Out of exotic ideas

[Sortsdam]

That title probably sounds pretty stupid; I mean, I totally understand the notion that (and I think Rosenfelder mentions this in his kit) when one first has a go at conlanging, it is often extremely attractive to use every single odd or non-IE feature of languages one has learned about. I wish I could explain this better. Oh yeah, he called it a kitchen sink conlang! But I intend to avoid that.

Anyway, I am in the early stages of making a Southeast Asian conlang. It's gonna be a possible relative of the Mon-Khmer languages, with monosyllabic words, many of which include semi-syllables at the beginning, so there will be words like 'rna:ng nkham' [r̩nəːŋ n̩kʰəm]. I've already got the phonology totally worked out and I like it and it's actually pretty sober and not too psychedelic at all. (meaning not too outlandish or kitchen-sink)

Those minor syllables were strange enough, so it would seem, so I scrapped any hope of making the language tonal and went with pitch accent instead.

SVO is too common and I hate it so I'm doing the only one I like, which is SOV. I wanna do topic-comment and use postpositional particles for indicating ergative case (gonna be ergative absolutive). These three things (topic, SOV, and pitch accent) are as Japanese as I wanna get.

All this stuff seems to be okay... but I'm left with verbal modes and whatnot, and I really don't want to use sentence-ending particles to represent modality, because that's too Korean, Chinese, Japanese etc. But the only other verb expression I can think of are inflections, which just make no sense for an analytic SE Asian language.

I can't seem to find any natlang examples of modality expression other than the standard European and standard East Asian traditions. I thought I would look at Amerind languages, but how could I possibly steal ideas for my conlang from such polysynthetic syntax?

So I'm not trying to use every exotic feature I've heard of to throw together this conlang. I just want to do something different with the verb morphology. Any ideas?

[MadBrain]

Niger-Congo languages sometimes have SOV order, but it's fairly different from Asian SOV languages (and closer to Indo-European languages in some ways).

They mix modality with pronouns, with a result somewhat between an aspect/tense-inflected pronoun and an auxiliary verb. They have S-Aux-O-V sentence order (and when Aux isn't present, either S-O-V or S-V-O depending on the langue - the latter type is called V2 and is shared with German). Another difference from Asian SOV languages is that Niger-Congo SOV language typically have circumstancial arguments after the verb.

More info:
http://projectwan.org/nikitina/word_order.pdf

[Sortsdam]

Niger-Congo languages sometimes have SOV order, but it's fairly different from Asian SOV languages (and closer to Indo-European languages in some ways).

They mix modality with pronouns, with a result somewhat between an aspect/tense-inflected pronoun and an auxiliary verb.

Cool! I really like that. So with such a system, one could include pronouns in a sentence even when there is already a noun..? Instead of

boy-SUB television-OBJ laugh-PERF
"The boy laughed at the TV"

We could say

3S.PERF.SUB boy-SUB television-OBJ laugh
"The boy, he laughed at the television"

In this case, 'laugh' is transitive, and really means 'laugh-at', so TV can be an object instead of dative. I could also make it topic-comment and ergative too:

television-TOP.ABS 3S.PERF boy-ERG laugh
"The television, the boy laughed at it"

Or make 'laugh' intransitive, like so:

television-TOP 3S.PERF boy-ABS laugh
"Concerning the television, the boy laughed"

Hmmmm.... Well at least I'm thinking outside of the box now. Thank you MadBrain

[Yng]

I think you might've misunderstood what 'topic' and 'comment' mean. 'Topic' doesn't just mean 'insert [concerning] before this word in the English translation' - the topic is still an integral part of the sentence in some way. All speech in all languages can be analysed as having a topic in a related sense, and almost all languages have some way of shifting syntax around to keep the topic (which is really just the 'topic' of the ongoing conversation or of a specific part of it - something that is likely to recur). English likes to keep the topic as the subject, and so often uses passivisation to shift it up towards subject-ness:

I saw John. He had been shot, and was hobbling along.

Also, if you want to set something in Southeast Asia plausibly, and make it a 'potential relative' of Mon-Khmer, you probably want to use common areal features, not go digging around completely different regions of the world. See what languages around there do and then try and put an interesting spin on it.

[clawgrip]

I think you might've misunderstood what 'topic' and 'comment' mean. 'Topic' doesn't just mean 'insert [concerning] before this word in the English translation' - the topic is still an integral part of the sentence in some way. All speech in all languages can be analysed as having a topic in a related sense, and almost all languages have some way of shifting syntax around to keep the topic (which is really just the 'topic' of the ongoing conversation or of a specific part of it - something that is likely to recur). English likes to keep the topic as the subject, and so often uses passivisation to shift it up towards subject-ness:

I saw John. He had been shot, and was hobbling along.

A lot of people misunderstand what topic-comment actually means. People have some vague idea of the topic being the "most important" thing, or the thing that you are "emphasizing." Really, the topic is an argument that delineates the scope of the comment's expectation of validity. That is to say, the statement made in the comment cannot be expected to be true (though neither is it automatically false) when taken out of the context set by the topic. However, this structure can be and is sometimes used to imply that the statement is false in certain other contexts (cf. "You look pretty today." vs. "Today, you look pretty." Topicalizing "today" makes it insulting because it implies that on days other than today, this comment is false i.e. "you are not pretty on other days")

Because the English topic is often (but not always) conflated with the subject. and arguments that can serve as topics are strongly tied to the predicate, the fact that the predicate is implied to be true only in the context of its topic is so obvious that many don't even think about it. So when considering languages that freely allow the topic to be separate from the subject and have no requirement for it to be a constituent of the predicate, people may not know what to do with it and not realize that the same expectation of truth still exists between the topic and the seemingly disconnected comment. A good example from Japanese is "money doesn't exist (in the context of me)" = "I have no money." The statement "money doesn't exist" is flagrantly nonsensical if taken out of the context of the topic, yet entirely sensible within it.

In this case, 'laugh' is transitive, and really means 'laugh-at', so TV can be an object instead of dative. I could also make it topic-comment and ergative too:

television-TOP.ABS 3S.PERF boy-ERG laugh
"The television, the boy laughed at it"

Or make 'laugh' intransitive, like so:

television-TOP 3S.PERF boy-ABS laugh
"Concerning the television, the boy laughed"

Hmmmm.... Well at least I'm thinking outside of the box now. Thank you MadBrain

In this case, by placing "television" as the topic, it means that the comment, "the boy laughed" is restricted to the context of "television" and so may not necessarily be a truthful statement in context other than television. With this topic and this comment, we see two elements of the comment that can be altered, meaning there are three most likely implications:
1. the boy may not have laughed at another thing (maybe he still did laugh at several things though)
2. someone other than the boy may have laughed at another thing
3. someone other than the boy did something other than laugh at another thing

Not to derail your thread too much or anything. I like Southeast Asian style languages and look forward to seeing more development on this.

[Vardelm]

A lot of people misunderstand what topic-comment actually means. People have some vague idea of the topic being the "most important" thing, or the thing that you are "emphasizing." Really, the topic is an argument that delineates the scope of the comment's expectation of validity. That is to say, the statement made in the comment cannot be expected to be true (though neither is it automatically false) when taken out of the context set by the topic. However, this structure can be and is sometimes used to imply that the statement is false in certain other contexts (cf. "You look pretty today." vs. "Today, you look pretty." Topicalizing "today" makes it insulting because it implies that on days other than today, this comment is false i.e. "you are not pretty on other days")

Because the English topic is often (but not always) conflated with the subject. and arguments that can serve as topics are strongly tied to the predicate, the fact that the predicate is only implied to be true in the context of its topic is so obvious that many don't even think about it. So when considering languages that freely allow the topic to be separate from the subject and have no requirement for it to be a constituent of the predicate, people may not know what to do with it and not realize that the same expectation of truth still exists between the comment and the seemingly disconnected comment. A good example from Japanese is "money doesn't exist (in the context of me)" = "I have no money." The statement "money doesn't exist" is flagrantly nonsensical if taken out of the context of the topic, yet entirely sensible within it.

I have struggled with the concept of topic, and this is a really good explanation that illustrates how subject & topic are different.

[Sortsdam]

You all make good points.

Yng, I understand your point for sure. Yet, I really can't seem to understand what makes the grammar of Mon-Khmer languages much different than English, other than lack of plural and person, and the existence of serial verbs (all features which I have included in my grammar). I don't plan on throwing in a million distant features, but I was looking for just one way of constructing basic clauses that was a little different than Sinitic and Tai and Austroasiatic etc etç

Clawgrip, you have really cleared up the mess I had in my head concerning topic-comment. I think I understand it better now; the "pretty today" example was really helpful. However, I'm still having trouble understanding the three points you made about my sentence. I get the first part of point 1) 'the boy may not have laughed at something else', but what implies that he might have laughed at several things, someone other than the boy laughed at something else, or someone other did something other than laugh? Basically 2 and a half of your 3 points have me confused...

[clawgrip]

Well if you understand a comment is only stated as true in the context of the topic, and that it can be implied to be false when taken out of that context, we have to look at how exactly the comment could be false in other contexts in order to understand that implication. In the comment "the boy laughed" there are two main arguments, so altering them in some way can give us potential implications of the phrase. My three points arise from altering the truthfulness of one or both of these arguments.

Examples:

1. Television, the boy laughed at. Comics, too. His uncle's story, no. (describing the boy's reactions to things)
2. Television, the boy laughed at. Comics, the girl laughed at. (describing who laughed at what.)
3. Television, the boy laughed at. Comics, the girl ripped up. (maybe I'm listing various people's reactions to the various things they each received)

[Sortsdam]

[/quote]

1. Television, the boy laughed at. Comics, too. His uncle's story, no. (describing the boy's reactions to things)
2. Television, the boy laughed at. Comics, the girl laughed at. (describing who laughed at what.)
3. Television, the boy laughed at. Comics, the girl ripped up. (maybe I'm listing various people's reactions to the various things they each received)

Okay. I am getting there. So, then, if only the first sentence of any of your examples appears in, say, a paragraph or short story, one would have to discern from context the deeper implications (expressed by the next sentence(s))? So it's basically like the notion of "Today, you look pretty (but not usually)" but with way more room for custom implication than just the positive-negative dichotomy of "Today, you look pretty" ?

Another, related, question: Let's say we go with number three. So say I'm writing a paragraph or two about various people's reactions to the various things they receive. If I say "The boy laughed at television-TOP", that shows how what he reacted to and how he reacted may be different than the others I have been writing about. If I choose not to topicalize 'television,' what would be the implication instead?

[clawgrip]

This is highly contrived because I'm applying intent that was not there originally, but in my example of #3, it seems the topic each time is a type of medium. If I chose to topicalize the medium each time, then it would seem that the various media are the focus of my conversation, and the people are just elements that support that story. Conversely, if I topicalized the experiencers instead, it would be the various people who are the focus of my conversation, the various media becoming secondary.

Let's not forget that the topic is generally still a topic most of the time. We choose to delimit the comment to the context of topic generally the topic is the thing that we're talking about. There are exceptions like "Today, you look pretty" of course, where "today" seems almost like an embedded topic, with "you" being both the overarching topic and a subordinate to "today". Tricky! (and yes embedded topics can happen - they occur from time to time in Japanese)

[Salmoneus]

Just to point out, the same ambiguity is present in 'today you look pretty'. The most likely reading is that tomorrow they may look something else. But that's not necessary:

1. Today, you look pretty. Yesterday you looked like shit.
2. Today, you look pretty. But tomorrow, Snow White will look pretty.
3. Today, you look pretty. Tomorrow, your landlord's stalking you. Is prettiness really worth the hassle?