Re: ANNOUNCE: My new conlang S11

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@Q...> wrote:

> > > Ebisédian does not use verbs for states. ...
> >
> > Ah!  That's logical. :-)
>
> Yeah, this point actually stumbled me for quite some time when I was
> designing Ebisédian grammar. For a long time I was so obsessed with
> how to handle verbs, that I completely forgot about stative
> statements. When I suddenly realized I needed a way to express those
> as well, it took me a while to try to rationalize it with the
> verb-centric system that I had developed. (This is one of the reasons
> stative sentences in Ebisédian are so strange---they were patched on
> after the fact, so some ugly kludges had to be made.)
I haven't studied Ebisédian in detail, but from what you
say now and from what I remember of your PDF grammar,
the definitions of the cases make lots of sense to me,
and the assignment of meanings to verbless combinations
of case arguments no less so.



> Ebisédian uses another (some may consider 'crazy') way of expressing
> position: the combination of the conveyant (the thing being owned)
> with the receptive (the owner). This is actually adapted from Greek,
> where the dative case is used for the owner. The receptive case does
> behave somewhat like a dative. One way to understand this is that two
> people are sitting at a table deciding to whom object X on the table
> belongs. The result of the decision would be the transferring of X to
> the owner, so the owner would be in the receptive. Hence the
> conveyant-receptive paradigm.
That use of the dative seems intuitive to the point of being
boring to me, as a native speaker ("natblab"? ;o) of a lang
that routinely parses "it is to me" as "it belongs to me".

I think you need to be less apologetic and more proud about
your grammar.  The vocabulary and the concepts it describes
are a wholly different matter, of course.  You have every
right to apologize for those.  :))



> 	fia nei kuini   bibi sei bunari kei dakat.
> 	Fia RCP acquire doll CVY woman  ORG COMPL
> 	Fia acquires a doll from the woman.
>
> 	fia nei kuini   bibi sei dakat.
> 	Fia RCP acquire doll CVY COMPL
> 	Fia acquires a doll. / Fia has a doll.
Apart from the seemingly unnecessarily large predicate
(what is that complement good for anyway?), I see
nothing wrong with that.  And the syllable count
awareness is just a freaky little obsession of mine.  ;)



-- Christian Thalmann