Grammatical Features of Different Languages

From the description of Tlingit by John R Swanton, The Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911) p.169

[Image Description: a picture of a page of a printed book with the following text:

§ 9. Collective

With animate and inanimate objects, but more often the latter, the sense of A LOT OF or A HEAP OF is expressed by suffixing q! or q!î, as,

Łīngî't man or men Łīngî'tq! many men together

ta stone teq! stones lying in a heap

q!at! island q!at!q!î islands

hît house hî'tq!î houses

gux slave guxq! slaves

That this is not a true plural is shown on the one hand by the fact that its employment is not essential, and on the other by the fact that it is occasionally used where no idea of plurality, according to the English understanding of that term, exist; Thus yuyā'i ʟanq! THE BIG WHALE may be said of a single whale, the suffix indicating that the whale was very large, and that it had many parts to be cut out. Therefore it may best be called a collective suffix.

[ID: text reading as follows: The name for the TV village located roughly at the site of present-day downtown Los Angeles often appears in sources as Jaa-nga. This name might be from jaa‑r ‘poison oak’, but the speakers Harrington worked with did not accept that etymology. It is also recorded as Jaang7ar (3a), which might be clipped from ‑ng7aro, the dative (3b), or a derivation adding an absolutive suffix ‑r after the locative suffix. Other place names recorded with ‑ng7ar include Aawing7ar ‘Huerta de los Ybarras’ and $evaang7ar ‘name of a ranchería (settlement) somewhere’ 179 (3.104.0017). Constructions with ‑nga are not fully onomasticized in that the ‑nga suffix is treated as inflectional, being replaced by other suffixes when a different local case expression is desired, as in (3). (3) TV a. Jaa-nga ~ Jaa-ng7a-r ‘Los Angeles’ (3.102.0749, 3.102.0156)

b. Jaa-ng7aro ‘to Los Angeles’ (3.102.0552)

c. Jaa-ve ‘from Los Angeles’ (3.102.0160) /ID]

The Smithsonian has an archive of notes written by 20th century linguist John Peabody Harrington. In these archive are scanned handwritten notes on Gabrieleño a.k.a. Tongva, among other languages. However, these notes, being handwritten, are not easy to read and are not necessarily handicap accessible for those with vision impairments. I have not been able to find a neat and convenient resource to overcome this issue.

My idea is that if I set up a patreon, people could send me a few bucks a month, and I could do the work of reading through the document and creating spreadsheets or similar documents with the information in the archives, including their reference position, so that people could easily see the information within.

Im currently wrapping up a project and between jobs, so if I am going to invest time in this, this is an ideal time to start. So I guess this is just a gauge of interest.

In some languages, they make use of what are sometimes called serial verb constructions. rather than sticking to one verb and a bunch of prepositions and subordinate clauses, you just run a bunch of verbs together. These show up in some West African languages, West Indian creole languages, and also in Chinese.

Here's an example. Imagine you are at a seafood restaurant, and you have ordered a crab rangoon. instead of a normal plate of seafood, however, the waiter picks up a long pole with a hook on the end, loops the hook through the handle of a bucket that someone has put on the counter that leads to the kitchen, and uses the pole to deposit the bucket, which is filled by a live, gigantic crab, in front of you. In English, we might say the following sentence to describe this scenario:

He put the bucket on the table with a pole.

In a language that uses serial verb constructions, it would probably come out like this.

He used a pole took the bucket put on the table

(IPA [wɔːtkeʔa nepaː nehaːvontaɾ])

In a number of Uto-Aztecan languages, the word for mother sounds like "dad", including Lower Pima (LP), Pima de Yepáchic (PYp), Northern Tepehuan (NT), and Southern Tepehuan (ST). Other roots trace back to reconstructed *nana, *jïʔï/jïC/jïk, *pija/piʔa, the latter two of which also seem related to words meaning 'big'.

I recently came across another set of words concerning marriage, tó'ma "v (of a man) to take a wife; (of an animal) to mate" and the related terms notó'ma "my wife" and notó'mavu "my husband". The suffix vu is unusual here; vu shows up as an irrealis suffix on verbs, but it is rare even on deverbal nouns.