Conlangery #36: Morphosyntactic Alignment

CORRECTION: A commenter below graciously corrected me on a point I (George) raised in the show.  When I talk about desiderative languages, please replace that word with dechticaetiative.  Look to the comments below for a relevant link.  I apologize for misidentifying the phenomenon I was talking about. We talk a lot about morphosyntactic alignment, outlining the basic types, talking a little about various complications, and even bringing up a linguist who thinks it’s not all that important, anyway.  Also, we feature a natlang for the second time: Ngarla, a language of Australia, with some morphosyntactic oddness (that’s typical for Australia, but still odd).  Also, stick around after the end music to hear George’s informal review of China Miéville’s Embassytown. Top of Show Greeting: Jameld Links and Resources: Wikipedia article Handout on ergativity The Blue Bird of Ergativity Featured NATLANG: Ngarla Feedback: Email from Bryn LaFollette: Hey guys,I came across your podcast a few of weeks ago on iTunes serendipitously and just wanted to let you know that I’ve been heartily enjoying it! I had been meaning to write in just to voice my appreciation, but then ep #33: Supersegmentals just happened to hit upon what happened to be the very subject matter of my Master’s Thesis; namely, derivation of phonemic tone inventories in natural languages, with field work on Mandarin. And while working with my collected data that I had specifically observed the tendency for low tone (i.e. tone 3) in Mandarin to be realized by many speakers, especially in continuous speech, as creaky voice! And, just as Bianca mentioned, the hell that wrought in trying to get usable frequency data from spectrograms of the recordings I had made with my native consultants! Anyhow, it gave me a good laugh.My main area of research used to be Phonology (though with a heavy dash of phonetics) and Syntax (very close to the very fuzzy border with morphology). I had gotten as far as completing a Linguistics Master’s degree from University of California, Santa Cruz when I took a “short break” from linguistics, graduate school and academics in general about ten years ago, but in the mean time sort of accidentally ended up a professional programmer. Your podcast has gotten me digging up my old attempts at constructed languages, as well as re-interested me in my old linguistics work, and, incidentally, LaTeX. From what I’ve seen since looking at the examples you’ve featured, my humble artlangs wouldn’t really qualify as much more than sketches, honestly. Plus, being designed for the use of non-linguists they were necessarily simplified and restrained from what I might have otherwise done. Although the content is unchanged from their last being worked on in ’98 (before grad school took up pretty much all my time), I think they’re laying about somewhere on the interwebz still in some form or other. Well over due for a revision, me thinks.Now that I’ve said ‘hi’, I may make some comments on older episodes as I get around to listening to them. So, here’s fair warning, I guess. As far as feedback, there were two main thoughts I’ve been having: 1. Aside from the foray into supersegmentals, it seems like phonology hasn’t figured very strongly in the podcast. The episode on sound systems and romanization was really mostly just romanization, and left me wondering if it might not be something worth covering. Especially, the wonderfully diverse contrasting features in the worlds languages. Likewise, concepts like sonority scale and what sorts of crazy phonemes some languages in the world deem to function as a syllable nucleus, not just syllabic /r/ or /l/, but like /t/, for example. The sound of a language as spoken by a fluent speaker is a major part of the appeal to me, and I feel like maybe more appreciation of the sound of less familiar languages might be a nice source of inspiration to others. For example, as I’ve heard you guys mention that Pacific Northwest languages are popular right. Although I don’t share the philosophy of the website, or the substance or message of the recordings, this is still a great series of recordings of speakers reading texts in Nootka (http://globalrecordings.net/en/program/C06150). There are many others of quite a variety of American Indian languages on the same site, as well. 2. Historical linguistics and language change are of strong interest to me, and I think the level of work in including elements of historical linguistics techniques in conlanging may not necessarily need to be as involved as it sounds like is often portrayed in the podcast. For example, I was thinking how in ep #27 on irregularity how one of the easiest ways to add irregularity is basically to get a suppletion pattern in a verb or noun paradigm by simply coming up with two separate lexical items, sussing out the full pattern for each, and then create the irregular one for the language by simply picking and choosing between the two. This is a nice quick way of getting, for example, a pattern like that of English verb ‘to go’ (go~gone~went). Another useful idea is to put some historical style structure in your lexicon by establishing specific strata (like Norman-French vs Anglo-Saxon vs Latin in English, or Yamato vs Sino-Japanese in Japanese). Having a subset of vocabulary that was borrowed at some point from another language, and so doesn’t “fit” quite the same with the rest is an easy and quick way to add some naturalistic detail. The thing is, Historical Linguistics, when you’re doing it formally, is for the most part working backwards toward some common ancestor by cross linguistic comparison, or internal reconstruction. Sure you can work forwards through time from a pre-defined proto-language to your daughter language. But, that’s just one method of using that toolset with others that can be applied on a much less overarching scale. This is getting too long, so I’ll just leave off there. Cheers, Bryn — Ceterum censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam.