WIP: Kalathi (NP: morphosyntax basics)

[nebula wind phone]

Kala (edit: now Kalathi) is my One True Conlang that I've had on the back burner for years. I'm working on a PDF grammar sketch -- I'll post here as I update it. (Currently: just a short chapter on phonology.)

[Kuchigakatai]

"Kala" is also the name of a conlang our user masako has been working on for nearly 10 years...

See the link at the bottom of this page: https://footballbatsandmore.wordpress.com/kala-grammar/

[mèþru]

I thought that this was masako's project until Ser replied.

[nebula wind phone]

Welp. Guess I'll be changing that?

[missals]

You could just change the English name/spelling of the language instead of changing what it's called in Kala. Like in English it could be Kalese, or - if you have a definite article - you could do what tons of European language did to Arabic words. Say your definite article was "al", the English name of the language could be Alkala. Or you could take in some inflected form of the word, like the accusative or a diminutive or something.

[nebula wind phone]

Definite article's not a bad idea — that would make it Kalee

[mèþru]

I don't see a problem with two conlangs on the same forum with the same name.

[nebula wind phone]

I'm not super attached to the name, though. The grammar's an idea I've been iterating on for a LONG time, but without a ton of worldbuilding behind it. The name I pulled out of a hat when I started this writeup.

[nebula wind phone]

More writeup soon, but skipping ahead a bit, one feature I'm still working out is verb chaining. I want it to be quite common for a single clause to have more than one finite verb in it, and I have in mind at least these three ways of doing that:

1. Verb serialization: This should be pretty productive for a wide range of verbs. The order of verbs is iconic -- events are described in the order in which they happen.

   go handle-OBJ3s put.inside-OBL3s for "go and put it in there"

2. Auxiliary constructions: Like in English, these feature a limited number of auxiliaries, but are fully productive for those auxiliaries. The order of verbs is head-last, which sometimes makes it anti-iconic: in "make hir do it," "make" comes after "do" even though that puts the cause after the effect.

   do-OBJ3s can for "can do it"
   do-OBJ3s make-OBJ3s for "make hir do it"

3. Difrasismo: These aren't a productive construction or family of constructions at all, but a category of poetic idioms in which two verbs or two longer verbal phrases are paired with a traditional non-literal meaning. The order of verbs is idiomatic -- you memorize it for each expression.

   call-OBJ3s sing-OBJ3s for "praise hir"
   go.down make-OBJ3s go.away make-OBJ3s for "kill hir"

The big open question for me right now is what limits to put on verb serialization. For language-specific grammar reasons, I want to limit them to ones where each verb has the same subject. (Object markers and oblique markers are affixes that attach to a single verb; subject markers are clitics that attach to a whole verb sequence; so a sequence with two different subjects would need two clitics, and I don't like that.) I also know I want to avoid the "sit airplane leave Beijing arrive Shanghai travel" kind of verb serialization where each verb gets its own object -- for aesthetic reasons, I want objects to appear outside the verb sequence. So I think that leaves me with a set of rules like this:

1. All verbs in the series have the same subject.
2. Transitive and intransitive verbs can be mixed together in one series -- but all the transitives must have the same object.
3. Similarly, verbs with and without an oblique argument can be mixed together in one series -- but for all the ones with an oblique argument, it must be the same argument.

But that would mean you couldn't say something like kick-OBJ3s fall to mean "kick it over" -- it could only mean "kick it and then fall down." This is a necessary result of those rules, but it annoys me.

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

But that would mean you couldn't say something like kick-OBJ3s fall to mean "kick it over" -- it could only mean "kick it and then fall down." This is a necessary result of those rules, but it annoys me.

Perhaps you could use a causative here, so that "kick it over" would be expressed as "kick it and cause it to fall".

[akam chinjir]

Or you could just make "it" the object of the serial verb "kick fall": "I kick falled it." Seems to me it works. (Maybe it helps that the "it" is the patient of both verbs.)

I recently saw a case (pretty sure somewhere in Shopen, Language Typology and Syntactic Description) where in English you'd say something like "X F-ed and Y G-ed the Z" (or maybe it was "X F-ed the Y and G-ed the Z"). The discussion was about a language in which this became a serial verb construction with "X" as subject, "Y" as direct object, and "Z" as indirect object.

[Frislander]

Can I just comment on the phonology a little bit, if mainly to say how much I like it myself and I think it's really nice. I particularly like some of those assimilations. I would like to see some rules for what happens when/if vowels come into contact; is this how the front-rounded vowels are created? (I do like how these are only found long btw).

[nebula wind phone]

Originally I'd wanted the mixed vowels to come from assimilation, but as I put the morphology together I've ended up with few or no places where it feels right to put two vowels together -- and so basically no assimilation. So in fact mostly now they occur in roots. I'm not 100% thrilled with this.

[Ares Land]

But that would mean you couldn't say something like kick-OBJ3s fall to mean "kick it over" -- it could only mean "kick it and then fall down." This is a necessary result of those rules, but it annoys me.

Unless you decide the language is ergative or active/stative; both verbs have the same patient.

[quinterbeck]

But that would mean you couldn't say something like kick-OBJ3s fall to mean "kick it over" -- it could only mean "kick it and then fall down."

Bear in mind English has alternating pairs of transitive/intransitive verbs for the same action with and without an agent, e.g.:

fell/fall (he fells a tree/the tree falls)
raise/rise (she raises a banner/the sun rises)
lay/lie (they lay me down/I lie down)

You could include pairs like this (or add some morphology to produce them) to get sentences like kick-OBJ3s fell for "kick it over" (that's 'fell' the transitive verb, not 'fell' the past tense of 'fall')

[bbbosborne]

you've likely noticed this by now, but just in case, in section 1.2 of the pdf, both /m/ and /n/ are said to be transcribed as <m>.

But that would mean you couldn't say something like kick-OBJ3s fall to mean "kick it over" -- it could only mean "kick it and then fall down." This is a necessary result of those rules, but it annoys me.

Perhaps you could use a causative here, so that "kick it over" would be expressed as "kick it and cause it to fall".

you could just use fall as a causative, omit kick entirely, and say kick it over as the idiomatic translation.

[So Haleza Grise]

I assume you are creating it in LaTeX? I am a fan of the formatting. Also, the IPA script looks really clear.

[nebula wind phone]

Yup! LaTeX with Stone Sans Phonetic as the IPA font. I'm actually really proud of that last part -- it's a GORGEOUS font, best IPA font ever designed in my opinion, but it's in a weird-ass pre-Unicode encoding, and I had to write a bunch of code to get the right characters at the right codepoints.

[nebula wind phone]

New chapter! Talks about some general points of morphosyntax, including the agreement markers, which are the same on both nouns and verbs.

[mèþru]

Saw your website from the link. I really like the twitter bot.