Re: Questions about Tense/Mood/Case

Philippe Caquant wrote:

>About cases, the best thing in my opinion is trying to
>escape from your mother tongue syntax, and to compare
>at least a dozen of very different natlangs
>(Indo-European, Semitic, Caucasian, Amerindian,
>African, Oceanian…) and then to build your own system
>on semantic bases. If you start by asking yourself 'is
>there a difference between *to him* and *for him* in
>English', or between direct and indirect object, you
>won't go very far I'm afraid. That's very much
>depending of one particular natlang. You might
>consider that you need from 2 up to about 40 different
>cases.
>
>
>
 From one to forty different cases, you mean (unless you count word
order as indicating case - and even then, some languages actually have
variable word order and no cases. I'm not sure how it works either)

>It's easy to explain what is French u, it's the vowel
>sound you use in the sentence 'Tu pues du cul!' (Your
>ass is stinking). Well, more seriously, form your lips
>like you would kiss somebody, or lay an egg, and
>expell air. But that's all theory, the only way to
>understand what a sound sounds like is to listen to a
>word pronounced by a native and try do do the same. By
>the way, *French u* also exists in German (written
>with a trema on it), in Turkish, in Norwegian, and in
>several other languages, so if you have no French
>speaker around, use a Turk, or a cassette, or listen
>to some foreign radio (but NOT to a Spanish one). As
>to Arabic q, I have strictly no idea.
>
>
>
No, there's a far easier way to explain that - say [i] with your lips
rounded. You don't really need to hear anyone say it, though of course,
it would help.

Arabic 'q' - well, it's pronounced like [k], but further back.