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Lurker surfaces and requests critique.

From:Steven Williams <feurieaux@...>
Date:Thursday, July 18, 2002, 4:40
Ladies and gentlemen of the mailing list, I present my
first really successful conlang project. I'm working
rather hard on it, so what you guys see now might have
been changed signifigantly, but I'll present some
examples of what I want critiqued anyways. I'll
eventually stuff it into a webpage and provide a link.

Firstly, I have a really unique way to indicate
relationships. For example, 'the cat ate the mouse'
would be -

"Mavs kat jenkui."
mouse cat eat.(actor marker [ku]).(perfect marker [i])

('kat' and 'mavs' are not the real words, by the way
:). Haven't started attacking the vocabulary yet.)

The subject and the verb are treated as one
inseperable item whose components may not be moved
about - the verb itself is marked and the subject is
left alone.

The subject _must_  precede the verb, but the
subject-verb combination may go anywhere. 'Mavs kat
jenkui' and 'kat jenkui mavs' mean the same thing, but
'kat mavs jenkui' switched the roles around, as if
Jerry bulked up and went after Tom with fork and
knife.

And alternately, by using the patient marker instead
of the actor marker, we get a construction that
parallels the passive voice. Thus, 'the cat was eaten
by the mouse' -

'Mavs kat jenlei.'
mouse cat eat.(patient marker [le]).(perfect marker
[i])

Other relationships can be expressed as well, like
instrumentivity and location. So, 'the cat ate for the
mouse' would read -

'Mavs kat jenrui.'
mouse cat eat.(benefactive marker [ru]).(perfect
marker [i])

All in all, a pretty weird way of expressing this sort
of thing. This sounds a whole lot like a mangled
trigger system - I tried to figure out how triggers
work, but I'm so dense, that a teaspoonful of me
weighs as much as a battleship, so I gave up.

But since I'm so resourceful that I'd use a
teaspoonful of me as a controllable gravitational
field so I never have to reach for something again, I
came up with this, based on my pitiful understanding
of Philipino languages.

So... Opinions? Any problems I didn't trap in
perpetual orbit around my center of mass?

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JS Bangs <jaspax@...>