Rethinking telicity and aspect in Qári
Recently, I’ve been reading the second edition of Semantics by Kate Kearns. I recall skimming through the first edition while still at university, but I’ll confess that not much stuck back in 2008. Chapters 8 and 9, on Aktionsarten and tense and aspect respctively, have made me reconsider what I’ve been doing with aspect and telicity marking in Qári.
I’ve been uneasy about this for a while, and this unease has grown as I’ve created more and more sample sentences for my Lexember entries (a post summarising Lexember 2020 is forthcoming!) – up until now, I’ve been using the telic markers –ye and –yó with verbs to indicate that the telos or endpoint has been reached (almost like a perfective marker, to be honest). Essentially, I have been morphologically marking what is semantically the least marked property. This is dumb.
So, taking some inspiration from “inverse number marking”, I’ve come up with a system which I feel is at once more realistic and more elegant. Commentary, as always, is highly welcome.
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Fá hó yé nijá tipót já? – a Qári journal entry
I’ve spoken before as an advocate of Wm S Annis’ suggestion of using a diary as a conlang creation tool. Below I copy and analyse a fairly bog-standard entry from my journal.
Continue readingDánafála and the next steps for the Qári lexicon
Reflections on dánafála* or “derviation from roots” in Qári, and next steps for the lexicon.
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One hundred and one Old Qári roots and their derivatives (part 2)
As I’ve worked through my list of roots, derived from the Leipzig-Jakarta list, I’ve realised how iterative this process can be. Starting out with only a handful of affixes, I can create dozens of words from one root, if I so wish. But new roots reveal new potential affixes, which can then be applied to earlier roots… Ultimately, the challenge here is knowing when to stop!
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Nonconcatenative morphology in Old Qári word-formation
A discussion of word-formation in Old Qári, along with a discussion of the phoneme inventory.
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