Subject: Adjectives vs. stative verbs, plus general info

Jesse Raccio <jraja0722@...> wrote:
Subject: Adjectives vs. stative verbs, plus general info
>>>
Well, I am exploring my possiblities for the lang I am
putting together.  I am curious if anyone else has
played with removing adjectives all together and
simply using stative verbs?
<<<
 plenty of natlangs do that and don't make any difference between adjectives,
stative and active verbs either.

>>>
I figured that in complex
sentences one would break it into a stative verb
phrase and append a tran/intrans verb to these
phrases.
  The happy man went home.
  would translate best literally as:
  The man, who is happy, went home.
>>>
The fact is that many natlangs just don't use "complex" sentences a lot, if not
at all. They prefer the logical chronological phrase order (it's called
"chronoexperience"). ex:
"The happy man went home" becomes "(Yesterday) the man is happy (and) he goes
home" or else "The man is (always) happy (and yesterday) he goes home."
Khmer and spoken Japanese do that all the time although Khmer has a subordinate
pronoun "aa" and Japanese formal articles may feature quasi-pages' long
subclauses. You could even make a lang where "The man cuts down a tree with an
ax" becomes "The man takes/uses an ax, cuts the tree (and) the tree falls down."
That's not so natural though, because instrumental is a secondary core case so
you're likely to have "The man cuts the tree with an ax (and) the tree falls."

>>>
since the language is to be inflecting I figured one
could chain together a number of these stative verbs
to describe in a few words current, past and possible
future states of an object.
<<<
i don't know why, but in the natlangs i know with this kind of structure, tense
is barely relevant. Past, future, etc, are tagged with an adverb or a
"complément circonstanciel de temps" (dunno the word in english) like
"yesterday", "always", "never", "in the case that", etc. Once the tense is
tagged once, the rest of the sentence and of the following sentences don't need
to tag it anymore. Furthermore, i can witness that learning how to mandatorily
tag tense on verbs is an ordeal for these billion people and many can never get
used to it.

AFMC. Regarding "complex" sentences, Tunu does either like you say or like Khmer
does:

Taka i atica ai* amane e suba kama.
Man who be-happy there-is-that [he] go-back to home [of] him.
or:
Taka atica ua amane e suba kama.
Man be-happy and [he] go-back to home [of] him.

*ai means "there is that..." and terminates the subclause. It's really the
combination of "a" "there is" and " i" "who, that, which". I write "a" as a
prefix because it tags all verbs so the line above would read: "Taka i a tica a
i a mane e suba kama" and noone would even take a look--if anyone does anyway.

Mathias
www.geocities.com/kalatunu/index.htm

Reply