Hallo!

On Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:03:15 +0100, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

> ## Kijeb verb inflection

I apologize for answering so late, saw it in Thursday, thought
I'd reply on the weekend when I'd have more time, then forgot it.
So, here I am.
 
> In the shower today I had a flash of inspiration
> and finally knew how Kijeb tense-aspect-mood
> marking should be organized.  I'll try to manage
> to describe it without access to my dictionary.
> 
> Many aspects (sic!) of the following wholly or
> partly obsoletize things said on the Kijeb page
> on FrathWiki.
> 
> The order of the markers (slots) are as follows:
> 
>      Root-aspect-(inverse)-(mood)-(tense)-(person)-(person)
> 
> Items in parentheses may be absent/zero-marked.
> Intransitive verbs have only one person marker
> while a transitive verb has two, but one or both
> of them may be zero-marked or haplologized.  When
> there are two person markers their relative order
> is determined by the animacy hierarchy as follows
> 
> ^
> | First person
> | Second person
> | Third person animate (singular)
> | (Third person animate plural)
> | Third person inanimate (singular)
> | (Third person inanimate plural)
> v
> 
> so that markers for persons higher in the list
> always precede markers for persons lower in the
> list.  Which one is agent and patient is
> signalled by the presence of the inverse marker if
> the lower person is agent.

So you have a direct/inverse system as in Algonquian, except that
in the latter, 2nd person is higher on the hierarchy than 1st.
Do you also use an obviative marking if both arguments are 3rd
person animate?

> I've also finally determined that the word order
> is verb initial.  The order of other constituents
> is pretty free, since inverse marking on the verb
> and distance marking on free pronouns generally
> take care or sorting out agent-patient relations.
> Quite possibly the slot after the verb is taken up
> by the topic!

Verb-initial word order is nice - I like it, too, and use it
in Old Albic, as well as in the experimental languages X-1 and
X-3.  In Old Albic, the word order is very free, and all six
logically possible permutations of verb, subject and object
are allowed, though the unmarked order is VSO.  X-1 requires
a fixed order of arguments, while in X-3 the verb must go
first but the arguments are all case-marked and may follow in
any order.

> I have long known that there are three different
> verb stems, each formed by adding one of the three
> vowels _-a- -i- -u-_ to the root (in Sohlob these give
> rise to alternations in the root vowel), and I
> have known that these express distinctions of
> aspect rather than of tense for almost as long.
> Now I also know for sure what the aspects are,
> namely:
> 
> * Punctual or instantaneous (_-a-_).
> * Progressive or durative (_-i-_).
> * Habitual (_-u-_).
> 
> I don't know if this is an odd bunch of aspects,
> but I want to be a bit different.  Besides the
> speakers of Kijeb and Sohlob are perhaps not even
> human.
> 
> The Punctual is somehow basic. [...]

I see no problem with this selection of verb aspects.

> Not all verbs can form all three aspects. Verbs
> which intrinsically express states for example can
> only form the Habitual. Prehistorically there were
> several morphemes added as prefixes (in Kijeb
> mostly fused with the root) and suffixes which
> assign Aktionsart, iterativity, inchoativity etc.
> to the verb -- semantics which restrict which
> aspects a verb can form. [...]

Like what is assumed to have been in place in Proto-Indo-European.
PIE apparently had truckloads of aktionsart-deriving suffixes,
and the aspect stems were irregular and a derivational more than
an inflectional category.  Kijeb, however, appears to have regular,
inflectional suffixes for forming the aspect stems.

> [...]
> 
> * There are two tenses, present and non-present,
>    the present being marked by _-r-_ (with
>    allomorphs _-ar-, -ir-, -ur-_) and **the
>    non-present being unmarked**.

Again, like PIE, which had a marked present tense (the "primary
endings" in *-i) and an unmarked non-present tense (the more
basic "secondary endings").

> [interesting stuff on sound changes snup]

On Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:51:02 +0100, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

> Eric Christopherson skrev:
> > On Mar 19, 2009, at 7:03 AM, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> >> Comments, questions, suggestions?
> > 
> > It sounds really cool; I'm looking forward to some examples.
> 
> The snag is that my dictionary is locked up in a
> FileMaker Pro database file which I can't access
> anymore.  Help by anyone to convert it and my
> likewise captive Mærik dictionary into tab files
> would be greatly appreciated!

I can't help you with your databases (is the Noric vocabulary lost
for the same reason?); such problems are one of the reasons why
I prefer keeping my stuff in the simplest format possible.  My
Old Albic vocabulary resides in a plain, hand-coded and well-
formated HTML file, which is unlikely to become unreadable in
the foreseeable future.  Of course, this is somewhat less
comfortable to sort and extract than a proper database, but Linux
comes with those nifty command-line text processing utilities,
with which it isn't all that difficult to extract the info you
want from simple text files.

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