Re: Imperatives... does this work?

H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> writes:

> On Wed, Jul 24, 2002 at 01:31:38AM -0700, Nihil Sum wrote:
> > Wondering if this makes sense:
> >
> > When indirectly quoting imperatives in Rhean, I've decided to keep the
> > imperative form.
>
> That makes sense. My L1 (Hokkien) works that way sometimes, too. :-)
> I suspect it's an IE phenomenon to change quoted imperatives into
> infinitives or some other verb form, but someone better-clued should step
> up and (dis)prove me.
English goes for the infinitives. Spanish prefers the subjunctive,
which is at least a finite form. That's because Sp only has a
second person real imperative; the other persons are taken from
the subjunctive mood.

    |Ven aquí.|       "Come here."
    |(Que) venga.|    "Let him come." / "That he comes."

For Rhean, you could maybe use an alternative way: a particle that
marks reported speech. The Bokuchi language (I've renamed it to
|Senu yiVokuchi|) uses |-le| for reported speech and as a hearsay
mark (probably the remains of a whole set of attitudinal affixes):

    |Votu okeo didele.|
     vot-u   o-keo         di-de-le
     say-PST VOL-listening IMP-be-REP
     he said "be listening"

    |Votu eokeo e didele.|
     vot-u   e-o-keo            e  di-de-le
     say-PST EMPH-VOL-listening 1s IMP-be-REP
     he said that I (must) be listening

VOL = volitive; EMPH = emphatic (used when an adjective precedes
a (pro)noun instead of following it). The 1st person pronoun |e|
goes near the imperative to avoid ambiguities, since the word
order SVO is flexible, and |votu e okeo didele| may also mean
"I said (that) (s/he/you) (must) be listening".


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.angelfire.com/ego/pdf/ng/index.html