonemes involved according to the following schema:

C_frontaC_front, C_frontaC_back --> High
C_backiC_back, C_backaC_back --> Low
Anywhere else --> Mid

Semivowels reduce when they occur at the beginning of a word: jV goes to V[long+] and wV goes to ?V.

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I'm very open to suggestions about the phonology, as it is certainly not my forté (the 'pitch' thing is particularly alien ground for me). I intend to move on to grammatical considerations as soon as possible (I have several notes, but not condensed into postable format) and will likely make a post on basic sentence structure in the coming day or so.

[cromulant]

I'm liking the general 'vibe,' the 'spirit' of what I'm seeing here. I think it will be interesting to watch this lang develop, and I look forward to seeing those killer Ps flying around.

Now for some phonological critique:

/d k/ as plosive system...can't. I'd either add /t/, replace /d/ with /t/, or add /t/ and /g/. The unifying element in all these suggestions being that you're gonna wanna add /t/.

All the other weirdnesses--the unattested vowel scheme, the lack of /n/--I'm OK with all that.

Trying to get my head around the front/back contrast. I see, generally, that the front consonants tend to have more anterior POAs than the back ones (with exceptions), but beyond that...what unifies them? What makes them behave the same way? What do /m/ and /j/ have in common, and why would they have the same effect on vowels? Why are /r/ and /l/ classified differently when they have the same POA?

They seem to be rather arbitrary classifications. I would expect there to be some definite feature you could put your finger on--something like systematic palatalization, velarization, or labialization. Not just 'everything articulated in front of/behind this line.'

And, I don't see most of those consonants having much effect on vowel realizations. Languages that do what I think you're getting at here (e.g. Marshallese, NW Caucasian langs) are plump with secondary articulations (palatalization, labialization, among others) that, diachronically, were once vowel features which were shunted onto the consonants, so the fact that, say, /mʲ/ turns /ɨ/ into makes sense, because the phonetic frontness of is a realization of the phonemic palatalization of /mʲ/. But your consonants don't seem to have any features that would realize as vowel qualities.

[Nortaneous]

there are some languages with vertical vowel systems that don't offload quality onto consonants like NWC and marshallese. look up [some analyses of] manambu -- it's not analyzed as having a VVS anymore but the basic idea there is something you can steal.

[Sakir]

Thanks for the feedback so far! I'll try to address it all:

I'm liking the general 'vibe,' the 'spirit' of what I'm seeing here. I think it will be interesting to watch this lang develop, and I look forward to seeing those killer Ps flying around.

Thanks!

/d k/ as plosive system...can't. I'd either add /t/, replace /d/ with /t/, or add /t/ and /g/. The unifying element in all these suggestions being that you're gonna wanna add /t/.

Fair point: I felt uneasy that the voicing was different there, and I think I'll replace /d/ with /t/. If I quite dislike [t] in some candidate word, I'll cook up an allophonic scheme for voicing consonants.

Trying to get my head around the front/back contrast. I see, generally, that the front consonants tend to have more anterior POAs than the back ones (with exceptions), but beyond that...what unifies them? What makes them behave the same way? What do /m/ and /j/ have in common, and why would they have the same effect on vowels? Why are /r/ and /l/ classified differently when they have the same POA?

They seem to be rather arbitrary classifications. I would expect there to be some definite feature you could put your finger on--something like systematic palatalization, velarization, or labialization. Not just 'everything articulated in front of/behind this line.'

Making these, my thought process was to have two phonemes from each 'normaler' articulatory methods and, because they were in pairs, I figured to differentiate them by a trait. In this case, I went with the 'frontinesscosity', as determined by me saying the letters with schwa coming after them and gauging them phonoaesthetically to my West Coast English ears, haha. Looking at it, I *do* seeem to have made quite an error with "/r/": it appears that that means the "r" in "trap" in my dialect, whereas I'm actually meaning good ol' English /r\/ (/ɹ/) ("r" as in "read") further back in the mouth. With that, the distinction does indeed seem to mostly be anterior/posterior (hah) articulation.

I assumed that such a minimal vowel system analysis would be pretty unrealistic without having the vowel realizations wander around a good bit, so I admit to just trying to cook up some regular (if arbitrary) rules to have /i/ and /a/ roam. If I understand correctly, your suggestion is to have a phoneme inventory which achieves the 'classes' of consonants based on a secondary feature of their articulation, and have the feature involved impart a consistent nature to the nearby vowel. If so (since it doesn't sound like a bad idea), how indeed would palatialization and such change the 'location' of the vowel? Ideally, I'd want to choose a set of secondary articulations that achieved /i/ : ~ ~[e] and /a/ : [a]~[@]~[o]. Palatization = fronting /I/ to and /a/ to [@], Labialization = centralizing /I/ to [e] and /a/ to [o]? Further, if I went this way, I guess I'd be reducing the phoneme inventory to then add in the variants: are any of the consonants more likely to not stick around than others?

In any case, lots of great stuff here, thanks Cromulant! I've made some edits to the first post for some of the smaller suggestions.

there are some languages with vertical vowel systems that don't offload quality onto consonants like NWC and marshallese. look up [some analyses of] manambu -- it's not analyzed as having a VVS anymore but the basic idea there is something you can steal.

Sounds intriguing, but my google/WALS-fu is failing me at the moment. Do their vowels take on large allophonic ranges? If not, am I perhaps trying too hard to make them do so in Kjáhida you think?

[Sakir]

Basic Sentences

Before we can get to the juiciest strategies for plopping appositive phrases in sub-relativized whojamacallits while referencing referents three sentences ago, we're going to need three things:
-Some Kjáhida words, so we don't have half-glosses
-Some typological decisions, so we can be consistent going forward
-A basic, prototypical, descriptive-tone sentence


Some Vocab
So, with the caveat that these words could radically change if I muss with the phonology of Kjáhida (and that I might be inadvertantly be breaking my own rules already...), here are a bank of words I think should serve us well for a while:

Joe, Jane, and Spot: Sakír, Ritá, Táti
Kinds: sal(person), nis(boy), nit(girl), tatíra(dog)
Inanimate props: tímitim(stick), rakási(potato), sjiráha(sriracha sauce)
Not really nouny, but why not: tína(hapiness) lídja(sadness) kirikinís(quickness)
Nice, active verbs: sam(go) lir(see/apprehend) dawi(throw) win(eat) mal(put/place)
Finicky, less-active verbs: rak(have/possess) nisír(feel) sja(be)
Fun multivalent verbs: sjim(give) dan(make/cause) mihya(tell/say)
Killer-P's that we'll determine later: ja, wi, sir, kja, liswá

Some Decisions
In order to break our own rules intelligently later with our interesting irregularities, we need to set down our regular themes first. I've always found typological decisions to be very productive in shaping how I approach the creation of structures in my linguistic doodlings, so here are some parameters I'll declare here:

-Head Initial phrase structure. We're gonna follow English's lead and have our prepositions, determiners, demonstratives, and so on come first in their phrase.
-VSO structure. Verb-first has always been something I've liked, and it appeals to the computer programmer in me. Further, I have plans for prepositions & verbs, so I want to echo the Head-Initial decision here to make life easier down the line.
-Pro Drop. Unless this becomes too cumbersome, we want there to be lots of dropped arguments to verbs so that we can imply their presence with agreement elsewhere in the sentence with fun anaphora and such.
-"As we go" morphological alignment. We'll see how interesting we can get word order to be, but I'm not focused on attaining a particular alignment: we'll likely be nominative-accusative with some lexically-determined switching.
-'Noun oriented'. If I could get away with it, we'd be having 'verbs' be a closed class; I want some flexibility here, though, so we'll just say we intend to convey most information through non-main-verb phrases.
-Serial/Phrasal Verbs. I want to make verbs really have to cooperate with each other and prepositions and clitics to get anything done. Not only are we going to do stuff like make "tell give in make" mean "to shame into charity" or whatever, but we're going to do it frequently.
-"Vague". By this I mean that we aren't going to be overly concerned with marking tense, gender of participants, aspect, or evidentiality in the creation process unless it is relevant and/or provides an interesting grammatical construct. Like any language, we'll be able to indicate these things, but I'm not gonna prioritize a 'declension table' early on, and the glosses will play a little loose with the distinctions when not relevant.

Basic Sentence
All that sounds real fun and all, but there are poor imaginary people who need to say things like "Spot is a dog", so:

sja Táti tatíra
be Spot dog
Spot is a dog

Verb-Subject-Object-Yawn. I dislike that tatíra isn't associated with a killer preposition or verb. So, instead of being sad about that, we'll change it to:

sja Táti sja tatíra
be Spot be dog
Spot is a dog

We're gonna just plop another 'be' by 'dog' and use the magic of juxtaposition for "instance of" constructions. We say "Spot is." along with "Dogs are." and let the speaker assume for us that these facts are related: Kjáhidans of course see that "Spot is a dog" is the presumption.

Further, this makes for a more natural progression to other basic-styled sentences. Not only is Spot a dog, I'd like this imaginary canine to be psychologically fulfilled and have an appropriate balance of hopes and expectations.

sja Táti ja tína
be Spot characterized-by/of happiness
"Spot is happy"

"ja" attributes a quality to the main argument to the verb, because it was the first free word in our 'killer preposition' list, and we needed a word here. Note that, due to the semantics I have in mind here, we don't want to use it for our last sentence, as here:

sja Táti ja tatíra
be spot characterized-by/of dog
"Spot is doglike"

I had a cat as a child that was a dog in all behavioural respects but he wasn't in actuality, and so I might use this construction to describe him as 'dog-like' or 'has the characteristics of a dog' but it'd be inaccurate and unethical to use "sja tatíra" with him.

Taking this as a pattern, we're gonna let verbs all have a set of feasible prepositional arguments that may or may not appear in any given utterance (like just about every other language ever). Right this second, I'll say that we always put the most 'Agent-like' argument of the verb right after the verb... but I plan some complexity/flexibility once we get more complex 'verb-al' elements into our sentences, as well as some passivization ideas.

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This post, however, has taken longer to write up than I had budgetted time for so I'll leave it at this for today, despite wanting to get to a use of 'ja' in a much more verbal role in this post. Feedback and such is welcome as always.

[Sevly]

Not only are we going to do stuff like make "tell give in make" mean "to shame into charity" or whatever, but we're going to do it frequently.

Ooh, this looks like it's going to be good.

"ja" attributes a quality to the main argument to the verb, because it was the first free word in our 'killer preposition' list, and we needed a word here.

Mmm, I like how you're working out the semantics of your prepositions and particles rather than constraining them with set labels. This approach should make for a complex and intruiguing system. I also like the voice of these notes in general; they're full of personal comments and anecdotes and really fun to read.

This post, however, has taken longer to write up than I had budgetted time for so I'll leave it at this for today, despite wanting to get to a use of 'ja' in a much more verbal role in this post.

Looking forward to seeing it.

[Sakir]

Mmm, I like how you're working out the semantics of your prepositions and particles rather than constraining them with set labels. This approach should make for a complex and intruiguing system. I also like the voice of these notes in general; they're full of personal comments and anecdotes and really fun to read.

Thanks! I'm an admirer of your work, which has been an influence on Kjáhida.

[Sakir]

Still Gettin' It
Dropped it pretty abruptly last time, so let's resume: we were just about to do something interesting. So far, we've two basic constructions that are keeping their nose clean - the semantics involved aren't too tricky, and I've not presented anything particularly outlandish. But wait--

ja Táti sja tína
characterized-by/of Spot be happiness
Spot became happy

Oh yes. Although comfortably a preposition one post ago, 'ja' is now acting as the main matrix verb in this sentence, and 'sja' has been kicked over and is acting at best as a case marker or somesuch. Together, they unite to form the sense "become". But what's going on here?

Well, perhaps we should start with our analysis so far. I've emphasized that the first particle in a sentence is the verb and (after its argument) following thereafter is a prepositional phrase (PP) acting as an argument. But I set out to do weird serial verb constructions, so why not look at it through this lens?

How would we say "Spot became/changed"? I propose we *could* do it like this:

ja sja Táti
characterized-by/of be Spot
Spot became

Here, 'ja sja' is (to my mind) gonna be like English phrases like "give in", "pull out", "rake in", "give up", and "take up": they form lexical items that mean something different than their constituents. Thus, the actual meaning of 'ja sja' is 'become', not 'of be'; I want to do this kind of thing for most Kjáhida verbs. In English, I could say "I gave up" or "I raked in the dough": in Kjáhida, I want to do the same thing, but sprinkle in the NPs in there. So, instead of saying "I took up space" we'd (in gloss-o-nese) say "took I up space". So perhaps a 'better' gloss to show what's going on in today's example would be like this:

ja Táti sja tína
-came Spot be- happiness
Spot became happy

Looking at our (only... other... example...) "Spot is a dog", let's follow this pattern and guess that if we just wanted to say "Spot exists" we'd have:

sja sja Táti
be be Spot
Spot is

The thing is that that would be logical and consistent for learners of the language, and we can't have that: this ain't no auxlang. Additionally, "be be" is silly to require at this point. Further, this is the word 'to be' in our language, and it is our duty to make it as oddball as we can get away with. Finally, we already said that the 'sja ... sja ...' construction was using juxtaposition! So, no, my friends, we'll just keep it like this:

sja Táti
is Spot
Spot is

The important thing here is that we thought of that possibility and chose to go with a different pattern because it looked prettier. I propose for now (until we want to make a construction that messes things up) we should analyze the particle/verb/preposition things as set constructions that get filled in with NPs. In this light, we still basically just have done VS(O) sentences, just that the V has been kind of crumbly. In fact, I don't think we've even done a 'proper' PP as a result of this analysis, which means we have even more design space to explore than we thought we did.

To be totally clear, I expect this analysis to change as we go forward: don't feel too comfortable with 'Oh! They're all just part of a verb'. I'm pretty sure they're gonna end up earning the 'Killer P' as we go along. However, the next post will cover those "Nice, active verbs" I mentioned but didn't use last time: they are single-wordy, but surely they'll need two arguments? No worries, we're gettin' it.

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Feedback, pointing-out-of-stupidity, and comments (as always) welcome.
These've been fun to do so far!

Analyzed Vocab as it stands
sja ... = "... exists"
sja ... sja ... = "... is a ..."
sja ... ja ... = "... is characterized by ..."
ja ... sja ... = "... became ..."

[Sakir]

Mass Transitive

Part of being an expatriate is to find creative ways to not eat the local food. It's not that I dislike Chinese food: far from it, I enjoy me some guōtiē. But sometimes I just want McDonald's, and they deliver over here, right to your door, and it's raining outside, and...

...I pour sriracha sauce on the fries. Bringing us to this post's doozie of an intro sentence:

win Sakír ja tímitim rakási wi sjiráha
eat Sakir of stick potato with sriracha sauce
Sakir eats fries with sriracha sauce

And all of a sudden we've proposed at least three different constructions for Kjáhida without even trying: the joys of early conlang development! Let's run an initial analysis, see if we like it, and determine any tweaks to be made. What have we done here...

-'tímitim rakási' is an NP with more than one noun in it, and is trying to associate the two words together to signify a different concept altogether. We need to be precise about this kind of thing, so this merits some dissection.
-'ja' is definitely indicating a Patient for this transitive verb concept: whether it is a distinct case marker that just looks like our previous 'ja' is yet to be determined.
-'wi sjiráha' could be an honest-to-goodness instrumental PP, a component of the matrix verb ('win ja wi'?), or some other particle denoting the relevance of the sriracha, perhaps an adverbial of some kind.

Yum
We'll go in order, starting with 'tímitim rakási'. I figured it was a bit much to have 'french fry' and 'sriracha sauce' be in the first 10 words I made, so figured I could get some mileage out of having a word for stick (Táti needs fun in example sentences too) and force at least a quick look at NP constructions in Kjáhida. That said, I don't think we need much going on here yet... this is like English "racecar", "gunsight", "shoelace" and so on.

This feels a little underwhelming to me, so we may revisit this, but for now I want to make juxtaposition a non-marginal method for Kjáhida speakers to associate two things, and we have such a lovely thing going on with 'sja... sja...' that I want to echo. So, I promise some more interesting NP constructions later, but not today. Only other thing to note here is that we're considering 'tímitim' as the head of the phrase, and so the status of 'rakási' (currently) is that of a null-marked "the head is made up of/comprised of' relationship, like French 'de'/'en'.

An Impasse
Moving on... what's 'ja' up to? It's not really the least obvious word to use, in its 'of' gloss. I think in church they even say things like "Drink of this wine, for it is my blood", so there is some cognate friendliness going on here. So I guess the real question is if it is part of the matrix verb or a head of an adjunct phrase. If the language existed already, I'd ask to see what "I eat" translates to, then we'd see if we got 'win ja Sakír' or 'win Sakír': that's the kind of stuff linguists do, after all.

win ja Sakír
eat of Sakir
?Sakir eats

OR

win Sakír
eat Sakir
?Sakir eats

As a conlanger, however, this is a design choice. The choice I see here, at least while keeping to our patterns and themes, is a decision about how strongly verbs in Kjáhida expect certain semantic arguments to be present. If we go with 'win ja Sakír' in the intransitive, we're closer to a stance emphasizing phrasal verbs crumbling toward relevant NP arguments, whereas 'win Sakir' goes more the route of our verbs not caring as much about the specifics of their actions, delegating the explanation to secondary phrases (and thus emphasizing our 'killer preposition' goal).

At the moment, I'm genuinely divided on which way to go, so I'd appreciate feedback/opinions. If I had to choose a preference, I'd say I'm leaning towards 'win ja Sakír', so that it is easier to imagine straightforward Kjáhida words for English concepts like 'eating in', 'eating out', 'eating it all up', and so on: 'win ja' would mean exactly 'eat of'. Lemme get your thoughts!

More Yum
Finally, we get to enigmatic 'wi' introducing my favorite condiment. That said, what does 'wi' actually indicate?

In this particular sentence, it might be tempting for the eager conlanger to label it "INSTRU." or "with" in the gloss, clap their hands, and be done. But I'm not gonna give one of the shortest words in Kjáhida such a simple, angst-free existence! No, we're gonna make this particle particle behave at least as promiscuously as the English word 'to', although in a different way: I propose that 'wi' indicates a pragmatic decision by the speaker to mention something particularly relevant to the action of the matrix verb.
You may wonder why I'm using the word 'matrix' all the time. It is because I want to get a headstart on my distinctions early on, since I'm allowing for/anticipating some wacky embedded-clause maneuvers later on

This is because, when I began this post, I didn't just want to say "I-am-Sakir-and-I-eat-french-fries-with-sriracha-sauce". I used ellipses and everything to focus on the sriracha, it was the reason I brought up the scenario at all; talking with friends, that's the hook of the story. The only reason I didn't say 'wi sjiráha win...' was that I'm uncomfortable performing grammatical fronting so early in development. So 'wi' is some amalgam of a 'THEME' or 'TOPIC' marker. So, I'm seeing 'wi' having a place in sentences like

lir Sakír wi Ríta
see Sakir the-lovely-and-talented Rita
Sakir saw Rita (and we're gonna talk about Rita now)

sam Sakír wi Táti
go Sakir with-the-going-very-relevant-to dog
Sakir went with Spot (since why would I bring up Sakir's travels if it wasn't important to the dog?)

rak Sakír wi sjiráha
have Sakir dat sriracha-sauce
Sakir has sriracha on him (and that's gonna lead to something)

In fact, it's almost like it glosses to "*THE*" right now, but that's mostly my enthusiasm showing: I'll be less excited about it later on and it'll simply be a way for us to 'promote' an NP in pragmatic situations without resorting to a passive or similar construction. It also coyly leaves undetermined whether we can have NPs not be 'headed' by a particle of some form.

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As always, thanks for taking the time out of your routine to read my post: I hope it was interesting. Feedback & criticism always warmly welcomed.

Constructions In This Post
<verb> ... wi <NP> = "NP is very likely to be our Topic going forward, or is being emphasized"
<nounA> <nounB> = compound NP where nounA is modified/specified by nounB in some fashion
win ... ja ... = "eat of something"
win ja ... or win ... = "to eat". But which one?

[Sakir]

Honest To Goodness Prepositional Phrases

As I've been writing these posts and coming up with the grammar for Kjáhida, I feel I've ben focusing on the verb-like behaviour of the non-NP elements in our sample sentences. However, since the goal is to create a language based on Killer-P's, we need to make sure they are clearly acting as prepositions as well. Doing some research (thus no post yesterday), I came across a neat thing in Chinese that I think is going in the right direction.

The Mandarin Chinese particle zài - 在 has several functions. It is most commonly used to indicate location. When used before a place word, zài means “on” “at” or “in”.

Shū zài nàli.
The book is there.
书在那里｡

Zài is also used as a preposition to indicate where an action takes place:

Tāmen zài chúfáng chī dōngxī.
They are in the kitchen eating.
他们在厨房吃东西｡

Another use for zài - 在 is to show that an action is occurring at the present moment. Zài is placed before the verb it modifies:

Tāmen zài kàn diànshì.
They are watching TV.
他们在看电视｡

This is also a lot, after I thought a bit, like English 'at/a-', such as in "I'm at the store" and "I'm a-running home!". This is the kind of multi-use I want Kjáhida Killer-P's to do regularly. So to start with, in today's post, we're gonna come up with some basic prepositional particles (including ones we've already used), and keep in mind alternate uses we can declare out-of-the-box. We're also gonna assign a heirarchy of semantics for determining which prepositional phrases are 'fronted', occurring closer to the verb.

The Lineup
This list is only for the meanings of these particles when they are not working with another Killer-P and as such are not complete definitions. They are presented in order of salience, and should be nearer to the verb in an 'unmarked' word order than those PPs below it.

Participant Particles: Highest Default Salience
ja - of, characterized by
wi - of, concerning/related to
sir - toward, with the natural endpoint being
lek - from, with the natural startpoint being
kja - for, to the interest/benefit/detriment of
liswá - with, accompanying

Locational/Environmental Particles: Medium Default Salience
kwa - moving over, past; to the detriment of
nar - moving under, beneath; with X in mind; to the benefit of
kjiri - above, atop
min - below, under
swiswi - with respect to, along; following with
nísam - against, upon; abutting, adjacent

Temporal Particles: Lowest Default Salience
liswá - while, at the same time as X (yup, liswá is in both lists)
daji - before, with X haven't happened yet
sjak - after, with X having happened already
wa - along with, with X beginning at the time of the action
kin - parting from, with X ending at the time of the action

Fun to do, easy to do, useful to do: a winning combination! So how do we use them?

The Prepositional Phrase
Thinking over the question from last post and after some reading/research, it seems very natural for all verbs to have a set of semantic parameters that get filled in, and that it is usually the choice of the language which ones to make mandatory. With that in mind, I'm going to take a loose approach largely consisting of the maxim "If the verb used comes built-in with Killer-P's, they are required to show: if there are no arguments to take, they stay in front of the main argument". This means I decided to go along with the 'win ja' option last post.

What this means for us today is that any prepositions 'built into' the verb come first, followed by the heirarchy of prepositions we specified above, which are optional. Some examples:

win ja Sakir
eat-of Sakir
Sakir Eats

win Sakir ja rakási
eat Sakir of potato
Sakir ate a potato

win Sakir ja rakási liswá Rita
eat Sakir of potato with/at-the-same-time-as Rita
Sakir ate a potato with Rita

win Sakir wi rakási kin dawi Rita ja tímitim nar Táti
eat Sakir TOPIC potato parting-from throw Rita of stick for Spot
Sakir began eating a potato once Rita threw a stick for Spot (topic will shift to the eating of the potato: unpalatable? delicious?)

Whoa whoa whoa.... we just introduced a whole subclause ('kin dawi Rita...') with that last one: very controversial at this early stage! All sorts of English-isms could abound here, so I'll have to think on that one in particular for an upcoming post. That said, it doesn't seem that offensive, and I like how it shows the usefulness of "kin" for tying together events. We've already come a long way from "Spot is a dog", don't you think?

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Nothing very wild was introduced today: we had a good ol' sit down with some semantically straightforward prepositions. However, this is in anticipation of overloading them in the use of constructions I've yet to come up with: I see lots of potential for making some mark verbal inception, marking ditransitive setups (and we're already seeing 'ja' acting as a de facto 'patient' marker), and perhaps even things like evidentiality. If you have a spiffy suggestion, or wisdom about what other (con)langs do, I'm all ears!

As always, thanks for taking the time to read!

Constructions in this Post
PP -> <Preposition> <NP>
PP -> <Preposition> <Subclause?>
PPs exist in a "actor > location > time" default heirarchy: higher-ups are said closer to the matrix verb.

[Sakir]

Relative Comfort
Well, I really hadn't meant to get into it so soon, but I suppose it is unavoidable: subordinate/dependent clauses. They are easily my favorite thing in syntax to tweak with: there are strategies based off of gaps, relativizing particles & pronouns, passivization schemes, and all of the previous multiplied together. Further, all this leaves aside the fun that appositive and adverbial clauses present! Today I will try to come up with a somewhat rich scheme for prototypical dependent clauses: clauses that serve the role of limiting the scope of possible referents for a verb's argument, such as "I hate the car that I bought" or "I saw the man who flew over my head" or similar.

The linguistic "Accessibility Hierarchy" is where I'll start off:

...[T]here are major restrictions on the role the antecedent may have in the relative clause.
Edward L. Keenan and Bernard Comrie noted that these roles can be ranked cross-linguistically in the following order from most accessible to least accessible:

Subject > Direct Object > Indirect Object > Oblique > Genitive > Object of comparative

This order is referred to as the accessibility hierarchy. If a language can relativize positions lower in the accessibility hierarchy, it can always relativize positions higher up, but not vice versa.

...

This kind of thing is a great thing for conlanging: we can choose to break it if we're feeling sparky, or just choose our point on the scale. I'm going to choose the latter since there are sound human/intuitive reasons for the order. Another cool factoid is that those languages which cannot relativize stuff lower on the scale are precisely the languages whose passives pick up the semantic slack. With that in mind, because passives are fun too, let's choose somewhere middling on the scale so both can eventually get some spotlight:

Kjáhida allows relative constructions for antecedents in the Subject, Direct Object, and Indirect Object roles.
Kjáhida uses passive constructions for antecedents in the Oblique, Genitive, and Comparatand(?) roles.

Having said that, we still need to decide what exactly these constructions will consist of. I'm quite a fan of gap constructions ("The man (I saw) was fat"), so we certainly want those, but it's useful to have some kind of relativizing particle to deal with trickier scenarios: we'll define an indeclinable 'di' for the purpose. There are four scenarios I want to handle explicitly:

1)The antecedent is the 'first' argument of the matrix verb, and the 'first' argument of the subordinate verb.
2)The antecedent is the 'first' argument of the matrix verb, and not the 'first' argument of the subordinate verb.
3)The antecedent is not the 'first' argument of the matrix verb, and is the 'first' argument of the subordinate verb.
4)The antecedent is not the 'first' argument of either verb.

The main reason I want to be sure of those cases is because we have to concern ourselves about parsing the 'crumbly' bits of our verbs, so best to be methodical. For 'non-first' roles, we more precisely mean arguments entailed by a verb being semantically 'transitive' or 'ditransitive', since we said we only relativize Indirect Objects and above in the accessibility hierarchy. (Side-note: we need to address the 'optionality' of verbs' preposition-headed arguments soon).

For cases 1) and 3), I think we can very handily get away with a simple 'plop it in' strategy:

1)
sja sam sir rakási ja namam
be go-toward(come) potato be yumminess
The potato that came was yummy

3)
win Sakir ja sam sir rakási
eat Sakir of go-toward(come) potato
Sakir ate the potato that came

Parsing the construction is pretty natural, as the verb of the relativized clause shows up right after any 'prepositions' where a noun'd be expected, so it's clear what is going on. We may need to cook up some strategies for fronting non-relativized phrases to clear up some ambiguity that occurs with a 'heavy' subclause, but it's nothing English and others can't handle, so we can look to them for inspiration when we address that issue.

For cases 2) and 4), I feel more comfortable inserting a 'dummy pronoun' in the subclause, and have the NP itself exit to the left of the verb:

2)
sam nit lir Sakir ja di sir tatíra
go girl saw Sakir of REL towards dog
The girl that Sakir saw went up to the dog

4)
dawi Sakir lek tímitim mal Táti min di
throw Sakir away/from stick place Spot down REL
Sakir threw out the stick that Spot had placed down

Further, to help our Kjáhida-speakers out a bit, we'll introduce a pragmatic shuffling rule: the '<preposition> di' segment should occur last in the subordinated clause as long as it doesn't introduce ambiguity of the meaning of those phrases it 'moves to the right of'. This is mostly important for ditransitive verbs with several arguments required:

sjin Sakir wi tímitim sir Táti
give Sakir of stick to Spot
Sakir gave the stick to Spot

goes to

lir Ríta ja tímitim sjin Sakir sir Táti wi di
saw Rita of stick give Sakir to Spot of REL
Rita saw the stick that Sakir had given Spot

NOT

lir Ríta ja tímitim sjin Sakir wi di sir Táti
saw Rita of stick give Sakir of REL to Spot
Rita saw the stick Sakir gave (toward Spot?)

This rule will come in handy when we have longer, more involved sentences: the 'di' forms a natural kind of 'end parenthesis' in most cases. However, ambiguity can still exist if there are PP's and such in the subclause (the shuffling rightwards won't happen because it'll often seem like we're relativizing an oblique object), but context should normally sort out the right parsing.

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Truth be told, I've been working on this post for two hours, so I'm going to end it there. I'm sure there are cases I've not looked at for our relative clauses, but I'm feeling good about it so far. Call me out on anything stupid/ambiguous if you see it, and I'll try and address it. If we catch anything egregious, my next post will be about addressing it, otherwise I'll likely think about the passive constructions next, leaving finer details for later. As always, thanks for reading this stuff: it's very much appreciated, even if you don't end up commenting.

Constructions this post
<NP <- Subclause NP, referent is subclause Agent> = <verb> REFERENT_NOUN <verb particles & their arguments...>
<NP <- Subclause NP, referent is not subclause Agent> = REFERENT_NOUN <verb> Main_Noun <verb particles & their arguments...> <now-lonely verb particle> 'di'

[Vardelm]

I love the "in progress thought process" nature of this thread. It's fun to see the development, and the twists it's taking are interesting. Kudos so far.

[Sakir]

I love the "in progress thought process" nature of this thread. It's fun to see the development, and the twists it's taking are interesting. Kudos so far.

Thanks for your kind words: means a lot!

Passive Aggression
Entailed by last post's determination that we'd be using passives in lieu of relativization strategies for 'arguments' of the verb of tertiary centrality, we need to actually create such passives... they don't exist yet. This will be just about the first time where we modify the semantics of a particular verb: up to this point they've comfortably had all their 'slots' filled in whenever they can lob the prepositional particles towards relevant NPs. Let's investigate ways we can change a transitive verb into a passive verb first, and then consider how to passivize intransitive and other kinds of verbs.

dawi Sakir lek tímitim
throw Sakir from stick
Sakir threw away the stick

Here are some approaches I brainstormed which I think are near the 'spirit' of Kjáhida:

Gap Strategy
Here, we kick the agent to a PP and move the 'object' into the first spot, leaving the phrasal preposition where it was to mark the change.

dawi tímitim lek ø (ja/kin/wi? Sakir)
throw stick from (of/after/concerning Sakir)
The stick was thrown (by Sakir)

Passivizing particle 'hi'
Here, we move the 'object' into the first part, put the particle 'hi' where the object moved from, and 'hi' is itself a killer-P that provides an optional home for the de-emphasized agent.

dawi tímitim lek hi (Sakir)
throw stick from PASS (Sakir)
The stick was thrown (by Sakir)

Front Now-Empty Preposition
Here, we move the 'object' into the first part, and lob the preposition that housed it right in front of the verb. The de-emphasized agent can assume a naked post directly after the promoted 'object'.

lek dawi tímitim (Sakir)
from throw stick (Sakir)
The stick was thrown (by Sakir)

All of these can be pretty interesting, and I'm tempted to choose more than one. However, they each have stylistic/artistic weaknesses to my nose. The Gap Strategy as I have here puts a bit of onus in determining what kind of PP the agent gets kicked to, and I'm not very impressed by that consequence. The Passivizing Particle approach is pretty darn attractive, introducing a new versatile Killer-P and being relatively low on the ambiguity scale; however, it reminds me pretty strongly of our second relativization strategy, and I'm not sure that's a selling point when we want a quirky grammar. Finally, the Fronting Preposition is very simple and elegant, but it has the wholly unattractive trait of introducing Kjáhida to an 'unheaded' NP.

So, I'm gonna make a quick, reversible judgement call: for verbs where we want to express the de-emphasized agent, we will use the Passivizing particle. For verbs where we do not wish to have the de-emphasized agent stated whatsoever, we will use the Fronting strategy. If either one winds up tying our shoelaces, we'll kick it away in favor for the one not messing us up as much.

Let's play around a bit:

lir Ríta ja hi Sakir
see Rita of PASS Sakir
Rita was seen by Sakir

ja lir Rita
of see Rita
Rita was seen

dawi tímitim lek hi Sakir nar Táti
throw stick away PASS Sakir for Spot
The stick was thrown to Spot by Sakir

lek dawi tímitim nar Táti
away throw stick for Spot
The stick was thrown to Spot

nísam kajis
upon precipitate
It rained

kajis nisam hi najis
precipitate upon PASS clouds
It rained due to clouds

kajis nisam najis
precipatate upon the clouds
The clouds rained down

The "intransitive" verb was probably the most difficult one there, but even that I think turned out just fine given how briefly we slapped together the construction. Now that we have passive constructions, I can think about how precisely we'll use them for the other purpose we had in mind for them: specifying genitive, oblique, and comparatand verb arguments.

-----------

Long workday today, though, so will have to address that next post. I think these are pretty respectable passives, but let me know your thoughts/alternative approaches. Thanks for reading/skimming all the glosses I had to come up with, and for your attention generally. Cheers!

Constructions This Post
Passive with Agent Still Stated: <verb> <promoted NP> (other args) <promoted-beyond particle> 'hi' <agent> (other PPs)
Passive with Agent Omitted: <promoted-beyond particle> <verb> <promotedNP> (other args) (other PPs)

[Sakir]

Complementary Snacks
Still on the quest to use passive verbs to 'relativize' oblique and indirect objects of subclauses, today we will investigate complementizing a clause. 'Complementizing' is the process of turning an independent clause into an argument of another clause: this is distinct from relativizing in that we aren't providing extra information about one of the verb's actors, but instead treating the clause *as a whole* as an argument of the verb. Some examples include "I knew that it was going to rain", "That he was stinking, filthy rich came as a surprise to me", "When he ran to the police I grabbed the gat", and similar. The 'that' in the examples is acting as a complementizer particle, although I'm not certain about the status of the last example's "when": it is either a complementizer or simply a preposition/adverb-thing with an 'empty complementizer' phrase as its argument.

I want to point out real quick that I am not addressing 'interrogative content clauses', which are sentences of the form "I know how you got all that money", "She asked where Jerome had stashed the bag", and such. I want to get back to those later with a different mechanism, although today's mechanism applies just fine to 'declarative content clauses' like the "I knew Sam was a good man".

Really, I think this is going to boil down to whether we're going to have an explicit complementizer (like English 'that') heading up things, or not. So let's just look at how Kjáhida would look either way, using a tentative particle 'na' for the explicit case:

Example 1:
a)
lir Sakir ja [dawi Rita lek tímitim]
saw Sakir of throw Rita away stick
Sakir saw Rita throw the stick

b)
lir Sakir ja [na dawi Rita lek tímitim]
saw Sakir of COMPL throw Rita away stick
Sakir saw Rita throw the stick

Example 2:
a)
tamal [rak Rita líswa tatíra] nísam Sakir
surprise possess Rita with dog against Sakir
That Rita had a dog surprised Sakir

b)
tamal [na rak Rita líswa tatíra] nísam Sakir
surprise COMPL possess Rita with dog against Sakir
That Rita had a dog surprised Sakir

A secondary option for the explicit case presents itself to us if we allow the complement to front, leaving 'na' in its place:

Example 1:
c)
[dawi Rita lek tímitim] lir Sakir ja na
throw Rita away stick saw Sakir of that
Sakir saw Rita throw the stick

Example 2:
c)
[rak Rita líswa tatíra] tamal na nísam Sakir
possess rita with dog surprise that against Sakir
That Rita had a dog surprised Sakir

<...An Hour of Confused Syntactaesthetic Pondering Later...>

After a bit of thought, I think I'll do for complement clauses what we did for relative clauses: we'll use a pair of constructions based on the 'first argument' status of the subordinate clause. In this case, we will use the "front & use 'na'" when the complement is the 'first', and use the unmarked construction otherwise. Precisely, we like Example 1a and 2c. Although I think that'll be fine, this is likely the most 'iffy' on a decision I've felt so far: let me know if you think up a more 'Kjáhidan' approach to this.

-----------------

Daily postings are quite a task to achieve, but this one marks the first full week of such updates. Tomorrow will likely be about using our new Complement and Passive constructions together so that we can finish off our 'relativization' strategies for clause arguments. Once we do that, depending on my mood, we'll really try to break our subordinate clause system with some contorted utterances and see if anything needs changing (challenges welcomed!), or we'll take a break and look at something unrelated. As always, thanks for reading!

Constructions this Post
Subject Complement Clause: <Complement clause> <matrix verb> 'na' <other arguments & phrases>
Non-Subject Complement Clause: <matrix verb> <subject argument> ... <Complement clause, unmarked> ...

[Sakir]

The Meek Shall Inherit
In what, in my eyes, is the culmination of several days of build-up, we shall attain the lofty goal of elevating an oblique object of a subclause to the grand status of matrix verb argument! I must have better things to do with my life, but such is the ailment of the conlanger, I suppose. So, what precisely are we trying to achieve in terms of a typical utterance? This:

Rita disliked the rain
PLUS
Sakir threw a stick to the dog in the rain
EQUALS
Rita disliked the rain in which Sakir threw the ball to the dog

Now, for reasons of making life difficult for ourselves, we have disallowed ourselves to use Kjáhida's relativization strategy to express this sentence: instead, we will be resorting to passive and complement constructions. I made this decision *days* ago: the choice simply required the existence of some constructs I hadn't formulated yet. So, let's see if that decision pans out by making 'the rain' become the main argument of a passive clause, and then place that passive clause into the "Rita sentence" via a complementizing strategy.

kaseta Ríta nísam kajis
dislike Rita against rain
Rita disliked the rain

PLUS

dawi kajis lek tímitim nar tatíri min hi Sakir
threw rain against stick under PASS Sakir
The rain was thrown-within by Sakir of a stick for a dog

EQUALS

kaseta Ríta nisam dawi kajis lek tímitim nar tatíri min hi Sakir
dislike Rita against throw stick away stick for dog under PASS Sakir
Rita disliked (that the rain was thrown-within by Sakir of a stick for a dog)

...

...

I hate it. Primarily because it doesn't attain the semantic meaning I wanted to achieve: Rita is disliking the whole scenario, not just the rain: maybe she's morally outraged at Sakir playing in the rain, and not at the rain inhibiting the dog's play. Blecch: I could just *say* it means that, but it's inconsistent and really just a giant lie. Because it's been a busy day for me, I'm feeling too tired to really fix it: I'm tempted to just be happy with the passive & complement constructions we've made up, undo our Accessibility Heirarchy decision, and let relative clauses sort this out. If I did that, we'd have

kaseta Ríta nísam kajis dawi Sakir lek tímitim nar tatíri min di
dislike Rita against rain throw Sakir away stick for Dog under REL
Rita disliked the rain in which Sakir threw the ball to the dog

I do marginally prefer this latter sentence's shape, but man if it doesn't feel like giving up at the first sign of adversity. What I think I'll do is read up on some stuff tomorrow about the nuts & bolts of how languages that can't relativize all the way down the accessibility heirarchy do it. Comments & feedback would be great here: I'll likely not have a 'normal' post tomorrow, doing reading instead of writing.

Thanks for your help in advance if given, and for your perusal already given!

[WeepingElf]

This language has a really interesting and original syntax. I like the way it develops.

[Sakir]

This language has a really interesting and original syntax. I like the way it develops.

Ti sintatimi! I'm glad all this work isn't churning out boring syntax, at least And forgive the mangled proto-timtu

Move On Up

It occurred to me, looking at the issue of elevating an oblique object in a subclause to an argument of the matrix clause, that the reason why we might be making its sentence passive is precisely to elevate that object to the 'first argument' status. And, as we've said, we happily relativize the 'first' argument of a verb with a gap strategy. However, because the 'first' argument isn't as prototypically 'agent-like', let's introduce an irregularity and use the "front + di" relativization method, instead of the gap method:

kaseta Ríta nisam kajis
dislike Rita against rain
Rita doesn't like the rain
PLUS
kajis dawi di lek tímitim nar tatíri min hi Sakir
throw rain away stick for dog under PASS Sakir
The rain was thrown-away-under concerning a stick for a dog by Sakir
EQUALS
kaseta Ríta nisam kajis dawi di lek tímitim nar tatíri min hi Sakir
dislike Rita against rain throw REL away stick for dog under PASS Sakir
Rita doesn't like the rain in which Sakir threw a stick for spot

WHAM: I like that much more. Let's place it in other positions in the matrix clause, just to do a once-over:

kaseta kajis dawi di lek tímitim nar tatíri min hi Sakir nisam Ríta
dislike rain throw REL away stick for dog under PASS Sakir against Rita
The rain within which Sakir threw a stick for the dog disliked Rita

sam Rita sir nanik wa kajis dawi di lek tímitim nar tatíri min hi Sakir
go Rita toward home upon rain throw REL away stick for dog under PASS Sakir
Rita went home at the same time as the rain within which Sakir threw a stick for the dog

Yeah, I'm feeling it. A lot of work here, though, for an utterance that no one hoping to be well-understood would speak out loud, but languages have to be rich enough to accomodate ineffective people effectively. Naturally, the form of the passive will be different if we leave out the actor. Here are out examples leaving out 'Sakir'.

kaseta Ríta nisam kajis min dawi di lek tímitim nar tatíri
dislike Rita against rain under(PASS) throw REL away stick for dog
Rita doesn't like the rain in which the dog was thrown a stick

kaseta kajis min dawi di lek tímitim nar tatíri nisam Ríta
dislike rain under(PASS) throw REL away stick for dog against Rita
The rain within which a dog was thrown a stick disliked Rita

sam Rita sir nanik wa kajis min dawi di lek tímitim nar tatíri
go Rita toward home upon rain under(PASS) throw REL away stick for dog
Rita went home at the same time as the rain within which a dog was thrown a stick

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Shorter post today, since I need to work on some thoughts for the CCC project: I'll be using Kjáhida for my cultural submission's language, so peek over there to see mine & other's efforts. Once I have something posted, remember to vote for me!

Also, I don't know about you, but I'm getting really fatigued typing out all these long glosses. I anticipate we'll take a break from clause-level syntax and visit something more basic, like noun phrases or serial verb constructions. Might skip a day tomorrow (IRL work & research to do). As always, thanks for tuning in.

Constructions this Post
To relativize an oblique argument of the subclause, use the passive to make it the 'first' argument, then use the "front + di" method of relativization to promote it to an argument of the matrix verb clause.