#langconning

heres an example:

if you can understand this, you know too much

IP (if) KEKEI (can, conjugated for you) JETVEIN (understand, infinative) NEN (this), BELAE (know, conjugated for you) HLI (too much)

IP KEKEI JETVEIN NEN, BELAE HLI

this is still fairly close to english, and that makes me afraid im doing it wrong but i dont think so. i just picked parameters that were close-ish to english so i would have an easier time.

BUT!!

i am now settled back into college life, classes havent started back up yet, but once they do, one of two things will happen:

1. i will post here less because ill be busy doing school work.

2. i will post here more because i will be busy avoiding school work.

probably a combination of both, in turns...

not much to note about the conlang today, did a bit more assigning words but thats it. i do, however, have a story about professional conlanger/tumblr user dedalvs, who i am not going to tag because what if he remembers this? its nothin bad its just dumb and i been thinking about it since i found him on youtube/tumblr

anyway, i have been vaguely interested in conlangs for years and back when i was about 16 or so, i came across this website in my google searching. i had not heard of david peterson before, and while i read some of what he wrote and found it interesting enough, i eventually found buttons on the bottom of the page that changed color scheme of the websites layout. 

unfortunately most of these dont seem to be working for me anymore... but oh well. at the time i clicked the one for plain black and white and didnt fully grasp what i had done/ how it could be undone. all i cared about was that colors had left the site, and thus so did the joy from my heart as well. it looked boring now.

so, after refreshing the page and failing to make the bright colors come back, i, in a panic, scoured the site for something that would help. what i found was the contact button on the side, which provided an email address, and a description that encouraged emailing him over about anything, and it granted me way too much power. like a house elf given imprecise instructions, i was able to take this as a loophole to the ‘do not contact strange men on the internet’ rule my 16 year old self was bound by. i sent him an email that went something like; 

“hey ur sites cool but i clicked a button and the pretty colors went away.... i dont know what to do.... loollolololo :P”

in this age i could probably dredge up the actual email if i wanted to, but i dont, because immediately after sending that email i figured the buttons out and had a grand time changing the sites color scheme for awhile. i sent out a follow up email saying something like "never mind i figured it out... this always happens.” which is still true. as soon as i ask for help, i figure it out. i probably added in a DX or a XD as well.

but the thing is he emailed me back..... all i could read of it was the first line because i was too embarrassed because i had never imagined in my wildest dreams that would happen.... but now i had to confront the knowledge that i had bothered this real serious adult for teenage funsies.

 the first line of the email was ‘no one has ever asked me about the site colors before’ and i blocked the rest out of my mind to protect my psyche so i will never know how seriously he took some kid taking advantage of him leaving an email address out in the open... but there you go... until recently that was the whole story,

but now here i find out hes not just some random internet dude... i found him on youtube and tumbly and wasnt 100% sure it was the same person at first but now i am, of course...

its just a small, small internet world....

ok time to knock out the relative clause. this is what the parameters say about it first. 

Relative clauses: Relative clauses follow the noun (NRel). Relative clauses are expressed with a noun reduplication strategy. What the hell does this mean?*

it then goes on to have a few paragraphs explaining what relative clauses even are. ill put it here, just cause im working through this as i go.

English uses a relative pronoun strategy to express relative clauses, for instance, in The man [who I know] died, "who" is a relative pronoun that stands in for "the man". In other words, "who I know" can be rearranged into "I know the man". English can also use what's known as a gap strategy where by the relative pronoun is a deleted: The man [I know] died.

Strategies in other languages include the noun reduplication strategy whereby the head noun is reduplicated inside the relative clause, as in: The man [I know the man] died, or a pronoun strategy, as in: The man [I know him] died.

In the first two strategies the structure of the relative clauses is different to the structure of a regular clause; they have been "relativized". In the last two strategies the structure is the same. It has been observed that a language's ability relativize certain types of constituents within the relative clause is constrained along a strict hierarchy of Subject > Direct object > Indirect object > Oblique > Genitive > Object of comparison. So, if you can relativize one of these you can also relativize everything to left of it nothing to right (at which point you have to employ a different strategy). English can relativize all of them:

Subject: The man [who ran away] died

Direct object: The man [who I know] died

Indirect object: The man [who I gave the letter to] died

Oblique: The man [who I was talking about] died

Genitive: The man [whose sister I know] died

Object of comparative: The man [who I am taller than] died

To unpack this, if you rearrange the relative clauses inside the square brackets to regular clauses you will notice that "who" always stands in for the "the man", however in each case "the man" is filling a different constituent role - subject, direct object, etc.

im not 100% sure what it wants me to do with this. im guessing that this means that if i wanted to say the man who i know i would have to say something that would translate directly to something like  the man i know the man instead?

but in all the example, the actual sentence they used is the same in english, with the differences only implied with context, so i dont know what the difference would look like in a language with a noun reduplication strategy instead? couldnt the ‘reduplicated noun’ just drop as well, and so all these sentences would come out the same? and im not sure what that whole 3rd paragraph is getting at either. 

in heard of reduplication being used to indicate plurality before, and when i try to search ‘relative clause noun reduplication’ thats what i come up with. i do like wikipedias description of the relative clause strategy in ASL though:

Relative clauses are signaled by tilting back the head and raising the eyebrows and upper lip. This is done during the performance of the entire clause. There is no change in word order.

 im going to continue today with doing more ‘aspects’

Perfect aspect: Perfect aspect is derived from word meaning 'finish' or 'already'.

@not-a-linguist very kindly explained this to me on one of my recent posts as:

And since I see it on the list, Perfect Aspect ties a past event to the present. “I have gone to the store”, the going was in the past but you are suggesting the information is relevant to the present (”-so you don’t have to”). Used with the future, “I will have gone to the store” it ties an event that hasn’t happened yet to a new “present” that will exist in the future (”- by the time the family arrives for dinner”).

the parameters dont give much to go on here, so ill say the ‘perfect aspect’ word is TSUNR and attempt to make some sentences with this aspect. 

I have gone to the store          HO TSUNR TAI SHE FIDA FRE

I will have gone to the store     HO TSUNR TAI ZHEING FIDA FRE

all these tenses being separate words is making this stuff seem deceptively simple. i dont feel like im really learning the concepts, and thats bound to come back and bite me in the butt at some point. 

i guess the past/future tense modifiers are required for this aspect, or at least for the future one. i think i can see the SHE being able to be dropped in context. hmmm....

i was going to do ‘possibility’ in this post as well but the rules for them are supposed to be this:

Possibility: Situational possibility is expressed with verbal constructions, like in English: The children can swim across the lake. Epistemic possibility is expressed with adverb type constructions like "possibly", instead of with verbal constructions like in English (John may have arrived).

but im not sure what to do with an adverb in this conlang when all the adjectives already act like verbs; so that will become its own post. 

Case alignment of personal pronouns: Nominative-Accusative.

i had ignored this until now because the language is not supposed to have ‘case,’ case alignment is neutral it says. 

is this something i should be worried about? because im looking this up and not understanding it. in fact there are very few things left in the parameters that i understand. here are all the things i have yet to do:

Relative clauses

Case alignment of personal pronouns

Adverbial Subordinators

Perfect aspect

Possibility

Evidentiality

Nominal and locational predication

Passive voice

Imperative mood

Negation

and  Questions