Talk:Proto-Dumic
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Am I right to assume this was canonised somewhere on the appropriate secret board of the forum and is just now being extracted and published from there?
(P.S. the addition of a manner adverb suffix -mi I find... disappointing. Morphologically distinct manner adverbs are one of those crosslinguistically rare features which are however familiar in SAE and therefore too prevalent in conlangs. Surely Proto-Dumic could have gotten by with its already ample palette of deverbalisers.) 4pq1injbok (talk) 06:02, 5 February 2015 (PST)
- Yes, this is all coming from the secret forum, which I believe is to be made public Real Soon Now; to minimise waiting I've also posted a link to Serafín's PDF grammar sketch. I didn't have much of a hand in the writing, and I am aware that a number of features were debated (e.g. the participles had support from Basilius but not really anyone else); some of these can probably be changed retrospectively, though. thedukeofnuke (talk) 07:39, 5 February 2015 (PST)
- Isn't it public already? :P the Devilcat (talk) 08:28, 5 February 2015 (PST)
- Ah, so it is. Forum delving to do, then, which is a little intimidating.
- As those watching the changelog will know, I have gone and started a Dumic language. It actually sprang into mind in 2011 when I was pitching into the T1 reconstruction effort a little (and "sprang into mind" is correct; if not I wouldn't've chosen to add another member to an over-replete family). It was Cedh encouraged me to make it official / write it up publicly.
- At any rate, that biasses me in the direction of wanting to retain the things that actually got reconstructed. The participles were among these (and DLNAF attests *-kaga, though not *-tini); *-mi e.g. was not. 4pq1injbok (talk) 09:30, 5 February 2015 (PST)
- I will remove the *-mi suffix in that case; I can't remember if it shows up in any daughters, but if it does we can treat it as an innovation. thedukeofnuke (talk) 02:24, 13 February 2015 (PST)
- RE: Participles. I forget if I made it clear back then, but the reasons for me to support them were roughly the following: (1) they were already used in one of the daughterlangs; (2) WeepingElf's "Subordinator" -ki also appeared (in some of his examples) as equivalent of complement clauses, i. e. looked indeed like a generic marker of secondary predication, so it seemed appropriate to have a specifically adnominal form beside it (perhaps with a difference in usage in adnominal position). --Basilius (talk) 13:10, 17 February 2015 (PST)
- RE: Adverb markers. I wouldn't drop them for the following reasons.
- (1) There are some adverbial-oids with this marker in the protolanguage:
- kimi : adv. in no way (also emphatic negation)
- mumi : adv. thus, like that
- rammi : adv. how?
- simi : adv. thus, like this
- They shouldn't be taken as a direct attestation of the productive model (since they aren't derived from predicate stems), but they show that the language did use some morphologically distinct adverbs, with the marker in question.
- (2) Alternatives (e. g. case forms of infinitives) would look clumsy.
- (3) Straightforward revisions of "official" descriptions of this type are IMO a Bad Thing. Perhaps just my own obsession, but anyway.
- (1) is a fair point, though also a possible locus of analogical extension. Perhaps there are only a few more forms than the "correlatives" with -mi kicking around Proto-Dumic, and Kataputi (e.g.) heavily generalised the pattern.
- I disagree with (2) as a good reason. Plenty of natlangs give no dedicated expression to manner adverbs; if the result seems "clumsy" one of my first impulses would be to wonder if that's a result of looking at the problem through SAE-coloured glasses. Case forms of nominalisations, or (just as likely) such caseforms with a lexical scattering of other methods, make a wholly reasonable strategy.
- (3) I'm not going to dispute. 4pq1injbok (talk) 11:31, 3 March 2015 (PST)
Did anyone ever make a Proto-Dumic word for 'all'? I want one. (As a base for DLNAF 'both'; my current word kovita is untenable.) 4pq1injbok (talk) 07:31, 16 October 2015 (PDT)
- If not, and I got to propose one, I'd propose mumsam = mum
ma+ ram, formed as per WALS chapter 56. 4pq1injbok (talk) 12:21, 16 October 2015 (PDT)
- I believe that if a lexical item isn't in this thread:
- - then it hasn't been officially adopted.
- The lexicon (including root lexicon) needs to be expanded anyway, so I'd suggest simply adding a new root, since the meaning is very basic. It was intended to be an open process; you pick a blank root here from the second message in the aforementioned thread, assign a meaning to it and post to the same thread. If no objections are posted in reasonable time, it's official. Since the thread has been silent for years, it may be a good idea to send notifications to other people who used to be involved. This may awaken a few dormant participants like this one, who may even feel an urge to resume work on their creations ;)
- Ah, secret things. I still haven't actually gone and read that forum. I'll go undertake that process, I suppose.
- But to answer you here: I'm certainly not proposing that Proto-Dumic show a truncation process in... well, in any way that would be sensible to document in a grammar sketch. I'm merely proposing that it show a relic of grammaticalisation, which I explicitly do want here, having the chance, because it's underexploited in conlangdom as a whole -- e.g. three natlangs in eight show a process like this one, but can you name any conlang that does? Grammaticalisation is well-known to be associated with irregular losses of phonetic material, such as may not be exampled in any morphological process that was ever productive. And as this is a basic meaning, I felt it was compelling to give it a bisyllabic form, like everything else basic, and not the trisyllabic ordinary compound. Synchronically it would seem to be a basic root. 4pq1injbok (talk) 02:19, 24 October 2015 (PDT)