Re: Absolute constructions

Trying to work this out as I post... scuse me if I ramble a bit.

Muke Tever wrote:

>> Disturbing realisation: I have no way of doing this in Rhean. BIG syntactic
>> hole there. Problem is that the non-finite forms (infinitive, adverbial
>> participle, etc) cannot have an explicit subject in Rhean. There's got to be
>> some way around that. But what?
>
>Perhaps it's the same construct used to express the agent of a passive verb?
Hmm maaaybe... that's marked with a preposition |zize| (acc. case). It comes
originally from |zizek| "to suffer (sthg)", but got generalised and lost the
negative meaning.

Could be done though, cause it'd be like "suffering condition A, we did B".
But it's kinda... not right. Using an example a.c. from the Bartleby site:

(with) The paint now dry, we brought the furniture out on the deck.

The closest thing to "the paint now having dried" would be
graska lud undvokhov aze
paint now dry-PTP be-AVP

|aze| is the adverbial participle of "to be"; the AVP is a lot like the
Japanese -te form and can link verbs. Problem is that this form assumes the
same subject as the main verb; what you get with |graska undvokhov aze| is
"the paint, having dried, (did something else)"
So that's no good. But I could go with, like you said, the same thing that
marks an agent -- zize.

(And "the now-having-dried paint" would be
lud undvokhov graska
which sounds much more natural in Rhean than its calque in English.)

|zize| here would give something like

Zize lud undovkhov graskan, meblijin ot derasu razegiomu.
BY now dry-PTP paint-ACC , furniture-ACC upon deck-DAT bring_out-1PL:PAST

Which still doesn't ring right. The 'feel' of |zize| is too much of an agent
or a cause, so it feels like "because of the dry paint" or "the paint having
dried made us..." Etymologically it's like "suffering dry paint, we..." So I
COULD use it, but I'd have to kind of reassign the meaning of |zize|.
Otherwise I'm still without a good way to say "With X being/doing A, Y did B."
This is tricky. Aai, my brain hurts.

M