Re: demonstratives

Well, elenyo doesn't have articles so I take the line that the use of
demonstratives will also be fairly limited. For example in English, take
this sentence:
"Don't listen to that man" (whilst pointing to a single person in an
otherwise empty courtyard)
Now, in elenyo I would just render that 'Don't listen to man' unless you get
a different scenario whereby you're pointing to someone in a crowded
courtyard - then I would use the demonstrative so it is not ambiguous who I
am refering to.
However, as elenyo likes to refer clauses and sentences back to previous
ones through anaphoric means, I imagine the demonstrative pronouns would be
fairly common.
The system I have made goes as follows:

   Visible   Invisible
                  Near  Far
s. dae         déto   déta
pl.daen       déton  détan

(no near/far distinction made when the item is visible)

These forms are both demonstratives and demonstrative pronouns.
They follow after the noun and any associated adjectives
They inflect for case using the regular (as opposed to most elenya pronouns)
case suffixes which are:
hin - ergative
no ending - absolutive
has - dative
hé - genetive
yis - allative
yas - ablative

(note it is always the singular suffixes that are used, as the
demonstratives already have their own plural form)

So, finally, some examples:

hauré dae mun?
What is this? (item is visible, near to hand, and in the absolutive case as
dae is acting as demonstrative pronoun here)

dolór hisil détan mun.
That hill is green. (détan is used as demonstrative, hill is far away and
only topical in the conversation, again in absolutive.)

leñwahin daehin atlannelo.
That man protected me. (daehin and leñwahin [the man] are ergative. No need
to put 'me' in the sentenece, as it is clear from the 'o' on the end of
atlannelo that the Object of the sentence is 1st person singular. I
translated dae as that, but wether it is near or far is not known, just that
it is visible.)

Hope this isn't like my unsual incomprehensible explanations :)

Jamestomas


----- Original Message -----
From: "Padraic Brown" <pbrown@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 2:48 PM
Subject: Re: demonstratives


> On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, James O'Connell wrote:
>
> >As I'm doing my demonstrative system in elenyo right now, I was wondering
> >how other people had done this. Do you have seperate demonstratives to
> >demonstrative pronouns or are they combined? Do they show case etc?
>
> Talarian uses the same roots (co- and to-) for demonstrative
> pronouns/adjectives as well as articles, interrogative and
> locative pronouns. They do show case, and also distinguish
> noun phrases as primary and secondary topics within the
> sentence and can also distinguish relative distance of the
> object from the interlocutors. There is also a separate
> interrogative pronoun (hi-) and several other minor pronoun
> types. Numbers also have pronominal force.
>
> Padraic.