Re: THEORY: questions

En réponse à Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>:

> Christophe Grandsire ga kakimashita:
> > (of course, those pronouns can be former nouns that were
> specialised,
> > like in Japanese).
>
> Earlier you argued that adjectives which act as nouns or as verbs
> shouldn't be called a separate class, yet Japanese pronouns likewise
> act
> like nouns.  :-)  It's even been argued that Japanese has no pronouns.
>
I'd agree, if you gave me an example of one of those Japanese words used
normally pronoun-like in a sentence where it's not used pronoun-like (that's to
say, where it doesn't refer to a participant of the conversation). Also,
pronouns don't behave like nouns when it comes to pluralization. "hana" can
mean flower or flowers, but AFAIK "anata" can never be used for "you (plural)".
For a plural "you", you're obliged to use "anatatachi". So those terms don't
actually behave like nouns, at least not for pluralization (optional, and
usually unexpressed for nouns, mandatory for pronouns). So unless what I say is
wrong, I think we can consider that Japanese has personal pronouns.

> >  Comox has a verb meaning 'to be what?' -, etc...)
>
> Interesting!  So, how do you say things like "What did you see?"
>
I don't know, I know only very little about Comox. But i'd guess that they use
a construction: "the thing seen by you is-what?", whatever their way to make
relative clauses. Funny enough, my conlang Itakian translates "what did you
see?" by:
see-destination-you.trigger source-thing

with a distinctive tone pattern on the word 'thing' to mean that it takes an
interrogative meaning. Yeah, it doesn't have specialised question words, but
normal nouns from which the tone pattern is changed grammatically.

> > I would add the necessity of 'or' too (disjunction is as essential
> as
> > association).
>
> Actually, there are languages without a word for "or".  I'm sure they
> have some other way of making that distinction, tho.
>
Yes, I think the distinction itself is mandatory. In fact, I don't see how you
can conceptualise association ('and') if you cannot conceptualise dissociation
and/or choice. To me, both concepts go together. Of course, it could be an
effect of my native language...

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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