Re: THEORY: questions

--- Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote:

> I'm curious and don't recall seeing it previously.
> How does it work (in 25
> words or less :-)  )?.  Increasingly, I find that
> "and" is mostly unncessary
> in Kash......
In Manchu, the "and" conjunction for noun phrases is
absent (lexically / morphologically); the items in a
list are simply strung along one after the other. In
writing (pretty much all that's left that you can
unambiguously call 'Manchu') they're often, but not
rigorously, separated by punctuation -- a single dot,
corresponding in this use to the Chinese-style
"list-separating comma mark".  (I forget what it's
called in Ch., sorry!).  Presumably in spoken Manchu
there was distinctive intonation in this situation.

Example:

     Nurhaci morin honin temen be gaiha.
     (name)  horse sheep camel ACC take-PERF
     'Nurhachi took the horses, sheep, and camels'

There's a word, jai, that's often misleadingly
translated as "and" in the dictionaries and so-called
grammars of Manchu, but it's really much more
restricted in use and far more specific in meaning --
its core sense is something like 'next' or 'second',
and when you read something like

    Nurhaci morin, honin, jai temen be gaiha

It can only be well understood as 'Nurhachi took the
horses and sheep and on top of that, he took the
camels' -- or maybe 'took the horses and sheep, and
next he took the camels'.

For conjoining verb phrases, it's done with the
inflectional morphology: the verb endings that
indicate aspect & mode are divided into final &
nonfinal types, with the former indicating the end of
a complete utterance, and the latter a sub-clause of
some kind or another:

Grossly oversimplified here:

   function         final        nonfinal
'imperfect'          -mbi          -me
'perfect'            -ha           -fi

So:

    Nurhaci efen jembi.
    'Nurhachi is eating bread'

    Nurhaci efen jeme nure omimbi
    'Nurhachi is eating bread and [while] drinking
wine'

    Nurhaci efen jefi nure omimbi
    'Nurhachi has eaten bread and [now] is drinking
wine'

    Nurhaci nure omime nikan be jafaha
    'Nurhachi was drinking wine and attacking the
Chinese'

and so forth.  There are other ways of linking VPs, of
course, but -me and -fi are the most 'basic' --
essentially "simultaneous and" and "sequential and",
respectively.

Is this any help/interest?

Kenji

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