Re: ANNOUNCE: My new conlang S11

Hi!

Christian Thalmann <cinga@...> writes:
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Henrik Theiling <theiling@A...> wrote:
>
> >    The word order is
> >
> >        noun verb noun verb ... noun verb.
>
> Ah, just like Oro Mpaa.  I'm afraid I can't take the credit for
> that idea, though, since I stole it from yet another conlang...
Seems like *the* solution then! :-))

> was it bac?  I don't remember.  Anyway, check out the grammar
> section of Oro Mpaa someday:
>
>   www.cinga.ch/langmaking/orompaa.html
Hmm?  But you state in 5.2:

* SVO: Transitive clause.  The first noun phrase acts as the subject,
  the second one as the object.
  ...
  *  Ttou cel heite.  {man see tree}  "The man sees the tree."

But S11 will not have transitive clauses.

As for the SVC constructions -- they are borrowed from natlangs.
I myself encountered them first in Mandarin Chinese.

> As for your idea to have three separate verbs for "to ask", "to
> be asked (a question)" and "to be asked (from someone)", that
> seems a bit like semantic overkill.  I suspect your speakers
> would very quickly end up generalizing one verb (e.g. "to be
> asked (a question)") for generic dative use, and you'd get a
> dative case or preposition instead of the auxiliary verb.
Something like that, yes.  I'll construct it to be more specific than
'dative', though, so that I'd get 'addressed' as a verb or something.

> On the other hand, if "lu 1 ni 2 pa 3" or whatever mean
> "1 asks 2 of 3" and "lu 1 go 2 se 3" are "1 gives birth to
> 2 seeded by 3", you can distribute the morphological
> distinctness needed for lexical diversity onto all three
> components, allowing the single components to be short and
> (by themselves) ambiguous.  One could re-analyze this
> structure as a verb INTO which the arguments are infixed.
Hehe. :-)))  But I want unary verbs! :-)

The precise way of planning what the verbs mean are indeed not fixed
yet, and I expect to make a lot of investigation in natlangs, so this
is all very interesting input for me! :-)

**Henrik