Accusative case proposal

[Deleted]

Blegh, accusative cases and the like really aren't needed in el glheþ's current form. I just figured it would further strengthen Talossan's connecttion to its Latin and Berber roots.

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

Like the King says, this is an intriguing proposal. I had a few questions for Jack, but unfortunately it appears that he won't be participating in the discussion any longer.

[Tamoran Montagnhard]

Well, I can't call myself a Talossan-speaker, but taking my native, I prefer preposition. But, as "pa(d)" looks a bit confuse, it would be good make it become archaic (and maybe also poetic) and the proposal as current.

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

Oct 5, 2016 18:19:09 GMT -6 Iac Marscheir said:

Therefore, as an expression of the Talossan language's connection with Latin and other Romance languages, I'd like to propose an optional accusative prefix, çe(d)- for masculine nouns and ça(d)- for feminine nouns (the parenthetical "d" is added in case the noun being prefixed starts with a vowel), that would mark the object of a transitive verb.

A couple of questions:

1. Do you have any thoughts about how this feature would arise in Talossan, in linguistic terms?

2. Why accusative? In the evolution of Old French from Vulgar Latin at least, the accusative became unmarked first, while the nominative retained a case marker.

[Deleted]

Dec 8, 2016 10:29:30 GMT -6 Sir C. M. Siervicül said:

A couple of questions:

1. Do you have any thoughts about how this feature would arise in Talossan, in linguistic terms?

2. Why accusative? In the evolution of Old French from Vulgar Latin at least, the accusative became unmarked first, while the nominative retained a case marker.

1. As in how this feature would have originated in Talossan's constructed history?

2. French is known as a proverbial ugly duckling in the world of Romance languages. Its orthography is weird, its grammar is weird, it leaves out more sounds than an American, it has sanctions for SOV word order, etc. Not a very good comparison. I figured accusative because that would probably be the last to go before completely dropping the declension system.

EDIT: Thanks for asking.

[Magniloqueu Épiqeu da Lhiun]

To be honest,I see “på(d)” as more of a (spatial and temporal) locative prefix than an accusative prefix. Also, the only reason I still am not in the CÚG, is, because I will not sign up on Yahoo!.

[Deleted]

Dec 8, 2016 19:15:58 GMT -6 Magniloqueu Épiqeu da Lhiun said:

To be honest,I see “på(d)” as more of a (spatial and temporal) locative prefix than an accusative prefix. Also, the only reason I still am not in the CÚG, is, because I will not sign up on Yahoo!.

*scratches head* <o

I'm sorry, I guess?

Anyway, okay.

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

Dec 8, 2016 11:18:11 GMT -6 Iac Marscheir said:

1. As in how this feature would have originated in Talossan's constructed history?

2. French is known as a proverbial ugly duckling in the world of Romance languages. Its orthography is weird, its grammar is weird, it leaves out more sounds than an American, it has sanctions for SOV word order, etc. Not a very good comparison. I figured accusative because that would probably be the last to go before completely dropping the declension system.

1. Yes. Or, what amounts to pretty much the same thing, how such a feature could come to exist in the type of Romance language Talossan is intended to be.

2. True, but Occitan was a huge influence on the earlier stages of Talossan. And the Wikipedia article on Vulgar Latin suggests that, outside of Romanian, it was French/Occitan that preserved case marking latest, with case distinctions being lost first in Africa.

[Deleted]

Dec 10, 2016 10:47:52 GMT -6 Sir C. M. Siervicül said:

Dec 8, 2016 11:18:11 GMT -6 Iac Marscheir said:

1. As in how this feature would have originated in Talossan's constructed history?

2. French is known as a proverbial ugly duckling in the world of Romance languages. Its orthography is weird, its grammar is weird, it leaves out more sounds than an American, it has sanctions for SOV word order, etc. Not a very good comparison. I figured accusative because that would probably be the last to go before completely dropping the declension system.

1. Yes. Or, what amounts to pretty much the same thing, how such a feature could come to exist in the type of Romance language Talossan is intended to be.

2. True, but Occitan was a huge influence on the earlier stages of Talossan. And the Wikipedia article on Vulgar Latin suggests that, outside of Romanian, it was French/Occitan that preserved case marking latest, with case distinctions being lost first in Africa.

Well, I think we can reasonably assume that the people who spoke Talossan migrated north through the Iberian Peninsula during the fall of Rome in order to escape the Vandals (via going south, then west, underneath the barbarians). I think they would have settled down somewhere in modern-day Poland (evidenced by the introduction of the ß and the use of ä for the sound /æ/, seen in Finnish). Since the surrounding languages (German, Finnish, Polish, etc.) all use cases (in which the nominative is unmarked), it is likely that, at the very least, one or more cases would have been reintroduced, if not just kept during the (presumably) slow migration. A prefix could be the result of smooshing a prepositional accusative against the word in question (similar to the story of contractions in English and French) due to outside influence combined with the precedent nature of a prepositional accusative (Finnish*, German, and Polish all encode case-related information in the word itself, rather than as a prepostion or suffix).

*Well, actually, Finnish is kinda weird. It uses a quasi-suffix that vowel-harmonizes and/or edits the stem to make it sound better or easier to say. So fifty-fifty, I guess

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

Dec 10, 2016 11:02:42 GMT -6 Iac Marscheir said:

Well, I think we can reasonably assume that the people who spoke Talossan migrated north through the Iberian Peninsula during the fall of Rome in order to escape the Vandals (via going south, then west, underneath the barbarians). I think they would have settled down somewhere in modern-day Poland (evidenced by the introduction of the ß and the use of ä for the sound /æ/, seen in Finnish). Since the surrounding languages (German, Finnish, Polish, etc.) all use cases (in which the nominative is unmarked), it is likely that, at the very least, one or more cases would have been reintroduced, if not just kept during the (presumably) slow migration. A prefix could be the result of smooshing a prepositional accusative against the word in question (similar to the story of contractions in English and French) due to outside influence combined with the precedent nature of a prepositional accusative (Finnish*, German, and Polish all encode case-related information in the word itself, rather than as a prepostion or suffix).

Hmm. We'd also need to explain the form of the affix, though. That's one advantage of the prepositional accusative approach Hooligan described--it uses an existing preposition within the language. If we wanted to create a prefix, ideally it'd be traceable to something like a different Latin preposition that didn't survive as an independent preposition in Talossan, or a Berber affix or particle, or a preposition borrowed from some other language. If we're drawing inspiration from Berber languages, it would be interesting if the marker reflected an ergative-absolutive distinction rather than nominative-accusative. Though maybe that would be a little too exotic for Talossan. I have another idea sort of similar to Hooligan's, and inspired by Sardinian and Catalan, that I will share when I have a little more time.

[Deleted]

Dec 12, 2016 0:51:36 GMT -6 Sir C. M. Siervicül said:

Dec 10, 2016 11:02:42 GMT -6 Iac Marscheir said:

Well, I think we can reasonably assume that the people who spoke Talossan migrated north through the Iberian Peninsula during the fall of Rome in order to escape the Vandals (via going south, then west, underneath the barbarians). I think they would have settled down somewhere in modern-day Poland (evidenced by the introduction of the ß and the use of ä for the sound /æ/, seen in Finnish). Since the surrounding languages (German, Finnish, Polish, etc.) all use cases (in which the nominative is unmarked), it is likely that, at the very least, one or more cases would have been reintroduced, if not just kept during the (presumably) slow migration. A prefix could be the result of smooshing a prepositional accusative against the word in question (similar to the story of contractions in English and French) due to outside influence combined with the precedent nature of a prepositional accusative (Finnish*, German, and Polish all encode case-related information in the word itself, rather than as a prepostion or suffix).

Hmm. We'd also need to explain the form of the affix, though. That's one advantage of the prepositional accusative approach Hooligan described--it uses an existing preposition within the language. If we wanted to create a prefix, ideally it'd be traceable to something like a different Latin preposition that didn't survive as an independent preposition in Talossan, or a Berber affix or particle, or a preposition borrowed from some other language. If we're drawing inspiration from Berber languages, it would be interesting if the marker reflected an ergative-absolutive distinction rather than nominative-accusative. Though maybe that would be a little too exotic for Talossan. I have another idea sort of similar to Hooligan's, and inspired by Sardinian and Catalan, that I will share when I have a little more time.

Please, feel free to share. I'd love to hear about it.