Re: comments on Itláni

From: "Jim Grossmann"

> "prepositional" and "locative":     Do you want to exclude "in" "on" and
> "at" from your inventory of prepositions?   Using only your locative case
to
> convey these relationships would make it tough to distinguish sentences
like
> these:
Perhaps one of the reasons I like Itláni (sorry to see the name Druni go,
but what can one do) is that it has a striking resemblance to Géarthnuns.
Géarthnuns has no quantitive or ablative case, but it's got all the rest. In
Géarthnuns, the locative has locative, ablative, and allative functions,
depending on context, but a postposition can always be pulled in for clarity
(with good context, a question like, "Chau teshers la cher-ha hömal?"
[Where's the cat?"] could be answered, "Chau övwarsauv." [the
chair-locative], with possible context-bound meanings "on the chair, on top
of the chair, under the chair, near the chair, beside the chair, in front of
the chair, behind the chair, etc." (in other words, "somwhere roughly in the
vicinity of the chair"). For such generality, body language like
finger-pointing or lip-pointing would be good.). Barring that, go for a
postposition.

> The ink on the book did not obscure the picture in the book.
> The ink in the book did not obscure the picture on the book.
Weird sentences, but point taken.

>  ???The ink at (in the vicinity of) the book did not obscure the picture
on/in
> the book.???
>
> ??? The ink on/in the book did not obscure the picture at (in the vicinity
of)
> the book.???
Heh? Like, "near"?

> Granted, "in," "on," and "at" could often be distinguished by context as
> implicit in a locative, but you may want prepositions available for those
> situations where context isn't sufficient to avoid ambiguity.
Again, Géarthnuns does this, but postpositions always invoke the
postpositional case.

> Another nit-picky comment:   Verbs:   Should the "tense indicator" be
> "tense/mood indicator"?
I'm not sure where Jim (Hopkins) is going here.

Since the "ya" exists in all verb forms, I'm not sure I understand why he
parses (for example):

korun + yar + u  (do/present/1st sing)

as opposed to

korunya (the infinitive) + ru (1st sing present)

whereupon you could get a paradigm like:

Present:
korunya/ru I do        korunya/ri we do
korunya/re you do    korunya/ray you (pl) do
korunya/ror he does    korunya/ren they do
korunya/rel  she does
korunya/rad  God does
korunya/ra  it does

Past:
korunya/vu I did        korunya/vi we did
korunya/ve you did    korunya/vay you (pl) did
korunya/vor he did    korunya/ven they did
korunya/vel  she did
korunya/vad  God did
korunya/va  it did

etc.

OR, one could do it

korunya + r + u
verb + pres/indicative + 1st sing

korunya + v + u
verb + past/indicative + 1st sing

korunya/v/u I did
korunya/v/e you did

etc.

thereby eliminating Jim (Grossman)'s question about tense vs. mood
indicator.

SOV totally *rules*, dewd (as do sounds like /Z/ and /dz/). Rock on.

Kou