Tag Archives: morphology

Some Ideas for Person Marking

A while ago, I posted a short blog article on how I found Ayeri’s 3rd-person marking strange. I was reminded by a commenter that since Swedish uses han and hon for ‘he’ and ‘she’ respectively (and recently also hen as a gender-neutral pronoun), Ayeri’s -ya, -ye, -yo for ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘~it’ isn’t too unnatural. However, this would-be issue didn’t let go of me, and neither did the fact that Ayeri’s topics still bear large similarities to subjects. So if I should ever get around to making a dialect, sister-, daughter- or proto-language for Ayeri, I thought of some changes in grammar to consider.

The following bit is just two sentences of current standard Ayeri:

[gloss]Ang silvyo peljas turayya mavi si sapaya kayvay. Na kacyong pelye men savaley hagin …
AT see-3SG.N horse-PL-P hill-LOC sheep(.T) REL(.A) wool-LOC without. GENT pull-3SG.N.A horse-PL(.T) one wagon-P.INAN heavy …[/gloss]
“A sheep which was without wool saw horses on a hill. One of the horses was pulling a heavy wagon …”

In this example – as usually –, verbs agree in number and gender with the agent of the clause (masculine/feminine/”neuter” animate vs. inanimate); if the agent NP is a non-topic pronoun, verb agreement additionally includes agent case marking. However, if we reduce gender to just animate/inanimate and also eliminate number marking in verb agreement (pronouns get -n, nouns -ye/-j?!), things could look like this:

[gloss]Ang silvya peljas turayya mavi si sapaya kayvay. Na kacyāng pelye men savaley hagin …
AT see-3 horse-PL-P hill-LOC sheep(.T) REL(.A) wool-LOC without. GENT pull-3.A horse-PL(.T) one wagon-P.INAN heavy …[/gloss]

And also, to decrease the subject-likeness of the topic, let’s make verbs not generally agree with the actor (or the patient in impersonal statements where there is no actor), but with the topic of the clause (While we’re at it, we could maybe also introduce syntactic restrictions to relative clauses!):

[gloss]Silvyāng peljas turayya mavi si sapaya kayvay. Kacana yāng pelye men savaley hagin …
See-3.AT horse-PL-P hill-LOC sheep(.T) REL(.T) wool-LOC without. pull-3.GENT 3.A horse-PL(.T) one wagon-P.INAN heavy …[/gloss]
(Or maybe I should keep ang … -ya, na … -ya etc. instead of using the normal, case-marked pronoun versions as clitics?)

In order to avoid having -yāng all over the place (Ayeri prefers actor topics, so its ancestor may have had a NOM/ACC alignment before probably developing a split-S system that resulted in the current, rather idiosyncratic variant of the Philippine alignment), reduce it to -a:

[gloss]Silva peljas … Kacana a pelye men … Naraya peljang …
See-3.AT horse-PL-P … pull-3.GENT 3.A horse-PL(.T) one … Say-3.A horse-PL-A[/gloss]

Just some ideas …

Fractions

I was just wondering about the way Ayeri forms fractions. The Grammar (§ 4.2.2.1) currently says that:

Fractional numerals are formed from men ‘one’ plus the integer divided by.

A table with all the forms for the basic numerals from ja to tam is listed.[1. Cf. an earlier article on numerals on this blog.] It informs furthermore that in order to

give multiples of a fraction, the numerator is used as a modifier of the fraction word, which serves as the head of the phrase:

[gloss]vadisān menkay sam
bread {third [= one.three]} two[/gloss]
‘two thirds of a loaf’

However, how about a competing (e.g. traditional/colloquial vs. mathematical) or regional alternative where the denominator is the genitive form of the respective cardinal number, like this:

  1. [gloss]vadisān kay-ena sam
    bread three-GEN two[/gloss]
    ‘two thirds of a loaf’

Or, to pattern with other case-marked numerals and their special meanings,[1. Cf. an earlier article on ordinals and multiplicative numerals on this blog.] the numeral could also be nominalized first and then case-marked:

  1. [gloss]vadisān kay-an-ena sam
    bread three-NMLZ-GEN two[/gloss]
    ‘two thirds of a loaf’

Although kayanena is strictly speaking a nominal form and thus might be expected to follow ordinals (kayan vadisānena ‘the third bread’, three-NMLZ bread-GEN), it makes sense to use it as a regular numeral anyway – a drop-in replacement for menkay – since noun phrases cannot usually be doubly case-marked in Ayeri:

  1. [gloss]Ang konja vadisānena {kayan-ena [= menkay]} sam.
    AT eat-3SG.M.T bread-GEN third-GEN two[/gloss]
    ‘He ate two thirds of a loaf.’

  2. [gloss]*​Ang konja kayan-ena-ley sam vadisānena.
    AT eat-3SG.M.T third-GEN-P sam vadisānena[/gloss]

“To be, or not to be …”

Quoth Peter Bleackley on Twitter:

See the message on Twitter.

Indeed, besides Peter’s joke (that took me a while to recognize …), it would be interesting to compare how various languages with a zero copula translate Shakespeare’s probably most famous line (yellow marking mine):

To be, or not to be, that is the queſtion
“To be, or not to be, that is the queſtion” (William Shakespeare, Hamlet, III.1 — Shakespeare Quartos Archive, CC-BY-NC; original image cropped and yellow marking added)

Since Ayeri is a language with a zero copula – that is, the copula, “be,” does not have a phonetic realization – I was wondering how to translate this quotation. However, I would rather expect from context that the way “be” is used in English here refers to existence: the verb “be” is used as a full, content verb rather than the copula as a function. That is, the way Hamlet uses “be” does not suggest that he is assigning a quality to the subject, as in “The king is dead,” or “I am suicidal.”

In spite of possessing a zero copula, Ayeri nonetheless has an overt verb for “be” in the meaning of ‘exist’: yoma-. However, what Ayeri still lacks is a proper infinitive – the only non-finite form there is, is the participle, but you can’t usually use this as a nouny standalone thing as in English.[1. I’m not sure if there’s something in the Grammar about this. If the Grammar allows participles to stand on their own, my usage has changed meanwhile.] A possible solution to this problem is to use the noun, yomān ‘existence’. This raises another question, though: how do you negate that, that is, what do you get for ‘inexistence’? Searching the dictionary for nouns in in-/ir-/il-, dis-, un- doesn’t reveal any obviously negated nouns.[1. A possible candidate would be tenyan ‘death’, though, since ‘life’ is ten‘; -ya is one of the allomorphs of -arya (cf. below). Ayeri quite loves -ya as a morpheme!]

Besides verbs, the only other category that can be negated are adjectives, which are rather noun-like in Ayeri. Adjectives may be negated by -oy and -arya (which has a variety of allomorphs), and since the negation of ‘existence’ we need here is categorical rather than transitory, I would choose -arya. This results in yomāryān as a possible negation:

[gloss]yoma- -arya -an
exist -NEG -NMLZ[/gloss]
‘inexistence’

On the other hand, since yomān is already derived from a verb and verbs get negated with -oy, another possible derivation could be yomoyan:[1. With the transitory adjective negation -oy, the outcome would indeed have been the same, so it really doesn’t matter here.]

[gloss]yoma- -oy -an
exist -NEG -NMLZ[/gloss]
‘inexistence’

I think the latter case is more succinct, so I’d translate the famous line from Hamlet as:

Yomān soyang yomoyan – adareng prantānley.
[gloss]Yomān soyang yomoyan – ada-reng prantān-ley
existence or inexistence – that-A.INAN question-P.INAN[/gloss]
‘Existence or inexistence, that is the question.’

Note that in the first half of the sentence, the nouns are not case marked. I chose not to mark them for case since as far as I can tell, they do not fit into the case frame of any verb here, besides the fact that the sentence above does not include any overt verb.

Of course, using less enigmatic language while it still being a bit of a pun, I could also simply translate:

Ten soyang tenyan – adareng prantānley.
[gloss]Ten soyang tenyan …
Life or death …[/gloss]
‘Life or death – that is the question.’

But that would’ve been boring.

  • Shakespeare, William. The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke. London, 1604. [​27.] The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke: An Electronic Edition. The Shakespeare Quartos Archive. Shakespeare Quartos Archive. Mar. 2009. Web. 8 May 2013. ‹http://www.quartos.org›. (The image the presented excerpt is taken from was published under CC-BY-NC; original image cropped and yellow marking added.)
  • David J. Peterson informs that the “[u]sual route is ‘to live or not to live’.” Phrasing it exactly that way doesn’t work in Ayeri either, though.

‘Locational’ Dative and Genitive with Prepositions

In the Grammar (§ 5.4) I mention something I dubbed ‘locational dative/genitive’, where instead of the locative case marker you would use the dative and genitive case marker respectively to indicate simple ‘to’ and ‘from’ – so basically, the dative is coupled with a lative meaning and the genitive with an ablative meaning, respectively:

[gloss]Ang nimp-ye māva-yam yena.
AT run-3SF.T mother-DAT 3SF.GEN[/gloss]
‘She runs to her mother.’

The example with the genitive that is currently in the grammar is not really locational at all, actually, now that I look at it. But anyway, lest I forget, here’s something I came across while translating something for myself today:

[gloss]Yam sarayan ayonang sam manga ling natrang, no natratang.
DATT go-3PM man-A two MOT top temple-T, want pray-3PM.A.
[/gloss]
‘Two men went up to the temple; they wanted to pray.’

In this case, it’s one of those ‘locational’ datives, but extended by a preposition unlike in the example from the Grammar above. Here, the preposition (manga) ling ‘(to the) top of’ does not trigger the locative case as usual, but the dative case. This is because with the locative, the phrase would imply that the two men were going literally to the top of the temple, that is, they end up standing on its roof. This is not the intended meaning, because they are only going up to the temple, that is, the temple is on a hill – Ayeri can’t distinguish ‘up’ from ‘to the top of’ just with the preposition. So, in order to differentiate going up to from going to the top of, the dative and the locative case are used respectively. The same works for ‘come down from X’:

[gloss]saha- manga avan X-na
come MOT bottom X-GEN[/gloss]

as opposed to

[gloss]saha- manga avan X-ya
come MOT bottom X-LOC[/gloss]
‘come to the bottom of X’.

Also, in the same translation challenge to myself, I discovered that it would make sense to allow div- ‘to stay’ to be used as a modal (ish), so that for example you can say diva bengyāng timangya ‘he remained standing at a distance’, as opposed to remaining seated at a distance. Now, what’s the difference between div(a)- ‘stay, remain’ and hang- ‘keep, hold; remain, stay’, though?!

Pronoun worries

By the way, I’ve lately been thinking that animate 3rd person pronouns in Ayeri are terrible from a naturalistic point of view: it’s -ya for masculine, -ye for feminine, -yo for ‘neuter’ (effectively, things considered animate but 1. whose gender is unknown; 2. which don’t overtly display, or don’t possess, sexual dimorphism; 3. also occasionally groups of mixed gender). I think it’s rather untypical for natural languages to exhibit that kind of regular vowel alternation to show changes in the same category?

Plus, animacy actually doesn’t play any important role in Ayeri, that is, there are no syntactic restrictions imposed on inanimate constituents, for example – which doesn’t preclude introducing some in the future, but I wasn’t aware of this for a long time and I am somewhat hesitant to break continuity. But anyway, animacy in Ayeri is mostly just a formal thing that is limited to third-person verbs, noun case suffixes, and pronouns (besides, 8 × 12 distinct personal pronouns – minus a few mergers – are also kind of silly). It could just as well be dropped and nothing would be lost. On the other hand, a certain level of redundancy in signals is actually a good thing if the transmitting channel is impaired. If you’ve ever had a conversation in a loud environment, you know what I mean. But still, meh.

Comments are open, should you have any suggestions or natlang evidence you want to share.