Re: Classification and 'to be'

Joe, you wrote the following (among other things):

>One such distinction made is the following:
>
>le can gen le bet
>the dog is [a member of the category] animal
>
>but
>
>le bet spes can
>the animal is [has as a subcategory] dog
>
>First of all, I am not exactly sure how to term the distinction.
>Secondly, are there any other conlangs [or natlangs for that
>matter] that use such a system?
Joe, I'm afraid I don't know of any languages that make this distinction
or what to call it.  But with your permission, I would like to
incorporate the idea into Yibrisitoj, my conlang that makes explicit
what is normally implicit.

I already have an odd way of handling "to be".  In Indo-European
languages, people don't distinguish between _be_ in the following
instances:

The dog is white.
The dog is an animal.

This doesn't work well with other copulative verbs.  Take a look:

The dog looks white.
*The dog looks an animal.

I wanted all my copulative verbs to work the same way; so I decided that
copulative verbs could be followed only by adjectives and phrases that
serve as adjectives.  To link nouns with other nouns, I use the
preposition _se_ which serves to make appositives.

Karap pif raka.
Dog   be  white

Karap pif se timoj.
Dog   be     animal

If you allow me to use your idea, I could use another word, say _ge_,
when saying, "The animal is a dog."  That leaves the question of what to
do when the predicate nominative is neither a subset or a superset of
the subject.  For example, what if "Megatron is Galvatron," and,
"Galvatron is Megatron" are both true?  I think I would allow users of
my language to take their pick: _se_ or _ge_.

Pharamond

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