As I wrote in the post on Kijeb verb inflection:

there is an enclitic marker -ya which is attached to a non-animate agent NP of a higher- ranking patient (expressed or unexpressed) or to an animate patient NP of a a lower-ranking animate agent (which also may be unexpressed) — i.e. it is a kind of inversion marker attached to NPs. The distributional pattern arises because it is attached to the ‘most inverted participant’ and it can only be assigned once. In practice this means that since inanimates cannot be grammatical subjects but are inflected in the instrumental case -r there arises a virtual ‘ergative ending’ -rya used when the agent is inanimate and ranking lower than the patient, and a virtual ‘accusative ending’ -ya which is used on animate patients when the agent is also animate and ranking lower than the patient. Not surprisingly this is restructured into a split ergative case marking system in the later Sohlob languages, so that they have

• an unmarked absolutive-nominative used for all patients of inanimate agents, for inanimate patients of animate agents and for animate agents.

• an ergative marked by -Vl (where /l/ is the regular reflex of the [ʎ] /rʲ/ //rj// of the Kijeb -r-ya) used for inanimate agents.

• an accusative marked by -Vy used for animate patients of animate agents.

The external history of these endings is rather funny. The -l derives from the pleonastic ending -all of “all-språket”, the Swedish version of Pig Latin. In my first naming playlanglang which I created when I was eleven or twelve years old, and which derived a lot of words from Swedish, German and English words by way of all-språket -al became a ‘noun marker’. It was not long before I learnt of the English version, Pig Latin, from my grandmother and took up the ending -ei which became the ending for ‘things’ — because it ‘rimed’ with grej, Swedish for ‘thingie’ — while -al remained the ending for ‘people’. Thus I introduced an animacy distinction without really knowing what I was doing! When I had got a bit better understanding of Swedish grammatical terminology the ‘thing’ category got renamed neutrum and the ‘people’ category got renamed ‘utrum’. Next when I started to learn Latin -al became the masculine nominative ending while -ei became the ending for the accusative masculine and both cases in the neuter, much like -us and -um in the Latin second declension. By then there also had entered a genitive ending -ar (from Swedish har ‘has’!) and a distinct feminine with endings identical to the masculine, except that the vowel in each case was -i- (-il, -i, -ir — German sie and ihr had everything to do with it! :-) The plural BTW had the endings m. -an, -en, -ern, f. -in, -in, -irn while the neuter had no distinct plural like the majority of Swedish neuters. There were locatives, allatives and ablatives also, basically formed by adding -s to the nominative, accusative and genitive respectively, but subject to some Swedish-like sandhi which got expressed in the spelling:

The sh was because Swedish /rs/ is realized [ʂ] and ch was because in the Bohuslän dialect /ls/ could also be [ʂ] and I thought [lʂ] when I said it sounded like [ɕ] — I had unwittingly produced an [ɬ]!

To make a long story short I resurrected -al as an ergative ending when I started Sohlob some fifteen years later, and when I decided that Sohlob /l/ was from Kijeb /rj/ the instrumental -r sort of created itself. I was however long reluctant to resurrect -ei by using -ya as the accusative marker in Kijeb, until I found a plausible explanation for how the same element could create the accusative when added to the absolutive and the ergative when added to the instrumental. I think however that an involvement with inverse marking constitutes a plausible explanation.

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That lekatan can mean both ‘that which is spoken’ and ‘the one spoken to’ is OTOH a real ambiguity in Mærik grammar. It can however be disambiguated by using a full relative clause for the former meaning, if context doesn’t make things sufficiently clear. BTW Mærik is like English in that -rt, properly the active participle suffix can be attached to a noun or adjective to get a new noun or adjective meaning ‘someone who works with/keeps/makes etc. X’ as quikert ‘goater/goat-herd’ jwart /’ju:art/ ‘shoemaker’, amnort ‘belittler’ made from the words for ‘goat, shoe, little’. At the same time the passive participle ending -t is also a general ending for deriving adjectives from nouns, so amn is ’ a little fellow, a halfling’, while amnot is both the adjectives ‘small’ and ‘belittled’, the latter meaning normally being disambiguated by the addition of a suitable noun, pronoun or name in the instrumental, e.g. amnot Thormodh(o)gh ‘belittled by Thormod’, amnot roogh ‘belittled by him’. The fly in the ointment is that here is no verb *amno; there is a verb klæghia ‘make small(er)’ and an adjective grøt ‘small’, but ‘belittle’ is tera amnot, literally ‘make belittled’.

It is still an open question if the people referred to as amnon ‘the little fellows’, probably the Mærik speakers, were actually physically smaller than verghen ‘the big fellows’ or if it somehow has a meaning ‘the belittled ones, the belittled people’. It seems pretty clear that they were an original people pushed aside and enslaved by the verghen. Other terms for them are døirt ‘the plowers’ for verghen and (the more common) tortullun ‘the mattockers’ for amnon. Amn clearly had negative connotations which tortull hadn’t. (BTW -ull is another ending for deriving ‘man associated with X’ nouns. The difference is that -ull makes predictions about the gender of the person which -rt doesn’t. The ‘feminines’ corresponding to -ull words are compounds with wan ‘woman’ and men(n) ‘girl’, e.g. tortwan ‘hacker-woman’.)

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Many aspects (sic!) of the following wholly or partly obsoletize things said on the Kijeb page on FrathWiki.

The order of the markers (slots) are as follows:

Root-aspect-(inverse)-(mood)-(tense)-(person)-(person)

Items in parentheses may be absent/zero-marked. Intransitive verbs have only one person marker while a transitive verb has two, but one or both of them may be zero-marked or haplologized. When there are two person markers their relative order is determined by the animacy hierarchy as follows

^
|
| First person
| Second person
| Third person animate (singular)
      | proximal
      | medial
      | distal
| (Third person animate plural)
      | proximal
      | medial
      | distal
| Third person inanimate (singular)
      | proximal
      | medial
      | distal
| (Third person inanimate plural)
      | proximal
      | medial
      | distal
|
v

so that markers for persons higher in the list always precede markers for persons lower in the list. Which one is agent and patient is signalled by the presence of the inverse marker if the lower person is agent.

There is no Algonkian-style obviative marking if both arguments are 3rd person animate, but there is a system of free pronouns marked for increasing remoteness from the speaker.

I call them “proximal — medial — distal” and translate them somewhat loosely as ‘this — that — yon’ (in German ‘der hier — der da — jener’. In practice these can be used to serve obviation in that they rank differently, as amended in the list above. They can also be used as a kind of ‘articles’ but what’s more any new referent is automatically assigned a place in the proximal— medial—distal hierarchy’ so that an Algonkian obviate will normally correspond to a Kijeb distal in relation to a medial corresponding to a non- obviate or sometimes a Kijeb medial or distal in relation to a proximal corresponding to a non- obviate.

Moreover there is an enclitic marker -ya which is attached to a non-animate agent NP of a higher- ranking patient (expressed or unexpressed) or to an animate patient NP of a a lower-ranking animate agent (which also may be unexpressed) — i.e. it is a kind of inversion marker attached to NPs. The distributional pattern arises because it is attached to the ‘most inverted participant’ and it can only be assigned once. In practice this means that since inanimates cannot be grammatical subjects but are inflected in the instrumental case -r there arises a virtual ‘ergative ending’ -rya used when the agent is inanimate and ranking lower than the patient, and a virtual ‘accusative ending’ -ya which is used on animate patients when the agent is also animate and ranking lower than the patient. Not surprisingly this is restructured into a split ergative case marking system in the later Sohlob languages, so that they have

• an unmarked absolutive-nominative used for all patients of inanimate agents, for inanimate patients of animate agents and for animate agents.

• an ergative marked by -Vl (where /l/ is the regular reflex of the [ʎ] /rʲ/ //rj// of the Kijeb -r-ya) used for inanimate agents.

• an accusative marked by -Vy used for animate patients of animate agents.

I’ve also finally determined that the word order is verb initial. The order of other constituents is pretty free, since inverse marking on the verb and distance marking on free pronouns generally take care or sorting out agent-patient relations. Quite possibly the slot after the verb is taken up by the topic!

The verb-first rule is probably absolute. The other constituents may follow in any order except that the topic comes in the second place — which incidentally helps alleviating the lack of overt obviation marking, since the topic will normally be the non-obviate!

I have long known that there are three different verb stems, each formed by adding one of the three vowels -a- -i- -u- to the root (in Sohlob these give rise to alternations in the root vowel), and I have known that these express distinctions of aspect rather than of tense for almost as long. Now I also know for sure what the aspects are, namely:

• Punctual or instantaneous (-a-).
• Progressive or durative (-i-).
• Habitual (-u-).

I don’t know if this is an odd bunch of aspects, but I want to be a bit different. Besides the speakers of Kijeb and Sohlob are perhaps not even human.

The Punctual is somehow basic. For example the imperative coincides with the Punctual stem and there is no such thing as a Progressive or Habitual imperative. It us likely that the -i- and -u- aspect morphemes go back to some -CV- form where the C was some palatalized consonant for the Progressive marker and some labial or labiovelar consonant for the Habitual marker. Prehistorically Kijeb verbs are marked by concentration of stress on the root syllable and loss of vowels in other syllables, with subsequent sandhi effects on the resulting consonant clusters, turning strings of tense, mood and person markers into portamanteau morphs and/or morphemes consisting only of consonants and with several combinatory allomorphs. The above-mentioned -CV- aspect markers would first have fused with the stem-final -a- into diphthongs -ai-, -au-, which then even later were monophthongized to -i-, -u-, the forms seen in Kijeb. The net result is that for any Kijeb verb the aspect marker is a fused part of the stem.

Not all verbs can form all three aspects. Verbs which intrinsically express states for example can only form the Habitual. Prehistorically there were several morphemes added as prefixes (in Kijeb mostly fused with the root) and suffixes which assign Aktionsart, iterativity, inchoativity etc. to the verb — semantics which restrict which aspects a verb can form. For example iteratives cannot be Punctual and inchoatives can only be Progressive. Sometimes different aspects encode meanings which are lexicalized as different verbs in European languages, such as Punctual ‘step’ and Progressive ‘walk’.

In pre-Kijeb these were a regular system of prefixes and suffixes for Aktionsart, but the regular loss of unstressed vowels in verb forms and subsequent sandhi effects make the processes seem almost suppletive in Kijeb. Consider what happens to the cusative prefix *p- when it ‘fuses’ with different root-initial consonants by following the p row in the Kijeb sandhi table at FrathWiki

(Initial mb and ñgw aren’t possible, so they become m, ñw!)

I now think that the punctual aspect is actually zero-marked, while the habitual and progressive in pre-Kijeb were marked by -CV- syllables where the C was some voiced palatalized consonant for the durative and some voiced labial for the habitual, becoming *-yV- and *-wV- in the first phase of vowel quashing and -i- and -u- in the second phase. The punctual -a- may have been exapted back from forms where the present marker became -ar-. The imperative probably was special because it was normally a full utterance in itself and thus escaped vowel-quashing. In any case the reduction of the number of possible person markings was as much a matter of restructuring as of sound change.

As said above inverse, mood’ tense and person markers (in that order) are partly fused with each other, so that not all the underlying morphemes are overtly present in all forms. Here there are two important differences to what is currently stated on the FrathWiki page:

• There are two tenses, present and non-present, the present being marked by -r- (with allomorphs -ar-, -ir-, -ur-) and the non-present being unmarked.
• There can be formed both present and non-present irrealis forms. NB that the non-present irrealis would be appropriate to translate both a past subjunctive and a future indicative. The irrealis has, especially with the present, has a strong tone of evidentiality, the irrealis being used for hearsay, assumptions, reported information, reservation etc. Conversely the present realis has a rather strong tone of assertion.

There are three modes: indicative, imperative and irrealis. The imperative is ‘marked’ by the absence of TAM markers and the irrealis by a morpheme. All imperative and some irrealis forms coincide with some other forms in the conjugation. The indicative mood is unmarked.

The person markers are prehistorically derived from the same pronominal roots which are used as possessive suffixes as per the FrathWiki page

but were heavily transformed by automatic phonological processes which affected the long final string of consonants resulting from the draconic loss of unstressed vowels in pre-Kijeb (actually the old version of Kijeb) verb forms.

1. first loss of unstressed vowels
2. {mm, nn, ŋŋ, rr} > {mb, nd, ŋg, dr}
3. second loss of vowels (originally secondary stressed)
4. the whole C(C…) string was devoiced
5. only coronals allowed as wordfinal consonants and clusters: velars became coronals and labials were lost except m > n.
6. tt > tst
7. {n, r, s} > {n̩, r̩, s̩} / C_C (including tst > ts̩t!)
8. haplology
9. tst > st / {V, n̩, r̩, s̩}_ (i.e. when /s/ was not [s̩])
   1. {n̩, r̩, s̩} > {an, Vr, is}

All this leads to surface forms which can be pretty ambiguous, with a good deal of isomorphy, but in spite of this the language tries hard to remain a pro-drop language. If however free pronouns are present the verb still takes the person endings, in spite of their originally being cliticized pronouns.

The funny thing is that I had made up all the phonological rules and their internal order beforehand. The only innovation was the concentration of stress on the verb root with subsequent loss of vowels and voilà a dull agglutinative string of enclitic morphemes was turned into something interesting!

The syllabicization of -n-, -r-, -s-, later resolving into a -VC- sequence, when stranded between two consonants, is somewhat more complicated than the above table suggests: -n- always becomes -an and -s- always becomes -is- and the inanimate person marker -r- always becomes -ur but the present tense marker -r- variably becomes -ar-, -ir-, -ur- depending on the (original) features of surrounding sounds — evidently a syllabic /r̩/ could be palatalized /rʲ̩/ or labialized /rʷ̩/ in addition to plain. The changes that applied were in order:

• The irrealis marker has several allophones -t-, -s-, -tis- of which -s- coincides with the inverse marker, which comes in the slot before the irrealis marker, and the person marker mentioned immediately below has identical allophones, so that a surface form may be ambiguous..
• The first person singular, the first person plural exclusive and the second person plural are marked by identical forms -t-, -s-, -tis- which also coincide with the forms of the irrealis marker.
• The secend person singular and the first person plural inclusive are both marked by zero.

• Third person markers distinguish between singular and plural and between animate and inanimate but not between the different animate sub-genders masculine, feminine, rational and irrational. The markers are as follows:

  • Animate singular: -n.
  • Animate plural: -nt, -ns-, -st-.
  • Inanimate singular: -ur.
  • Inanimate plural: -tur.

• When agent and patient belong to the same gender and both are third person singular a single ending corresponding to the plural of the appropriate gender and person is used.

• When both agent and patient are the same gender and both are third person plural only a singel plural ending of the appropriate gender is used.
• There is a reflexive marker, the same for all numbers and genders, which is also -n, but is distinguished by always coming in the second person marker slot while the animate singular marker always comes in the first person marker slot. When a third person animate singular agent acts on itself only a single -n appears on the surface.

These last three phenomena are what somewhat inaccurately is referred to as *haplologization*. It goes back to the fact that the third person plural forms are historically reduplications of the singular forms, so that e.g. *-na-na > *-nna > *-nda > *-nd > -nt and *-ru-ru > *-rru > *-dru > *-drʷ > *-trʷ > -tur. The list of “third persen enclitic pronouns” — now actually possessive suffixes — makes this clear.

All this leads to surface forms which can be pretty ambiguous, but in spite of this the language tries hard to remain a pro-drop language. If however free pronouns are present the verb still takes the person endings, in spite of their originally being cliticized pronouns.

BTW I’ve decided to change the sandhi rules somewhat: *pp and *kk now give f and x.

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I’m ATM in woes WRT the Rhodrese indefinite article. I feel that the changes I’ve made to the feminine indefinite and plural definite forms call for a change in the plural indefinite as well. Consider the following patterns:

	masc. sing.		fem. sing.		plur.
	_#C	_#V	_#C	_#V	_#C	_#V
def.	el	el	la	l’	li	gl’
indef.	un	un	na	n’	eun	eun

OR

	masc. sing.		fem. sing.		plur.
	_#C	_#V	_#C	_#V	_#C	_#V
def.	el	el	la	l’	li	gl’
indef.	un	un	na	n’	ni	gn’

Is the latter preferable or am I over-regularizing?

NB eun would still mean ‘some, a few’, while aocú means ‘some, any’ and naocú means ‘not any, none’.

My gut feeling for Rhodese is that the first alternative is more like it. It has that nice vowel change. And the system should not be made too regular I think.

That’s exacly what one part of me is saying, but I’m not qute sure that the language doesn’t want otherwise…

Note that my answer disregards any aspect but aesthetics, because I basically have no idea how the modern words are derived exactly and why you would think you’re overgeneralising in the second alternative.

The basic idea is that since the forms of ille which ended in a long vowel developed forms stressed on the ending, why could not the forms of unus do the same? There are essentially two objections:

1. unus probably became an indefinite article much later than ille became a definite article, and so should not develop in parallel with it.
2. ūnus had a long vowel in the first syllable, which would be a stress attractor.

Contra objection 1. can be said that the field should be rife for analogies with the definite article.

Contra objection 2. can be said that ille also began with a heavy syllable, due to the double ll.

In fact I suspect that one factor which made the ending-stressed forms of ille arise in the first place may have been the way assignment of secondary stress affected them once they became proclitic. Recall that secondary stress in Latin apparently tended to fall on every second syllable before the main stress:

ˌin-cre-ˈdi-bi-lis

apparently a first syllable immediately before the stressed syllable received a secondary stress even though no unstressed syllable intervened:

ˌcre-ˈdi-bi-lis

but I think that a first syllable of a word with three syllables before the stressed syllable (which was uncommon in Latin) did not, or at least did not always receive secondary stress, or attract it from the following syllable:

pe-ˌrin-cre-ˈdi-bi-lis

At least that seems to be the pattern which seems to apply in modern Italian.

Now consider what would happen when the disyllabic forms of ille were procliticized to words stressed on the first and second syllable respectively:

ˌil-la-ˈta-bu-la

but

il-ˌla-ta-ˈber-na

The nominative singular masculine apparently got special treatment. The short unstressed final ĕ must have been prone to disappear for its own reasons as part of the cliticization process; probably it was already [ə] already and could not receive contextual stress. Whatever the particular reason we get

ˌil-ca-ˈbal-lus

as well as

ˌil-ˈpa-tre

(NB French le cheval, le père are from the accusative with illum — it was still lo in Old French.)

Now what I think happened nect was that the unstressed initial vowel in il-ˌla-ta-ˈber-na fell off, giving ˌla-ta-ˈber-na, and the thus arisen allomorph la was later generalized to all cases. Actually I think the burden of proof rests on those who would claim that forms of ille received stress on the endings in some other way!

Finally even if the ‘articulization’ of unus was later it shared two important features with ille: it was disyllabic and it began with a vowel, which in Vulgar Latin was just as short as i in ille in proclitic position. To be sure unus caballus would not regularly become un caballus but rather *nus caballus according to my theory above, but unus pater would become un(u)s pater and in the accusative unu patre with stress on un and pa, and analogy with the definite article could take care of the rest.

Note that I really miss the u in some of the indefinite articles. For me, u is the essence of that article, not n, but of course, that’s pure aesthetics again. :-) Maybe that’s why I like eun more than ni. (Terkunan has nus with an u…)

To me the essence of the Romance definite article is l, yet look at Portuguese and the Italian masculine plural! :-)

There would be some factors in Rhodrese which could tip the scales towards the n-based forms: the regular Old Rhodrese reflex of *uni before a pause or a fricative would be *eu, but that would be homophonous with habes ‘thou hast’, which probably would favor forms with preserved n — though that may just as well be eun, so that’s another matter. However there is one possibility which I imagine could have happened in some Romance natlang somewhere, though I never heard of it, namely that ūnus got reanalysed as ŭnnus on analogy with ille — that would both explain Rhodrese stressed forms with -n and encourage total analogy with ĭlle as per above. I guess compound forms like quisque-cata-unus and aliqui-unus could might be exempt from this and keep single *-n which would then be lost before a pause or a fricative as usual in Rhodrese¹.

I need to sort out the possible rôle of pronominal eun. Your overview of Spanish indefinite pronouns will be most helpful! Now if I could only find that French grammar…

BTW the name of the language is Rhodrese with a dr in the middle — it derives from Rhódanus Rhuodre ‘Rhône’ and has nothing to do with Rhodes Rhodus Rhuod, although the names end up similar. I used to have a list of other words with d’n > dr somewhere. Primary dr of course becomes rr, as does nr.

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This also offers a clue to the demise of distinct feminine forms, for surely the feminine plural article was originally le but became homophonous with the masculine li. The abolition of le was surely one of Bernual’s reforms.

However this rises the question whether the plural indefinite article should be ni with an old feminine ne, and a prevocalic gn’ I think it’s possible unless neque becomes [nɪ], and I think it becomes nec! ‘Not’ also most likely does not become ne [nɪ] but no [nʊ], with ‘no’ being nó [no] or even nau.

The form eun can live on with the meaning ‘some’, with n’eu(n) meaning ‘not any’ as in Tu tin eun menit? — Nó jo no tien n’eu. “Have you got some coins? — No I haven’t got any”. Of course there will also be aocú — aocune — eochéu for ‘some’ in the sense where it can’t be replaced by ‘any’: Txi daift estre aocun’ explanaçáu!

/BP 8^)>

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