Talk:Kilda Kelen

Talk:Kilda Kelen (comment)

1) Hi, Panchakahq. 2) I like what you've done to Kilda Kelen so far. 3) I commented on Yahoo! groups "aboriconlangs" and "eastasianconlangs". 4) You ought to post an announcement on Yahoo! group "frathwiki" as well. 5) IMO you should consider joining Yahoo! group "altaica", at least to lurk; and consider posting an announcement there. 6) Have you considered cross-referencing Kilda Kelen in the Conlang Wikia? 7) I'm looking forward to your "Kinship Terms". Why not just look up some R.L. ones in the Wikipedia, see how it's done, and then do it more-or-less that way here on Frathwiki? Then tell the Yahoo! groups what URL to look at. Worry _later_ about how to e-mail the kinterm-system itself to a Yahoo! group afterward. 8) If "this wasn't as hard as you expected", that encourages me to attempt further progress on Adpihi and/or Reptigan. So I'm _really_ looking forward to the kinterms.

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eldin

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Hi, Eldin -- Thanks very much for all the positive feedback, encouragement, and ideas! - I'm really reluctant to join yet more email lists, when so few have any activity, and when in turn so little of that activity is of much quality. And the "altaica" list (and its cousins and predecessors) has enough cranks without adding conlanging to the mix, IMO -- I'd like to see some forums with some serious, non-wingnut Altaistics discussion ;( - Good idea about cross-listing or linking in other conlangy wikis; I just don't know which ones are actually lively and trafficked, and keep thinking I'm going to get more material together to post and *then* I'll work on linking and so forth! - I didn't know that Wikipedia proper has a format set up for presenting kin terms or systems; I'll check that out for sure -- it could save me a lot of headache. - Looking forward to reading more about Adpihi & Reptigan, myself, in whatever location!

Aren't participles verbal adjectives?

Aren't participles verbal adjectives? (Though not necessarily all verbal adjectives are participles, FAIK.)

Converbs are usually considered equivalent to gerunds (and vice versa).

Normally the "most important" (whatever that means) verbal noun is called "the (or an) infinitive" IIUC; and other verbal nouns are usually called "gerunds".

If you've got one (or more) important non-finite form(s) of your verbs which is a verbal noun, and distinguish them from gerunds, shouldn't you call (one of) them "infinitives" (especially if in your opinion it's "more important" than the "gerunds") instead of "participles"?

(Other names for verbal nouns include "masdars", "supines", and "verbnouns".)

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If your 'lang allows using adjectives as nouns, then you may be able (and probably are able) to use participles as nouns, too. In that case your active participle could be used as your agent-nominalization and your passive participle could be used as your passive-nominalization.

What do you think?

(And incidentally I like your most recent update. Naturally people talk more about what they think you should change than what they think you got just perfect the first try; and I'm a "people", so I do that too.)

eldin 16:13, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Response to Eldin's 16 May 08 comments

First, no worries about the nature of your comments; actually I'd much prefer the "what you should change/why did you do it like THAT???" feedback than the "OMG thats liek so cool" kind :) So, thank you very much!

"Adjective" just is a pretty vague and marginally useful category, as Neo-Khitanese parts-of-speech go, so it didn't occur to me to describe these things as "verbal *adjectives*" instead of as nouns/nominals. It's more a matter of "my lang allows using nouns as adjectives" than vice versa -- and, for that matter, there's not really a distinction between "the active participle" and "the passive participle" as such.

I'm honestly not familiar with the term "verbal adjective" in general linguistic literature, but from that position of ignorance, I can't see any reason to prefer "verbal adjective" over "verbal noun" here.

And, frankly, a factor in using "participle" was simply to mimic the terminology used by other (English-language, at least) writers on Mongol/Tungusic languages. I'm well aware it's not pukka terminology, but I sacrificed descriptive perfection to try to simulate real-world documentation of a real-world language :) Though I modernized a *little* bit, and used "converb" instead of "gerund" to distinguish the non-nounish/adjectivish, non-finite verbal forms. I'm reluctant to use the term infinitive, except in scare quotes, because I don't think there's a really good match between any of the NK candidates and other languages' "infinitives". Maybe the "Purposive Converbs"... but I just can't see much advantage in slapping such a vague label on them.

Response to response; recommend "supine", recommend against "converb", but your reasons sufficient.

"to mimic the terminology used by other (English-language, at least) writers on Mongol/Tungusic languages" is a perfectly sufficient reason to do as you have done. And so is "to simulate real-world documentation of a real-world language".

Not all languages have "adjectives" as a separate open class. Many languages use verbs where other languages would use adjectives; many languages use nouns where other languages would use adjectives. It appears NK is one of the latter? ("Polysynthetic" languages seem particularly prone to do without adjectives, I have read.) Anyway, I've also read objections to distinguishing adjectives from nouns, that say they should really be "adjective nouns" vs "substantive nouns".

The difference, if there is one, is that adjectives modify noun-phrases. Many languages have a case for most of their nouns which is adnominal rather than adverbial; the noun in that case is used to modify another noun or noun-phrase, rather than a verb or a clause or some other multi-word constituent than a noun-phrase. The genitive is probably the most popular name for such a case. So "allowing nouns to be used as adjectives" is also a pretty popular strategy cross-linguistically, even among languages which do distinguish between nouns and adjectives.

If X is a part of speech, a "verbal X" is an X derived from a verb which still has some of the properties of a verb; for instance, maybe it's able to take an object. "Verbal nouns" are nouns derived from verbs which still act somewhat like verbs; "verbal adjectives" are adjectives derived from verbs which still act somewhat like verbs. (In a parallel sense there can be adjectival adverbs, adjectival nouns, adjectival verbs, adverbal adjectives, adverbal nouns, adverbal verbs, nominal adjectives, nominal adverbs, nominal verbs, verbal adverbs. Some of those won't be very big or very interesting or very common.) One of the distinctions is between the "verbal adj" and the "deverbal adj"; a "deverbal adj" is also derived from a verb, but may have no verb-like properties. Similarly a "deverbal noun" is a noun derived from a verb, but need not have any verb-like properties.

Participles are usually considered verbal adjectives; they are the only kind of verbal adjective of which I am aware that frequently occur cross-linguistically. It is a personal conceit of mine that the category of participle should be based on the meaning "the modified noun was/is/couldbe a participant in the root verb". Participles can have tense, aspect, mood, and voice. An active participle modifies a noun to say that that noun was(or other form of the verb "to be") an agent of the root verb; a passive participle means that the noun was a patient of the root verb. In English, active participles tend to end with -ing, and sound and look exactly like present participles and imperfective participles and gerunds ("I am killing"); passive participles tend to end with -ed, and sound and look exactly like past participles and perfective participles ("I am killed").

EUROTYP says "converb" and "gerund" might as well be synonyms for the use they make of these terms; but they might not be synonyms when trying to typologize non-European languages. NK is Northeast Asian, right?

"Converb" was first introduced (or so it is my impression; I could be mistaken) to describe the completely morphology-less forms of verbs used in serial verb constructions in many SVC languages; for some serial-verbs, only one of the verbs in the series is inflected for anything, and the others all appear as converbs. It rather resembles the "construct state" of some Semitic languages, in which the root of the noun appears with as little inflection as possible. I think the lack of inflection is more important, considered world-wide, than the use as a noun, for purposes of calling something a "converb"; a "converb" is the most non-finite or least finite possible form of a non-finite verb.

While I am personally aware of only one type of verbal adjective that reappears in several languages (to wit "participles", though inflecting these for aspect mood number polarity tense and voice makes several sub-types), I am aware of several types of verbal nouns. There are infinitives and gerunds to start with; there are also masdars and supines and gerundives. Normally the most important kind of verbal noun is called "the infinitive" and the others are all called "gerunds", but obviouslly there are exceptions; some languages traditionallly have a "first infinitive" and a "second infinitive" and so on, and some have a "first gerund" and a "second gerund" and so on. I don't know what the customs are regarding "masdars", but there just aren't a lot of customs regarding "supines"; some grammarians analyzing some languages use "supine" for a type of verbal adverb rather than a type of verbal noun, in particular for a non-finite form of the verb intended to express purpose. (For instance, "it is good to drink", in some languages, what English accomplishes with the infinitive "to drink" would be accomplished with a supine instead.)

The term infinitive is never applied to a finite form of the verb. The infinitive must be missing some of the inflection ordinarily required for the nucleus of a main clause. Of course what's "ordinarily required" changes from language to language. But, for preference, if some non-finite forms lack agreement with (some or all) participant(s) (e.g. in number or person or gender), and others instead are "untensed" (lacking, for example, aspect and/or mood and/or polarity and/or tense and/or voice), the term "infinitive" goes to one of the forms specifically lacking agreement. (This doesn't apply to languages where no verb ever has to agree with any of its participants.)

In what other ways do you think none of NK's verbal nouns fit the idea of "infinitive"?

I think your "Purposive Converbs", or at least "purposive verbal nouns", could well be called "supines". It would fit. The term "supine" is a bit obscure (not well known), and also a bit vague. You might want to consider it anyway.

I don't know that you really want to call anything a "converb", unless its for one of the two reasons I mentioned at the top of this response. Are the things you're calling "converbs" really totally without any verbal morphology -- really bare roots? If not, or not almost, you might want to consider some other term. Edit: your "uninflected converbs" probably should still be called "converbs". Maybe your "inflected converbs" should be called something else?

The term "verbnoun" is frequently used e.g. in discussing Celtic languages. There are a few other families where it is commonly used. If a language's verb lexicon consists mostly of "lightverb + contentword" combinations, as e.g. Korean's does, then perhaps the content-word is usually a noun, or very nounlike, and can usually be used as a verbal noun; if so it's likely to be called a "verbnoun".

eldin 19:53, 17 May 2008 (UTC)