Today we can began the long day’s journey into verbs. If you want a really solid review of predicates and clause types, check out the the paper by Matthew Dryer below. Otherwise, tomorrow we’re having a guest speaker—Mr. John Quijada, about whom this New Yorker article was written—so please read the preparatory handout he wrote heading into tomorrow’s lecture. Also check out this picture they did of John for that New Yorker article (lol):

Material From Today’s Class

PDFs

• Class Slides
• Matthew Dryer “Clause Types”

Links

• Joshua Foer “Utopian for Beginners”

Assignments

Reading

• Reading from John Quijada
• AoLI Chapter 2, pp. 139-148 (or save till tomorrow)

Practice

• Go and take a look at John Quijada’s Ithkuil website. Read the Introduction (up through the section entitled “Addressing the Vagueness Inherent in Natural Languages”), then what I want you to do is find your favorite example sentence throughout the site (there are tons), and post the romanized version along with the meaning to the #morphology channel. (Note: Be prepared for a lot of sentences about clowns.)
• Find an agreement pattern in a natlang grammar—but not just any agreement pattern. Find a subject (or object or direct object) agreement pattern where the same form is used for two or more different person/number combinations. In English, for example, the verb agreement for a first person plural, second person plural, and third person plural subject will always be identical. Find an agreement pattern like that, and post a link to it along with a description of the pattern in question to our #morphology channel.

Mastery

• (None Today)

Backburner

• Start looking at MA 6!

High Valyrian is a funny language. Either way, that’s the end of week 2! Great job! ~:D Today is a good day to be alive, because you are there to appreciate it!

Material From Today’s Class

PDFs

• Class Slides
• John’s Presentation
• Andy’s Presentation

Links

• High Valyrian Portal at the Dothraki Wiki

Assignments

Reading

• AoLI Chapter 2, pp. 136-139
• AoLI Chapter 2, pp. 150-152

Practice

• Find an interesting natlang verb system (hint: they’re all interesting), and post it to our #morphology channel. Describe in a sentence or two what’s different/interesting about it.

Mastery

• MA 4: The Nouns of Your Language: Remember that for your language, you have to do two of the following: (1) a number system that distinguishes at least singular and plural; (2) a composite noun case system; or (3) a gender system. You can get some bonus points on this if you do all, but that’s not the intent of this: I really want you to just focus on two of them (and also want you to not say “My language makes no distinctions for anything!”).

Backburner

• Start thinking about some basic verb stems you can produce. Basic as it gets. What’s basic to our human experience? (Note: Apparently fear. Kind of a bummer. It’s always one of the oldest words in a language…)
• You’ll need some pronouns for your final project, so after today’s discussion, think about pronouns a bit. What do you want to do with them?

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!