Elicitation is back with a vengeance

Ramata is now back from Tongo-Tongo and working with me. The last couple days have been very productive. Yesterday, I went through a lot of noun phrase and relative clause structures. There's some cool tone stuff that happens there. For instance, as I mentioned before, an adjective will force tone dropping on the preceding noun, but a number does not. In a possessive construction, such as "Ramata's cows", the possessor will force tone dropping on the following noun, so cow gets its tone axed. If you have a phrase like "Ramata's black cows", Ramata axes the tone on the noun and adjective. However, if the phrase is "Ramata's three cows" or "Ramata's three black cows", the number retains its tone.

As for relative clauses, the head noun of a relative clause also has its tone dropped, plus cool stuff happens like the determiner and plural enclitic being after the participle. For example, you get something like:

naa mi sEmE gE=mbe
cow I slaughtered the=plural
The cows I slaughtered

with "cow" losing its tone. Here, if you have a numerical quantifier, the number DOES lose its tone.

naa taandugo mi sEmE gE=mbe
cow three I slaughtered the=plural
The three cows a slaughtered

And what's more, if the head of a relative clause is a possessor phrase, even the possessor drops its tone, so you can get a really long string of low tones if the head of the relative phrase is complex, such as:

ramata naa taandugo mi sEmE gE=mbe
Ramata cow three I slaughtered the=plural
Ramata's three cows that I slaughtered

wherein the first high tone that happens is on the pronoun "mi." Finally, the demonstrative pronoun "this" or "that", which comes in the same position as the determiner "the", will cause the same tone dropping PLUS it will force the tone to drop on the participle itself, so "slaughtered" would also end up low toned.

So I've been working on some of that, plus I got a rough transcription/translation done of my first text, a nice animal story about why we humans should not give the sun a wife, even though the rest of us have one. When I clean the translation up, I will share.

More later.