Akangka wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2019 9:33 amI'm furious about the fact the Austronesian Trigger System exists, while the simpler Conlang Trigger System doesn't. It's even diachronically simpler:
Initially, the word order is
V nom S acc O pp N
Later, one of the preposition is fused with the verb. That noun is then focused and put on the front:
S V-nom acc O pp N
O V-acc nom S pp N
It doesn't even requires any reanalysis, compared with the Austronesian Trigger System.
Hah! That's beautiful, yes.
Do you, or anyone else, know about current speculation or theories of how the Austronesian Trigger System came into being? I mean, I look at it, and my first suspicion is that historically it might have involved a reinterpretation of nouns (in a nominalized construction) as predicate verbs.
The real Austronesian alignment is basically:
V-agt gen O trig S pp N
V-pat gen S trig O pp N
V-obl gen S gen O trig N
(other constituent orders are available, naturally)
This reminds me a lot of the use of the genitive case in Arabic and possessive
de in Spanish, which can also mark either the subject or the object of a deverbal noun. Meanwhile, the trigger particle clarifies what the subject of the verb is, which reminds me a lot of the Indo-European cleft construction (it was Akangka who bought the book) as well as its sister the headless relative clause identified as an argument of a copula (the one who bought the book was Akangka; Akangka was the one who bought the book).
Could it be that Austronesian verbs were actually ancient verbal participles, that the Austronesian "indirect-genitive" particles were originally just genitive markers, and that the trigger particle was a copula?
I can imagine a process where, say, pseudo-Late-Latin gets reinterpreted in such a way:
emptor de libro est acanca
buy.AGT.PARTIC of book is Akangka -> buy-AGT GEN book TRIG akangka
'The buyer of the book is Akangka.' -> 'Akangka bought the book.'
emptum de acanca est libro
buy.PAT.PARTIC of akangka is book -> buy-PAT GEN akangka TRIG book
'The thing bought by Akangka is the book.' -> 'Akangka bought the book.'
I haven't read any of the relevant literature, but I imagine this is probably one of the hypothesis thrown around, since it's low-hanging fruit. What others are there?