roughly 30 transwoman trying to live her best life
ᓚᘏᗢ
catgirl android


https://pleasepraise.me/Laoruna


sapphicism
@sapphicism

rizzing a girl with grammar that looks like math 👍


sapphicism
@sapphicism

and also a duck. it looks like a duck


laoruna
@laoruna

...how does grammar that looks like math look like a duck?


sapphicism
@sapphicism

The left part admittedly does look like a duck
(The process being described is something called "Fluid accusivity" and its a major part of my conlang Ansión's grammar)

Im not super feeling like getting into the details of it, but remind me later and i might


sapphicism
@sapphicism

Welp, so, I'm gonna try to explain Ansión's grammar at a basic-enough level that most people can understand it. Not fully sure how to do that, but idr mind answering questions later. Btw, most of what I'm describing developed completely accidentally so I'm not entirely sure how it works myself lmoa.

But anyway, one of the most important concepts in fluid accusivity is, unsurprisingly, that of accusivity itself. Accusivity isn't a formal term in linguistics, but instead something I came up with to belp describe Ansión's grammar. Accusivity can be understood as a measure of importance of any given concept in a sentence relative to the other parts of the sentence. More simply, it can also be described as a measure of obviation. A more obviate concept is one that is less important, or less directly related, to the sentence's "peak".

It helps to imagine sentences as a descending mountain slope. At the peak of the slope is the most central concept within the sentence, which I call the "subject". Around halfway down the slope is a concept which is the direct object. Named so because it is directly related to the subject, but I usually just call it the "object". At the base of the slope is a concept that isn't closely related to the subject or which is more closely related to the object than the subject. Typically, I call this the "indirect object" or the "dative (object)".

Next, i wanna talk about the A, B, and P found in the image above. for our purposes, it doesnt really matter what they mean, but they each stand for "agent", "beneficiary" and "patient" if you want to google them or smth. but anyway, A is nearly always also the subject while B and P are nearly always the indirect object and direct object, respectfully. By default, then, most sentences follow the formula As+Bd+Po+V^-a (which is also written out fully in the above image). Sometimes though, it's a bit more complicated than that.

Let's go back to thinking about a mountain slope. The peak, this time, is labelled A. There are two "steps" on the mountainside. A step halfway down the slope is labelled P. A step at the very base of teh mountain is labelled B. If, A fell off the peak, then it woudl be forced to shelter at the nearest step. That is, the Indirect object step with B. But, there's only space for one label at any individual step. So, A forces B to run up the mountain to the next-highest step, the Direct object step. But P is already there, so B forces P to run up the mountain to the vacant peak. So, As+Bd+Po+V^-a instead becomes Ps+Ad+Bo+V^2a. The image I sent earlier depicts this exact change. Note that the V, which stands for "Verb", matches with the A. because the A became more obviate by two steps, then the V is marked with the 2a superscript

There's a lot more to it about how this works in practicality, but im a lil too tired to really get into that rn.


laoruna
@laoruna

I'm not gonna pretend I fully understand this :D but it does look very interesting! What would force A off the peak?


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @sapphicism's post: