Hallo conlangers!

On Sat, 16 Apr 2011 08:49:04 -0700, J. Burke wrote:

> [quoting me]
> >Hallo conlangers!
> [...]
> >Nice and interesting.  I also have an animate/inanimate distinction
> >in my conlang Old Albic, and there too are some things which are
> >grammatically animate even though they aren't living beings, but I
> >haven't found out much of what they are.  (The whole Old Albic
> >lexicon requires more work yet.)
> 
> According to one account, I believe, PIE (or pre-PIE) had animate/inanimate 
> genders, from which the familiar M/F/N system evolved; among the non-living 
> animate things was natural or wild fire (as opposed to fire under the
> control of people, such as campfires, which were inanimate).  I remember
> being told that by someone, but can't remember who.  It makes a certain
> amount of sense, and would go a long way toward explaining some of the
> frankly baffling genders of various IE words (like French _le vagin_, which
> is masculine, and _la verge_, which is feminine).

Hittite has only two genders, which are sometimes called "common"
and "neuter", sometimes "animate" and "inanimate"; and it is assumed
by *many* Indo-Europeanists that this animate/inanimate system is
older than the three-way system of the other IE languages.  I have
read somewhere that such animate/inanimate gender systems are typical
of active/stative languages, and there is evidence for pre-PIE having
been an active/stative language.  The whole matter is controversial,
though, but that did not stop me from developing Old Albic from that
internally reconstructed ancestor of Proto-Indo-European.

And what regards _le vagin_ and _la verge_, those words originally
just meant (and still mean) 'the sheath' and 'the rod', and it is
merely a funny coincidence that they both have the "wrong" gender.

> In my experience, languages that mark both persons on the verb don't 
> generally require those kinds of processes to develop new inflections.
> New markings can be innovated spontaneously.  Algic-Algonquian is a great 
> example.  At one time, Algic verbs apparently marked subject and object with 
> personal endings alone; then at some point, for unknown reasons,
> speakers largely abandoned the personal endings for independent order (non-
> subbordinate) verbs and began using a new set of personal prefixes (which 
> were pluralized and obviated by suffixes, which were remnants of the old 
> personal endings they'd abandoned); but the old personal endings remained in 
> use for conjunct order (subbordinate) verbs.  In the modern Algonquian 
> languages you can see quite clearly that the conjunct order endings are very 
> old--fused and highly irregular--while the new independent order prefixes 
> are of more recent vintage.  If there ever was a stage where the new 
> prefixes were once independent words that later fused with the verbs, you 
> can't discern it now.

I see.  But the prefixes must have come from *somewhere*, and it
strikes me as weird to assume that they flipped over from one end
of the verb to the other.  They must have been either independent
pronouns, or suffixed to something preceding the verb which got
eroded away.

> >What are the functions of -ł- and -š- in Noyahtowa?  I guess they
> >are connected to animacy, if that is how they are used in Hanoa?tsi.
> 
> They served to mark an intransitive participant as a patient/undergoer, in 
> the context of the active agreement system.  -š- was used in inanimate third 
> person forms, while -ł- was used for all other persons (both ultimately 
> descend from the same element, the pre-Proto-Central Mountain root *-tɛ- 
> 'accidentally'; by various twists and turns, they developed into those 
> different allomorphic forms in different verb paradigms, and when in 
> Noyahtowa the inflectional endings underwent heavy leveling,
> -š- happened to be the form that was present most commonly among the 
> inanimates, while -ł- was the most common form elsewhere; and the allomorphs 
> got carried over into Hanoa?tsi when its pronominal system was reformed,
> as described in my first post).

As I don't know the details of your conlangs, I cannot really say
whether it makes sense or not.

> >This sounds weird to me.  The same element as dual or plural marker,
> >depending on whether it precedes or follows the person marker?  Not
> >impossible, but weird.  Is there a natlang precedent for that?
> 
> Not for marking grammatical number, but it's certainly the case that varying 
> morpheme order can have an effect on meaning or function.  E.g., Algonquian 
> verb suffixes that signal obviation, inanimacy, etc.  The third person 
> suffix is  -wa; the obviation singular suffix -ali is identical to the 
> suffix that marks plurality + inanimacy for third persons; -wali (wa+ali) 
> means 'third plural inanimate', while -aliwa (ali+wa) means 'obviative 
> singular'.  That's one example among many possible.  

But aren't there two different suffixes of the shape -ali involved
here?  I mean, "obviative singular" is not the same meaning as
"inanimate plural".

> In my case, I made the dualizer and pluralizer the same because I wanted to 
> show that the dual number developed from the plural number; I could easily 
> imagine speakers switching the order of person and number to make a semantic 
> distinction, as with the Algonquian example above.

I still find such a switcheroo rather hard to believe.

>       I imagine they could have begun making the additional number 
> distinction to help disambiguate third persons, after the abandonment of the 
> obviative; it wasn't until later that the 4-way gender system developed, 
> which went further in helping distinguish third persons.  (Also, it's far 
> too common (in natlangs and conlangs) for dual markers to descend from roots 
> for 'two' or the like, and I wanted to do something different here.  
> I couldn't think of any other origin for a dual element that would make 
> sense.)

Sure, you wanted to do "something different" here, but this "something
different" feels *very* unnatural to me.

> >I see.  I could imagine *-γ˜ã-ya- and *-γ˜ã-ž˜ẽ- losing the -γ˜ã-
> >element, perhaps due to some sound change; and as the category of
> >clusivity is found only in the first person, no replacement for the
> >lost 1st person element is necessary.  A nice way to arrive at
> >irregular 1st person plurals.
> 
> It's not a sound change; it's just simple omission.  The same is done among 
> non-singular first person pronominal prefixes in Iroquoian, where there are 
> also elements that mean 'inclusive' and 'exclusive' (-te- and -ya- in 
> Mohawk, e.g.; first person singular is k(e)-, while first person plural 
> inclusive is tewa-, instead of ketewa- or tekewa-).  

I don't know the relevant facts here, but it still sounds strange
to me.

Perhaps I am simply too entrenched in Indo-European patterns and know
too little about indigenous languages of North America, but your
diachronics feel quite unnatural to me.  (I also noticed how you did,
in your diachronic developments of Hlohlamelo and Kapakwomak (if I
spelled them correctly) from Proto-Central-Mountain, have the same
few sound changes happen repeatedly, which rubbed me as wrong.
I have also seen your PCM pronouns, which struck me as implausibly
long-winded.)

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