User:Wball1/Language selection

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Who I will work with

I'll work with anyone.

Languages

Here's some languages I would like to work on this semester in very rough order of preference:

Konkani

Grammar

Konkani is primarily fusional, with a pretty hefty amount of morphology conveyed mostly through suffixes with some prefixes. It is Indo-Aryan, so that isn't a big surprise. It's grammar is very similar to other Indo-Aryan languages.

Description

As of the 2011 Indian Census, there are 2,256,502 Konkani speakers. It is spoken in the western coastal region of India, most prominently in the Indian state of Goa. It is written using a variety of scripts, including Devanagari, Kannada, Latin, Mayalayam, and Arabic. The ISO code is kok for Konkani as a whole and gom for Goan Konkani and knn for Maharashtrian Konkani.

Texts

It will be very easy to find texts in Konkani (there's one from 1187).

Comments

I took Intro to Sanskrit and Intro to Sanskrit Grammar and found it absolutely fascinating, and Wikipedia says that Konkani "retains elements of Vedic structures," which just seems very cool to me. I considered Magahi and Maithili, as well, for similar reasons, and would be happy to work with either, but I figured I should put three fairly distinct languages on my list.

Kabardian

Grammar

Like many Caucasian languages, Kabardian is agglutinative with an absolutely insane amount of morphology [1] conveyed primarily through suffixes.

Description

According to various censuses, there are about 1,712,000 Kabardian speakers. It is spoken in the Northern Caucasus. It's written primarily with Cyrillic. The ISO code is kbd.

Texts

It will also be quite easy to find texts in Kabardian.

Comments

I don't know anything about Kabardian, but I know Caucasian languages by their reputation for extreme morphology and my cursory overview of Kabardian did not disappoint. Like with Konkani and Magahi, I also considered Lezgian, because it also has a ton of cool-looking morphology, but, again, I should put three fairly distinct languages on my list.

Yawelmani/Yowlumne

Grammar

It's definitely not isolating, but I'd have to read quite a bit more to find out if it's agglutinative or fusional, but my guess is agglutinative, based on a grammar sketch I skimmed (from the beginning of Yowlumne in the Twentieth Century). There are several cases, tenses, aspects, moods, valences, etc. all indicated via suffixes or reduplication.

Description

Yowlumne is on the verge of extinction, with an estimated 25 fluent speakers, although there are revitalization efforts. It is historically spoken in Southern California by Yokuts living along the Kern River, though it is now mostly spoken in or near the Tule River Reservation. When written, it is written with the Latin alphabet. It does not have an ISO code.

Texts

Cursory googling was not very fruitful, but there is a surprisingly large amount of research done on Yowlumne, which requires data, so, presumably, it's out there somewhere.

Comments

I actually live very near the ancestral land of some of the Yokuts, and learned a little bit about them in elementary school. Despite not having any real personal connection with Yowlumne, it is still quite sad reading about a language originally spoken near where I live slowly die.

Resources

Here's some of the resources I was able to find after a bit of looking around. [2] [3],,,