Recent Developments in Kahtsaai

In the last few months I have been focusing almost entirely on Kahtsaai vocabulary, and allowing that to drive any tweaks to the grammar. At this point, I consider the skeleton of the grammar complete, wanting only a lot more detail for certain sections.

The Imperfective

For most of its life Kahtsaai has had a single primary verb of motion, ló, which was usually marked with either the trans- or cis-locative prefix to distinguish go and come. This turns out to be typologically very rare, which was fine, but I finally started to find it annoying, so I added aas come. The form kóh-ló is still available for come, but it cannot be used when the speaker means "right here where we're talking now," which is aas's core meaning.

At the same time aas was coming into being, I was getting a bit annoyed about the regularity of the imperfective marker, -na. I did not want to add massive irregularity, but it just wasn't sitting right all by itself. So, I added a small number of verbs which take the imperfective in -rá/-réí. The choice between the two forms depends on things like stem syllable weight and compensatory lengthening after certain assimilations, but for practical purposes should be considered irregular. In a last act of randomness, I seriously modified aas, giving it an imperfective of saréí. Finally, an imperfective in -rá becomes -réí when the adverbial suffix -ne/-hte is added, always resulting in -réín. This parallels the -na > -naan change.

I have confined the -rá/-réí forms to intransitive verbs of motion ("come," "flow"), location and posture ("stand," "hang") and weather ("lightening"). I don't expect that to change. Right now only thirteen verbs have this new imperfective. Probably a few more will enter this class over time, but I doubt it will be too many.

Postpositions and Verbs do the Frame Dance

I recently added the postposition -próh. It is imagined that at one point in its history it covered certain meanings one expects of the dative, but by about, say, a half a millennium ago it was confined to marking the experiencer of certain verbs of emotion or judgement. For example, léíkou means insipid, flavorless, boring. With -próh one can say someone is bored,

Ra'é	tápróh	heléíkou.
ra'é	tá-próh	he-léíkou
that.INAN	1SG-to	3INAN-be.insipid
That bores me.

The postposition now also marks the judicantis role, that is, the person in whose judgement a statement holds true.

Táttá	aapróh	máámo	łakíntsááłtsi	wé.
tá-ttá	aa-próh	máámo	ła-kí-n-tsááł-ts	wé
1SG-father	3AN.SG-to	money	TRNS-3INAN.S-3INAN-misuse-EVID	this
To my father, this is a waste of money.

In thinking about the core uses for -próh an interesting commonality has developed, where a stative verb takes the "detransitive of causative" marking -ríi-se and is then used with -próh to mark the induction of some state in a person. For example, láhme means "be angry, be unpleasant," but rather than taking the causative for "to anger," instead this -ríi-se form is used, tápróh yoláhmeríise he made me angry. I'm expecting to see more of the construction X-próh V^stative-ríi-se in the future.

Finally, I have started thinking more about the frames of new and existing vocabulary, and making sure I have examples covering expected uses. One result of this is that the postposition -por, "seeking after, wanting," is now used mark the ultimate goal for purposive action. For example, the verb móka means "trick" or "deceive." The postposition -por marks the goal of the deception if that is expressed,

Yokatmókats	máámo	onpor	pá.
yo-kat-móka-ts	máámo	on-por	pá
3AN.SG-1PL-trick-EVID	money	3INAN-wanting	PTCL
He tricked us for the money.

This week makes me want to give into the "40 words for snow" syndrome, and create a rich vocabulary to describe my own emotional state when experiencing 95-100F days and very high humidity. I'm also trying to think up a good way to express "at stake, on the line," as in the phrase, "when your life is at stake." This is a subtle one.

Thesaurus 1.4

A new version of the Conlanger's Thesaurus is ready. It has a few more maps, a few more grammaticalizations, and some subsections on classifiers, demonstratives and a few useful implicational hierarchies for verbs.

I've been tidying up some parts of Kahtsaai vocabulary as a direct result of working on the thesaurus, which is a nice side effect.

Kahtsaai: Intensives and Content Questions

Version 1.3 of the Conlanger's Thesaurus is out. It has a few more polysemy maps, a few more grammaticalizations, and an addition to the final section with some notes on the typology of content question words ("who, what, when," etc.). The semantic map I got from "thread" was suitably and ironically tangled.

Some of the work on the Thesaurus has motivated me to make a few refinements to Kahtsaai. The biggest change is that I made some changes to question words. In English and the rest of the Indo-European family, we're used to content question words being obviously related in some way. In English, they all start with wh-, and in the Romance languages with qu-/c-. But it turns out this pattern is very rare in the world's languages, which may have completely unrelated roots for their core set of question words. So, I irregularized Kahtsaai a bit, with *ye'wei where becoming táá, and *ye'pas why becoming łouh.

Related to the question words, I have started to fill out the range of indefinites a bit. In particular, there's now an affix on the question words to mark a free choice indefinite ("pick any one"),

Ye'énał	so'ołípto.
ye'é-nał	sou-n-líp-to
what-FREE.CHOICE	2SG-3INAN-select-IMP
Pick anything.

Additionally, it struck me that I didn't yet have a way to indicate intensives, I myself did it. In quite a few languages, those are related to the word for body. I didn't feel like using the full noun for body, tsire. Instead, I took the inspiration from the morpheme used in noun incorporation for body, which is -s(i)-. I expanded that a bit, to -ssi', which must be possessed:

Mo	keil	aassi'	yo'áhlektén	yolleile.
mo	keil	ats-ssi'	yo-'áh-lekté-n	yolleile
SUBJ	soldier	3SG.AN-self	3SG.AN-3PL-save-EVID	children
The soldier himself saved the children.

Generating Semantic Maps

One of the central features of the Conlanger's Thesaurus is the cross-linguistic semantic maps. For the first version of the Thesaurus I used those I could find in public linguistics journal articles. But it occurred to me I could come up with some of these on my own.

First I came up with some straightforward software to manipulate lists of definitions to produce the semantic maps automatically. I wasn't actually expecting this approach to work out so well right away, but my initial assumptions and model turned out to work pretty well.

The biggest problem has been finding good dictionaries to work with. All too many online dictionaries — and not a few printed ones — are simply lists of words with single-word definitions. This is not a great way to get at polysemy. However, over the last few days I have managed to find enough good dictionaries online to make me confident in the cross-linguistic (and cross-cultural) polysemy maps I've been creating.

The code is explained at Generating Cross-Linguistic Semantic Maps. At the bottom of that page is a list of core words around which I have generated maps. Even if you cannot understand the Python programming language, you can see the list of languages and meanings I have used in the links that end in .py. The maps are images of the common polysemies.

There have been two big surprises to me in these maps. First, "face" can refer to the blade of a knife in two utterly unrelated languages (Turkish and Inupiaq). Second, I was surprised how often "sweet" can refer to what English speakers consider other flavors, especially "salty."

A Conlanger's Thesaurus

In the last year or so I have been thinking about writing a piece of software which would spit up a skeleton dictionary which I could fill in with a new language being created. The point was to help me get out of certain lexical ruts, while still creating a language that would be more or less internally consistent. I gave up on that project, but one side effect was a lot of reading about recent work in lexical typology. I found the semantic maps especially interesting as tools for conlanging. I've collected a bunch of that work in A Conlanger's Thesaurus.

The core of that document is a word list, lightly edited, but mixed in whenever possible are cross-linguistic semantic maps, to prod thinking about new possibilities for words that don't simply reproduce the semantic boundaries of languages I already know. There are still a lot of gaps, but this seems a good start.

The last two pages have some dense but very interesting semantic maps relating to matters most people would consider grammatical rather than lexical. But there's a lot of interesting stuff there, too. Whenever possible I have included links to free, online papers and articles which discuss the maps in much more detail, so people can hunt down details if they are moved to do so.

If you know of cross-linguistic maps I have missed, please let me know. I'm sure I'll be updating this document from time to time as I run across new work.

Kahtsaai: a year old

I just noticed that the document sketch.pdf in my Kahtsaai directory is dated to April 23, 2011, meaning I just missed Kahtsaai's birthday. Taking a quick look at that sketch, it's interesting how much of the basic character of the language was firmly settled in just three not-very-dense pages with a whopping 20-word vocabulary.

For example, the conjugation table of subject and object prefixes is very similar, with the biggest change being the addition of several conditioned variants for the third person inanimate object, and the indefinites (thank you, Nahuatl). The sound system is completely unchanged, which shows serious restraint for me. The inchoative went from being a suffix, -píí to an aspectual prefix, -yé'-. The verb chain got a new slot just for those aspectual and adverbial prefixes.

I somehow derived an entire system of deixis from the single word hó'owa, thus.

Amusingly, the clause-final discourse particle łaai, undefined in the sketch, was briefly turned into the word yes, but now again sits without definition. It was used in the phrase, "s/he will make tea łaai." I suppose I really should find a meaning for it, given it's seniority.

It's at 973 lexical entries, including sublemmata. Perhaps I can spend the weekend getting that up to 1000.

Agreement of What?

I recently ran across this page about transitivity. Section six, "Problem Cases," mentions two languages in which it appears that the verb transitivity is cross-referenced on other constituents in the clause, in particular, adverbs and noun phrases acting adverbially. The first of the Shipibo-Conibo examples has two other elements in the clause so marked, Jain-xon-ra there-TRNS-EV and xobo-n-xon house-LOC-TRNS.

I don't think I'm going to be using this feature any time soon, but some people might find it alluring.