Today was a busy, busy day. That’s the nature of it, though.

Material From Today’s Class

PDFs

• Class Slides
• Something to Help with Question 4

Links

• List of Noun Cases
• Old Explanation of Ergativity
• Newer Video on Ergativity (Shorter)

Assignments

Reading

• AoLI Chapter 3, pp. 199-207

Practice

• Post something to our Slack’s #general channel that makes you happy. (Yes, this is a freebie, because I know MA3 is a bit of a bear. Free points! Take advantage of this!)

Mastery

• MA 3: Case and Gender

Backburner

• Keep looking at MA4.

Today we jumped into nominal morphology. Nouns are the best. As you look at nouns, start to think, “How could this noun evolve into a bit of morphology?” Conversely, when you look at a suffix or prefix, think about, “Where might this thing have come from?”

Material From Today’s Class

PDFs

• Class Slides

Links

• Reddit AMA where we did a bunch of words for butterflies
• Etymonline.com
• A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary
• Proto-Indo-European Lexicon

Assignments

Reading

• AoLI Chapter 2, pp. 113-135
• AoLI Chapter 2, pp. 153-158 (Optional)
• AoLI Chapter 3, pp. 184-197

Practice

• Since we’ve started work on nouns, let’s create some words! Using some of the etymological resources listed above, come up with two new nouns that are likely to be basic, and post their proto- and modern forms to our #lexicon channel. (Try to do different ones from those who post before you, but I won’t hold you to having to create totally unique words. Do at least one unique one!)
• Using Wikipedia, find a natlang that has a case system (something other than unmodified and oblique—three or more cases, on the nouns and the pronouns), and post it to our #morphology channel. (Note: A language like Japanese that has postpositions that are explicitly for basic case? Still counts.)

Mastery

• (None Today)

Backburner

• Here’s an early look at MA3. You probably won’t be able to do much (or any) of it now, but I at least want you to start thinking about.
• Ditto MA4, which is the next stage of your language.

There is no class today, on account of Memorial Day. Enjoy the holiday!

Week 1 is in the books! Your task this weekend is to complete the first step of your final project. For reading, we’ll be preparing to jump straight into nominal morphology. In so doing, I’ve assigned two readings on iconicity, in addition to the AoLI selection. Iconicity is a really awesome and really important concept we’ll be discussing more next week, but I wanted to give you some background reading on it. Having said that, both pieces are fairly long, and, in spots, fairly complex. Basically, I want you to read the beginning of the Haiman paper to get the gist of what he’s saying, then maybe look at the Dingemanse, et al. paper, which is much shorter, and especially take a look at the tables/figures at the end. Some interesting ideas there!

Material From Today’s Class

PDFs

• Class Slides
• Arthur S. Abramson “The Plausibility of Phonetic Explanations of Tonogenesis”
• Graham Thurgood “Vietnamese and Tonogenesis: Revising the Model and the Analysis”

Links

• Dothraki Blog
• Dothraki Wiki
• The Dritok Language by Don Boozer
• AoLI Video on Register Tone Languages

Assignments

Reading

• AoLI Chapter 2, pp. 97-112
• John Haiman “Iconic and Economic Motivation” [PDF] (Optional)
• Mark Dingemanse, Damián E. Blasi, Gary Lupyan, Morten H. Christiansen, Padraic Monaghan “Arbitrariness, Iconicity and Systematicity in Language” [PDF] (Optional)

Practice

• Find a natlang grammar on Wikipedia that has a section related to nominal number morphology. Find one that distinguishes something other than singular vs. plural and post it to our Slack in the #morphology channel.

Mastery

• MA 2: The Phonology of Your Language

Backburner

• Since your phonology is set, why not start generating some roots? Think about what would make good word forms in your language. It’ll be great to have a cache of these on hand as we move forward!

Today we talked about sound change, which sets the stage for stuff like stress and tone. Sound change is the cause of—and solution to—all your problems. I know there was a lot of material today, but the important takeaways are the major types of sound changes (assimilations, dissimilations, lenitions, fortitions, deletions, insertions), and the principles that underlie them. Often when creating a language you have to make up your own sound changes, whether they ever existed or not. Keep that in mind when you look at your homework tonight!

Material From Today’s Class

PDFs

• Class Slides
• The Kahtsaai Language by William Annis
• Index Diachronica

Links

• Sound Change Article on Wikipedia
• FrathWiki List of Sound Changes
• Lenition (This one’s particularly good!)
• Online Index Diachronica

Assignments

Reading

• AoLI Chapter 1, pp. 66-78
• AoLI Chapter 1, pp. 89-96

Practice

• Scour Wikipedia or other sources and find an interesting sound change, and post it to our #evolution channel. (This should help with the homework!)

Mastery

• Mastery Assignment (MA) 1: Sound Change

Backburner

• Continue examining the first stage of your final project.