Re: Predicate nominals in Piata (Andreas's Law of Freaks strikes again!)

daniel andreasson wrote:

>Then I thought I could express that as 'It is one cow'. But
>how would I do that? There is no copula verb.
>
>So I thought, what if 'cow' got denominalized to 'to be a cow'?
>I created the denominalizer _-chv_ (_v_ is /V/) and suddenly I
>had the word _akachv_ 'to be a cow'.
It's been a couple of years since I looked at any Turkish grammar, but I
think they do something similar with -tir, which harmonises with the
previous vowel. But I may not be remembering that right.

>So I translated the sentence 'My father is a chief'. This came
>out as:
>
>nu  -ata     fu  -chahta-chv
>3PAT-father  3PAT-chief -DENOM
>'My father is a chief.'
>
>Literally, this means 'My father, he chiefs/is chiefing.'
>
>"Now, that's an odd way of expressing this construction," I thought.
>"Aren't there any better or more sane ways of expressing it?" I looked
>up copular expressions in my copy of "Describing morphosyntax" and
>imagine my surprise when EXACTLY THIS CONSTRUCTION is found Bella
>Coola. It's even a Native American language! Just like Piata! This
>construction seemed so perfect for Piata, and it was even more perfect
>than I could imagine. (Actually, it was *exactly* as perfect as I could
>imagine. :)
When you say EXACTLY that construction, do you mean right down to the
prefixed person/patient? 'Cause that would be quite the anadew.

>One more very weird thing happened to me today, which I have to tell
>y'all about in a later mail.
Yeah I've just read that; pretty wild!

M

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