A total redo of my language.

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wakeagainstthefall
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Re: A total redo of my language.

Post by wakeagainstthefall »

I already know how my nouns are gonna work. The endings will change according to case and number, and will have 6 cases, sigular and plural. My "letter" declension will also have a trial number.
Magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri. -Multomixtor

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eldin raigmore
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Re: A total redo of my language.

Post by eldin raigmore »

Kyrie
Gloria
Credo
Sanctus
Benedictus
Agnus Dei
  • Kyrie: Lord, have mercy upon us. Christ, have mercy upon us. Lord, have mercy upon us.
  • Gloria: Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. (That's the lesser doxology, the Gloria Patri. Sometimes the greater doxology, the Gloria in Excelsis Deo, is used instead.)
  • Credo: pretty much any accepted symbol or creed; usually the Nicene or the Roman ("Apostles'") creed.
  • Sanctus: Holy, holy, holy LORD, God of Hosts. Heaven and Earth are full of Your glory. Hosanna in the highest.
  • Benedictus: Blessed is He Who comes in the name of the LORD. Hosanna in the highest.
  • Agnus Dei: O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, grant us Thy peace.
Work on translating these first; especially one of the Creeds.
wakeagainstthefall
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Re: A total redo of my language.

Post by wakeagainstthefall »

I'll get to those, but can you tell me what natlang has adjectives that change according to animate/inanimate and person? I wanted to see an example.
Magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri. -Multomixtor

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eldin raigmore
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Re: A total redo of my language.

Post by eldin raigmore »

wakeagainstthefall wrote:I'll get to those, but can you tell me what natlang has adjectives that change according to animate/inanimate and person? I wanted to see an example.
See http://wals.info/chapter/118.
Predicate adjectives sometimes appear as verbs. In fact if they agree with the gender or number or person with the subject, they're adjudged as verbs by WALS.info writer (Leon Stassen).

Look here, and see these six languages:
Ainu Fijian Malagasy Meithei Tagalog Vietnamese
and these six three languages:
Indonesian Khmer Mandarin

Maybe they'll interest you, or maybe not.

http://wals.info/feature/48A is about person-marking on adpositions (not adjectives).


It's probably pretty rare for an adjective to agree in person with the noun it modifies. It's probably rare for an adjective to modify a first-person or second-person pronoun (or noun?).

If I understand correctly, and remember correctly, someone has claimed that ancient Sumerian did allow person-marking of nouns, so that "king" sounded a bit different depending on whether it meant "I, the king" or "you, the king" or "he, the king".

I don't remember hearing whether adjectives had to concord with their head-nouns in such a language.

In copula clauses, or predicator clauses, where you might say, for example, "I am red" or "you are hot", maybe the adjective in the predicate does agree with the person of the subject.

But it's going to be unusual for an attributive adjective like "red me" or "hot you" to be applied to a first- or second- -person head.

As for agreeing in animacy;
Certain adjectives are unlikely to apply to animate nouns; certain others are unlikely to apply to inanimate nouns. And then there will be some that might apply nearly equally likely to either animates or inanimates.

You'll probably want to look at the 28 languages* that http://wals.info/feature/31A says have a non-sex-based gender system. They wouldn't call it a "gender" system unless some other words were required to agree with a noun's gender; but you'd have to examine the languages individually to find out whether the adjective is one of those agreement-targets.

*Babungo, Chichewa, Chinantec (Lealao), Cree (Plains), Diola-Fogny, Fula (Guinean), Godié, Grebo, Hixkaryana, Ju|'hoan, Kisi, Kongo, Koromfe, Lingala, Luvale, Macushi, Mundari, Nicobarese (Car), Nkore-Kiga, Nyamwezi, Nyiha, Ojibwa (Eastern), Passamaquoddy-Maliseet, Shona, Supyire, Swahili, Wardaman, Zulu.
Last edited by eldin raigmore on 25 Dec 2011 04:30, edited 1 time in total.
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Ilaeriu
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Re: A total redo of my language.

Post by Ilaeriu »

Micamo wrote: Finally, here's an idea I had that you just might be able to use: A special fourth person for a monotheistic diety, expressed in the verbal person marking paradigm. So something like "watch-PROG-4.NOM-2.ACC" -> "God is watching you."
My conlang Aentoui has something along these lines, thanks to a couple of grammatical and cultural rules. It's not exactly a fourth person, but a set of honorific grammatical endings reserved when talking to or about God, called the Sacred level. In this level, you wouldn't address God directly in the second person, but indirectly in the third or by leaving it out all together. You can usually just leave it out because nouns are pretty optional in Aentoui anyway; they're only included if needed, if not it's just taken through inference. And so we can get sentences like:

shau auunlahaesyn
2P.DIRECT PRES.SACRED-watch
"God is watching you."

It's in the Sacred level so we're talking either to or about God. And since the subject of the sentence is "you", and we don't address God directly like that, we're talking about an action that God is doing, which is watching you.

Kind of a roundabout way of doing things, but just wanted to offer another way that this could work. (Yeah, both the honorific levels and the optional-ness of nouns were both shamelessly stolen from Korean. Shoot me.)
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