All, every, each

I have decided on a simple scheme for non-numeric quantifiers in Mirexu.

It is not the degrees of quantification that I was concerned with. Whether there will be more degrees than "all, none, some" ... "enough"? "a lot"? "few"? ... I can leave till later. The distinction that I needed to figure out how to capture was distributionality. In English, it is the difference between "all" and "each" or "every".

In researching the problem, I came across mention of natural languages which use a single word for both "all" and "every". When it is applied to plural or mass nouns, it means "all", and when applied to a noun in the singular, it means "every". I was prepared to lose some of the distinctions that English makes, but upon reflection, this distinguishes just as much as English does along the distributionality axis (see below, however, about "each" and "every"). After all, in English, we don't use "all" with singular countable nouns (though we do use "all of" with them, but this means "the whole of", a meaning which I can easily capture via "every part of"), and we don't use "every" with a mass noun like "water" (unless making it a count noun via a discretizing noun like "drop (of)"), and cannot use it with a noun in the plural ("every shoes" is just wrong in English). It seems, in fact, like English's distinction between "all" and "every" is rather redundant!

So Mirexu jur, or a word like it (I still have to figure out what part of speech these should be!), will mean both "all" and "every". And, in a turn rather strange-sounding to English ears, Mirexu nus, meaning "some", will work as we expect in the plural, but when modifying a singular noun, will have a meaning closest to the English "each of some of", and not at all like the singular English construction "some man".

(Now what could be the distributive of "none"? Or is that inherently distributive? Heh.)

And as for the difference between "each" and "every"? It turns out that this is a difference of definiteness. Definiteness is very important to English, but not to Mirexu. Mirexu "each" and "every" are the same word.

Recent developments in Mirexu

It seems that I haven't written here about Mirexu, mërèchi's sister language. Perhaps there wasn't anything much to write by the time I stopped updating.

Mirexu has been used in two Conlang relays, numbers 15 and 16. The text I produced for Relay 15 was quite satisfying, but inbetween then and Relay 16, I lost my notes on when to use which kinds of complement clause. The resulting text for Relay 16 is painful for me to read; every single sentence ended up being a content-filled subordinate clause and an empty main clause consisting only of a modal verb (sometimes two deep!).

So! In an effort to wrench Mirexu back from the wrongheaded direction it took off the rails over a year ago, I recently resumed development.

Mirexu is meant to be a polysynthetic language. I'm attempting to build it entirely out of inflected forms of noun and verb roots, as Comrie analyzes Tamil to be. I am also drawing upon Abkhaz for inspiration. All of the roots and many of the bound morphemes are imported from mërèchi through a regular sound change process which mainly affects the vowels.

The corrections made so far, on the 19th of January, are:

• situational possibility (can, is able to) is to be expressed with the derivational morpheme -se on the main verb, instead of the construction using a complement clause in -i followed by the fully inflected verb aisen, "may"
• situational necessity (must, needs to) will use the newly-created derivational morphemes -dju (for positive necessity) and -dar (for negative necessity), instead of the construction using a negated complement clause and the fully inflected verb adarusan, "must not"
• epistemic possibility and necessity will probably still use a periphrastic construction, unless I introduce evidential morpemes

Other blemishes introduced by the relay which still need to be corrected include:

• create a way to say "always" without using the verb root kumela "to continue on"
• create an overall scheme for the treatment of "any", "every", "each" etc. without needing adverbs, adjectives or periphrastic constructions
• address conditional statements, both if...then and when...then

There is a lot of work to do!

Why are there two different 'k's in mërèchi?

Well, yes, "because T.E. Hastely spelled it that way," sure. But in the case of 'k' and 'c', he was simply reflecting a distinction preserved in the native orthography. In fact, while the dialect he studied had merged the sounds represented by 'c' and 'k', the distinction was alive and well elsewhere: 'c' is labialized before front vowels, and 'k' is palatalized before back values, giving pronunciations as follows:

Spelling	Pronunciation (mërèchi)	After sound shift (mirexu)
kà	/kja/	/kje/
cà	/kwa/	/kwe/
kè	/kE/	/kE/
cè	/kwE/	/kwE/
ké	/ke/	/ki/
cé	/kwe/	/kwi/
kí	/ki/	/ku/
cí	/kwi/	/kwa/
kú	/kju/	/kjo/
cú	/ku/	/ko/
kó	/kjo/	/kja/
có	/ko/	/ka/
kò	/kjO/	/kjO/
cò	/kO/	/kO/

Note that the mirexu pronunciation which would have sound-shifted into */kwu/ dissimilates into /kwa/, giving a three-way distinction between cí /kwa/, có /ka/, and kó /kja/! Mirexu is also left without a /ke/ or /kju/ sound.

New words for 8/16/07

-dúr: to be anxious about X
yirdúr: to stress over everything
kàkesdür: to stress over nothing at all

-madü: an X which happens regularly or periodically
càlëmadü: menstrual period
yirdúria calëmàdüki: PMS
calëmadüdúria: anxiety about one's period

yirdúria màmi: anxiety of being a mom
mamiadúria: anxiety about motherhood
mamëdúria: anxiety over one's mother!

síri: moist, humid (but not necessarily càshi)
làri: arid, dessicated (but not necessarily kàli)
càshi: wet, dripping (but not necessarily síri)
kàli: dry, can be moist but not damp (not necessarily làri)

Greetings

I'll be using this blog to work out changes in my conlangs. Currently the one I'm working on is mërèchi, perhaps soon to be known as mirexu, hence the URL of my all-mërèchi in-language blog: mirexu.blogspot.com.

mërèchi started out life when I was 13, and has been my first, longest-running, and most personal conlang. However, what it has not been is rigorous, realistic, and free from unwanted English influences. So I am trying to take it in a new direction - changing it from a quirky, idiosyncratic, badly-spelled personal language, into more of a LostLang-like form.

In this first post I will briefly outline two fixes for the benighted orthography of mërèchi (to see how, well, naive it is, check out here; ignore the half-baked reform at the bottom). The first is absolutely crucial: a native script. Putting the words in their own native script demotes the orthography to a mere transliteration scheme, and I have already come up with a reasoable excuse for the transliteration scheme: blame dead people! I have invented a 19th-century missionary-linguist upon whose ignorance I can place the blame for the orthography (see here).

But to go further, I feel the need to distance the "new" mërèchi from the old, in order to be able to scrap some of the things that will need scrapping. So there will be some sound changes. In order of certainty (from things I am committed to implementing down to wild speculation), they are:

• the endings -i and -a change to -u and -e
  
• other unstressed vowels change cyclically, i -> u -> o -> a -> e -> i
  
• unstressed final ai -> O (this is X-SAMPA for the "short" o, or an aw sound)
  
• unstressed final ue -> we
  
• more restrictive rules for consonant clusters
  
• maybe all the vowels change as above. Note that this still leaves /E/ and /O/ unchanged.
  
• possibly degrade labial consonants: Cp/pC -> p -> b -> v -> w, f -> h -> 0.

Well, that's all for now. Stay tuned for more ramblings!