(Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here [2010-2020]

[Xing]

Sorry, I just made an error in the glosses. It should of course be the ABS in both the antipassive and the regular intransitive.

[Ear of the Sphinx]

English. [ɕ] (if I'm not mistaken) is like that in "shield" and "shard" so it's easy. As far as I know, [ɬ] isn't even in English, or my dialect (RP with a bit of South West) of English.

No English accent that I know of uses [ɕ] for /ʃ/. In fact, speaking of Japanese, using [ʃ] for /ɕ/ in Japanese is common for English speakers and is conspicuously foreign-sounding. Same goes for the reverse, Japanese speakers using [ɕ] for English /ʃ/. This is my experience.

Estelle uses something close to [ɕ] in this song, she has a strong British accent, however.

If my impression is correct, British accents tend to palatalise the postalveolars much more than, say, American accents (which, in turn, sometimes turn them into retroflexes).

[Omzinesý]

Don't (probably a small number of) languages also have (productive) zero-derived antipassives or antipassives that are formed by deleting the object agreement morpheme as well though?

That's an interesting note!
Do you have an example? Does some linguist analyse it as an antipassive?

[MrKrov]

What could condition a differential object marking split besides animacy or definiteness?

[Frislander]

What could condition a differential object marking split besides animacy or definiteness?

In Finnish it's telic vs. atelic actions: "I read the book" v.s. "I was reading a book"

I think success is a possibility: "I kicked the cat" vs. "I kicked at the cat".

[Salmoneus]

What could condition a differential object marking split besides animacy or definiteness?

In Finnish it's telic vs. atelic actions: "I read the book" v.s. "I was reading a book"

I think success is a possibility: "I kicked the cat" vs. "I kicked at the cat".

Yes. More generally, you're looking at differences in the level of transitivity.

According to WP, Hopper and Thompson give 10 characteristics of transitivity:
1. two or more participants
2. action involved
3. telicity
4. punctuality
5. volition
6. affirmation
7. realis mood
8. high potency of agent
9. object is highly affected
10. object is highly individuated

So you may have different object marking if:
a) only one participant (i.e. for reflexives)
b) no action involved (eg. verbs of perception or attitude) or perhaps little action (eg. communicative verbs - English "I punched him" but "I talked TO him")
c) action is not telic
d) action is not punctual (so the equivalent of, say, "I kicked him" vs "I was kicking at him")
e) involuntary actions (so "the car smashed the lamppost (intentionally)" vs "the car smashed into the lamppost (when it crashed)")
f) negations
g) irrealis moods ("I ate it" but "I would eat from it if I could" or "I wonder whether he ate from it")
h) low potency of agent (i.e. low animacy)
i) object is not affected (eg failed actions or non-transformative verbs, like "worship") or only partly affected (eg incomplete actions)
j) object is not individuated (eg a mass noun, or perhaps just an indefinite noun).

[Creyeditor]

What could condition a differential object marking split besides animacy or definiteness?

In Finnish it's telic vs. atelic actions: "I read the book" v.s. "I was reading a book"

I think success is a possibility: "I kicked the cat" vs. "I kicked at the cat".

Yes. More generally, you're looking at differences in the level of transitivity.

According to WP, Hopper and Thompson give 10 characteristics of transitivity:
1. two or more participants
2. action involved
3. telicity
4. punctuality
5. volition
6. affirmation
7. realis mood
8. high potency of agent
9. object is highly affected
10. object is highly individuated

So you may have different object marking if:
a) only one participant (i.e. for reflexives)
b) no action involved (eg. verbs of perception or attitude) or perhaps little action (eg. communicative verbs - English "I punched him" but "I talked TO him")
c) action is not telic
d) action is not punctual (so the equivalent of, say, "I kicked him" vs "I was kicking at him")
e) involuntary actions (so "the car smashed the lamppost (intentionally)" vs "the car smashed into the lamppost (when it crashed)")
f) negations
g) irrealis moods ("I ate it" but "I would eat from it if I could" or "I wonder whether he ate from it")
h) low potency of agent (i.e. low animacy)
i) object is not affected (eg failed actions or non-transformative verbs, like "worship") or only partly affected (eg incomplete actions)
j) object is not individuated (eg a mass noun, or perhaps just an indefinite noun).

It would be so cool, to have hundreds of different object markers for different combinations of these

[LinguoFranco]

So are tenseless strictly necessary for languages?

Mine is agglutinative, but Idk if I want tenses. Are there any examples of natlangs like this?

Also, if I include tenses, I will have present, recent past, and remote past, but it seems like a lot of languages lack a future tense and are rather past and non-past. Why is this?

[Salmoneus]

To the first question: all languages have ways of indicating position in time, but lots of them do not have morphosyntactic tenses. Malay, for instance, is one of the ten most spoken languages on the planet, and does not have tense.


To the second question, I can think of two answers, one practical and one philosophical (or, pragmatic and semantic if you prefer):

- the true present is very rarely useful. It makes sense, therefore, to combine it with either past or future. From a pragmatic point of view, the past/nonpast distinction is more important than the future/nonfuture one, because past/nonpast defines whether things can be altered or influenced - what is past is done, but what is ongoing or in the future can be changed. So past/nonpast systems are likely to be more common.

- the future, meanwhile, isn't really a tense at all. Or it is, but only as a cheat, a way to talk about something important within a tense-prominent system. Semantically, however, we can't really talk in the indicative about the future, because there's no fact of the matter about what will or won't happen in the future - it's all hypothesis, preference, conditionals, fears, promises, etc, not set in stone (or maybe it is, according to some physicists, but the point is that it may as well not be from the point of view of human observers, as it is unknowable). Therefore there will always be a tendency to blur the line between the 'future tense' and various irrealis moods. So English's periphrastic 'future tense', for instance, derives from and probably is still better conceived of as a series of modal expressions.

[LinguoFranco]

To the first question: all languages have ways of indicating position in time, but lots of them do not have morphosyntactic tenses. Malay, for instance, is one of the ten most spoken languages on the planet, and does not have tense.


To the second question, I can think of two answers, one practical and one philosophical (or, pragmatic and semantic if you prefer):

- the true present is very rarely useful. It makes sense, therefore, to combine it with either past or future. From a pragmatic point of view, the past/nonpast distinction is more important than the future/nonfuture one, because past/nonpast defines whether things can be altered or influenced - what is past is done, but what is ongoing or in the future can be changed. So past/nonpast systems are likely to be more common.

- the future, meanwhile, isn't really a tense at all. Or it is, but only as a cheat, a way to talk about something important within a tense-prominent system. Semantically, however, we can't really talk in the indicative about the future, because there's no fact of the matter about what will or won't happen in the future - it's all hypothesis, preference, conditionals, fears, promises, etc, not set in stone (or maybe it is, according to some physicists, but the point is that it may as well not be from the point of view of human observers, as it is unknowable). Therefore there will always be a tendency to blur the line between the 'future tense' and various irrealis moods. So English's periphrastic 'future tense', for instance, derives from and probably is still better conceived of as a series of modal expressions.

I see. That makes sense.

I figured it had to with the future being less certain, which isn't far from your response.

Originally, I had three tenses (past, present, and future) and past and future were divided between between "recent" and "distant. It seems to make more sense to divide up the past tense like that, but not the future due to the uncertainty of the future and most references of the future would more likely be recent since it is more relevant to everyday life and the closer it the future is, the higher the certainty.

Idk if I'm making any sense.

[Keenir]

So are tenseless strictly necessary for languages?

Mine is agglutinative, but Idk if I want tenses. Are there any examples of natlangs like this?

there are plenty of tenseless languages; but I don't know if many of them are also agglutinative. that would be cool, though.

Also, if I include tenses, I will have present, recent past, and remote past, but it seems like a lot of languages lack a future tense and are rather past and non-past. Why is this?

because they cheat, and talk about the future either by referring to it, or with non-tense features of the language. ("why yes, we would be happy to walk your dog.")

[loglorn]

I've checked WALS and approximately 12% of the languages who had values for all the features in question were purely agglutinative and tenseless. This may or may not be accurate because i'm not sure how well WALS "exclusively concatenative" value relates to what we mean by agglutinative.

For the record, i used features 20A, 66A and 67A for that.

[clawgrip]

Past and present are known and verifiable, while the future can never be known with certainty*. Therefore, the future is often not differentiated using the same means as is used to distinguish past and present. Since present actions are often in progress and thus are continuing into the future, the present tense is often a natural choice for marking the future as well, giving us a nonpast tense. This tense may be further augmented by modals that indicate the degree of certainty, method of inference, etc.

*Vitalstatistix himself has only one fear: he is afraid the sky will fall on his head tomorrow. But as he says, "tomorrow never comes."

[LinguoFranco]

Any tips on making an isolating/analytical language grammatically interesting?

I think isolating languages are ideal as an auxlang or lingua Franca but I find them boring to create.

[k1234567890y]

Any tips on making an isolating/analytical language grammatically interesting?

I think isolating languages are ideal as an auxlang or lingua Franca but I find them boring to create.

you can simply get rid of adpositions and conjunctions and use the combination of verbs and nouns instead.

Case endings are likely to be from adpositions, and adpositions are likely to be eventually from nouns and verbs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_verb_construction < consider to use this (:

you can consider to use verbs like "be.located" to replace "at", "go" or "give" to replace "to", "be.located the root belonging.to" to replace "from" etc., and phrases like "be.located the back belonging.to that" to replace "after(conjugation)". "be.located the back belonging.to" to replace "after(adposition)", "be.at the time" to replace "when(as a conjugation)", etc. and you can use an adjective meaning "some" or "many" as a plural marker.

[LinguoFranco]

Any tips on making an isolating/analytical language grammatically interesting?

I think isolating languages are ideal as an auxlang or lingua Franca but I find them boring to create.

you can simply get rid of adpositions and conjunctions and use the combination of verbs and nouns instead.

Case endings are likely to be from adpositions, and adpositions are likely to be eventually from nouns and verbs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_verb_construction < consider to use this (:

you can consider to use phrases like "be.at the back belonging.to that" to replace "after", "be.at the time" to replace "when(as a conjugation)", etc. and you can use an adjective meaning "some" or "many" as a plural marker.

Thanks!

I want to use cases, but idk if that counts as inflection. I know isolating languages can have a little bit of inflection, but I want a purely isolating conlang.

I've also considered using a pitch accent like what Japanese has instead of a fully tonal system like Mandarin.

[k1234567890y]

Thanks!

I want to use cases, but idk if that counts as inflection. I know isolating languages can have a little bit of inflection, but I want a purely isolating conlang.

I've also considered using a pitch accent like what Japanese has instead of a fully tonal system like Mandarin.

(:

case endings are inflections unless you use adpositions instead, adpositions are independent words that can function the same.

there are languages like Hebrew that use adpositions to mark direct objects(in case of Hebrew, it is only used on definite direct objects, proper nouns and pronouns though)

and your idea that uses tones to indicate inflections can work, there are few languages using solely tones to mark grammatical informations: http://wals.info/chapter/20

[LinguoFranco]

Thanks!

I want to use cases, but idk if that counts as inflection. I know isolating languages can have a little bit of inflection, but I want a purely isolating conlang.

I've also considered using a pitch accent like what Japanese has instead of a fully tonal system like Mandarin.

(:

case endings are inflections unless you use adpositions instead, adpositions are independent words that can function the same.

there are languages like Hebrew that use adpositions to mark direct objects(in case of Hebrew, it is only used on definite direct objects, proper nouns and pronouns though)

and your idea that uses tones to indicate inflections can work, there are few languages using solely tones to mark grammatical informations: http://wals.info/chapter/20

I did something like that with one of my older conlangs where a pitch accent was used to mark a noun's gender and a verb's tense.

[k1234567890y]

I did something like that with one of my older conlangs where a pitch accent was used to mark a noun's gender and a verb's tense.

sounds nice (:

also, if you feel isolatings are not interesting, you can do more works on the semantics and the phonology like trying some interesting compounds(compound word exist in most languages, I think). (:

speaking of compound words, I have read in a paper about compounding which mentions that in the Turkana language, almost every compound word is exocentric, maybe Turkana people think endocentric compounds are not needed, as one can always replace them with the combination of noun+modifiers, verb+modifiers, etc.

[LinguoFranco]

Okay, so I want to add a nominal tense to my conlang.

A nominal tense is an affix (maybe a particle could be, too) that is attached to a noun to make it past or future tense. Guarani does this by adding a suffix -kue or rã (IIRC) to make ex- president and president-elect. Other than that, I believe Guarani is a tenseless language.

Nãmãsan, my conlang, already has a past tense and a non-past tense for verbs. I really like what Guarani does, but I don't know if it is pointless to add nominal tense.

Also, could I have a future nominal tense when verb tenses are past and non-past?