Yay or Nay? [2011–2018]

[Solarius]

How many other stops are there? If only a few, then Yay.

Excluding it, there is /p b t k/.

[Chagen]

No adverbs, their function expressed with the instrumental case, anyone? That is, "He is running with speed" (Or even "His running has speed") instead of "He's running fast".

[Rainchild]

Hi, Chagen,

No adverbs, their function expressed with the instrumental case, anyone? That is, "He is running with speed" (Or even "His running has speed") instead of "He's running fast".

I think this would work with most adverbs of manner, but what about adverbs of place, time, frequency, and duration?

You may have to expand the number of cases or adpositions that you use in order for your scheme to work across these categories, e.g.

We played outside. = We played at outside the house-locative.
We rode horses sometimes. = We rode horses on sparse occasions-temporal.
We voted daily. = We voted one-adpositional.suffix (meaning "once per) day-temporal.
We will love each other forever. = We will love each other for all time.

So I'm voting "Nay" on your scheme without modifications, but "Yay" on your scheme with modifications.

--Jim G.

[yaSBP]

I'd say yay on the instrumental adverbs, I've done that in one of my conlangs. As for whether or not it could represent time or other abstract concepts as time, frequency, and whatnot as Jim G said, the portrayal of such abstract concepts are arbitrary, so I don't think it matters. I could totally see someone saying "we played with outside" or "the riding of horses has infrequency". In fact, I'd say that's a really intuitive way of thinking about it. Yay all the way.

[Ànradh]

No adverbs, their function expressed with the instrumental case, anyone? That is, "He is running with speed" (Or even "His running has speed") instead of "He's running fast".

I'd also say 'yay'.

Hi, Chagen,

No adverbs, their function expressed with the instrumental case, anyone? That is, "He is running with speed" (Or even "His running has speed") instead of "He's running fast".

I think this would work with most adverbs of manner, but what about adverbs of place, time, frequency, and duration?

You may have to expand the number of cases or adpositions that you use in order for your scheme to work across these categories, e.g.

We played outside. = We played at outside the house-locative.
We rode horses sometimes. = We rode horses on sparse occasions-temporal.
We voted daily. = We voted one-adpositional.suffix (meaning "once per) day-temporal.
We will love each other forever. = We will love each other for all time.

So I'm voting "Nay" on your scheme without modifications, but "Yay" on your scheme with modifications.

--Jim G.

It doesn't matter if a literal English translation makes sense, so long as it makes sense within the language.
"I love you." in Gaelic is "Love is at me, on you." for example.

[Omzinesý]

No adverbs, their function expressed with the instrumental case, anyone? That is, "He is running with speed" (Or even "His running has speed") instead of "He's running fast".

Many Finnish adverbs are originally plural instructives.
Näin, noin, niin 'so', are plural instructives of tämä 'this', tuo 'that' se 'that'.
Yks-i-n 'alone', one-PL-INSTR
Suin päin - 'without considering' - with mouths and heads.
Päin 'toeards' - head:PL:INSTR
hyvin 'well' - with good ones

But nobody nowadays regards them as instumentals, anymore. So, though you adverbs would be instrumentals structurally, are they that really? But, at least etymologically, a good idea, YAY.

[Rainchild]

Lodhas was right to criticize my post. I'm changing my vote to an unqualified "Yay."

--Jim G.

[Solarius]

Should I add clicks to my latest project?

[Rainchild]

Why not?

--Jim G.

[thetha]

Should I add clicks to my latest project?

Absolutely. Clicks are awesome.

[Avo]

So I have this old conlang of mine which is designed to look and sound like something in between Icelandic-Faroese-Scottish Gaelic. However, the vocabulary and the grammar are heavily inspired by Northeast Caucasian languages. I restarted working on it recently.
The proto-language had ejectives, and I have two different ideas what to do with them in this language:
1. Merge all ejectives with their voiced counterparts or 2. keep ejectives distinct, but only in word initial position (a bit like what happened to Proto-Nakh ejectives in Chechen and Ingush).
I don't know, I like both versions.

[Ànradh]

So I have this old conlang of mine which is designed to look and sound like something in between Icelandic-Faroese-Scottish Gaelic. However, the vocabulary and the grammar are heavily inspired by Northeast Caucasian languages. I restarted working on it recently.
The proto-language had ejectives, and I have two different ideas what to do with them in this language:
1. Merge all ejectives with their voiced counterparts or 2. keep ejectives distinct, but only in word initial position (a bit like what happened to Proto-Nakh ejectives in Chechen and Ingush).
I don't know, I like both versions.

I like the sound of 2. best.

[Ànradh]

I decided to steal Gaelic's prepositional pronoun idea, and implement it such that I would have words that translate as "I am at" "you are on" etc. but I had already decided that Iriex would have postpositions, not prepositions, and the word order is SOV, so this leadd to the interesting question of how to form a phrase in which the pronoun is the subject.
The obvious fixes are;
-change the postpositions to prepositions in these circumstances.
-form the sentence as 'pronoun noun postposition', making the inflection more of an agreement and opening up the possibility for pro-drop in this enviroment.

I'm leaning towards the latter but I was wondering if you guys could come up with anything more interesting.

Edit: Clarity fixes.

Nevermind, I've decided.

[smrk]

So I was thinking last night about this phenomenon in Czech where the auxiliary verb marking the second person singular in the past tense gets reduced and stuck on the end of the first word (since the past tense auxiliary always has to go in second place). That means, for instance, that "Co jsi dělal" (What did you do) becomes "Cos dělal", "Věděl jsi to" (You knew it) becomes "Věděls to", etc. I've only seen the auxiliary get reduced when the first word in the sentence is a verb or a pronoun, but it strikes me as not a huge leap to have this happen to ordinary nouns. I was inspired to imagine a language where a similar auxiliary verb had reduced down into a suffix stuck on the end of noun phrases to indicate the person, which along with some sort of morphological change to the verb would mark the past tense.

I basically thought this was the greatest idea I'd ever had and I had to incorporate it into my conlang, which I haven't actually really started yet, just thought about. I'm completely a n00b, though, so I don't trust my judgement just yet. What does everyone think?

[Maximillian]

I decided to steal Gaelic's thing where postpositions inflect for person, so I'd have words that translate as "I am at" "you are on" etc.

It's not exactly like this. Gaelic, as well as Hebrew inflected adpositions agree with object, not subject, so it would be "at me" and "on you" rather than "I am at" and "you are on".

[Ànradh]

It's not exactly like this. Gaelic, as well as Hebrew inflected adpositions agree with object, not subject, so it would be "at me" and "on you" rather than "I am at" and "you are on".

I worded that poorly; I stole the idea of prepositional pronouns from Gaelic but I implemented it (attempted to anyway) in the way I described.

[Maximillian]

I worded that poorly; I stole the idea of prepositional pronouns from Gaelic but I implemented it (attempted to anyway) in the way I described.

Doesn't it then make them verbs?

[Ànradh]

Doesn't it then make them verbs?

Gaelic? Not that I'm aware, but there is no verb for 'have'. To say you possess something, you say that it's at you, using the aforementioned pronoun. In this case, said pronoun would be playing the part of what is a verb in English, but beyond that, no.

In Iriex, that's also a no. I've simply decided that they'll be 'ambipositions', if that's a correct term, making my original problem moot.

[Maximillian]

In Iriex, that's also a no. I've simply decided that they'll be 'ambipositions', if that's a correct term, making my original problem moot.

Why not? How do you say "I am at home", "I was at home" and "I will be at home"?

[Chagen]

My latest lang, Sunago, is very heavily inspired by Japanese.

BUT. I want to make some things different. How about having subject/object markers (like japanese <ga> and <o>), that also encode definiteness? In other words, they act as articles and case markers. I'm also thinking of having the topic-marker do this.

An example:

Ena lo neruti.
[Ena lo neru-ti]
[Child TOPIC.INDEF run-PROG]
"A child is running"

Ena ke neruti.
[child TOPIC-DEF run-PROG]
"The child is running"