At 14:16 31/05/99 -0400, you wrote:
>In my current conlang, I've opted against prepositions in favor of what
seem to
>be transitive adjectives (well, not strictly transitive; they can take any of
>the obique cases: accusative, genitive, locative, or instrumental) in
agreement
>with the nouns the phrase describes. Like this:
>
>metto asta celo: si:.
>mother-FEM-NOM-SG beyond-FEM-NOM-SG wall-MASC-LOC-SG is-3S-PRES-INDIC.
>"the mother is beyond the wall."
>where asta is one of these adjectives which happens to take the locative.
>
>What should I call these? I'm leaning towards "prepositional adjectives",
but I
>really have no idea.
>
I don't know any other language that has such a feature, so I think you
can invent your own name for them. In this case, "prepositional adjectives"
is as good as anything else.
>(For adverbial preposition-type phrases (like "I like to run *in my
house*"), I
>think I'll use the adjective in the masculine locative singular (the standard
>way to form adverbs: remme "swift" > remmo: "swiftly") with its object in the
>proper case. If that turns out to be workable)
>
It seems to be very workable. Just carry on!
>ever green
>sam
>
>
Christophe Grandsire
|Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.
"Reality is just another point of view."
homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html