Re: Various Commands (was Uralic Negative Verbs)

On Sat, 1 Apr 2006 16:00:36 +0300, John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
wrote:

>> >I don't think it's
>> >even possible to actually order oneself. Alternately, it's trivial -
>> >everything a person does is "ordered" by hirself... but these are mental
>> >orders. I mean, a language can sure allow for a first person imperative
>> >construction, but it can be only used to announce an already existing
>>urge;
>> >never to inform oneself of it. This is what makes true 1SG imperativs
>> >impossible.
>
>>if one can use an imperative with the
>>3rd person, it is hardly much of a stretch to use it for the 1st person.
>>In fact the English construction using "let" provides a certain
>>continuity between the two.
>>
>>True, imagining it as a command is not exactly accurate, but as
>>natural languages (like Finnish) have 3rd pers. imperative forms
>>(which also cannot really be interpreted as commands*), then the
>>extension to first person I think is really justified.
>
>>Harold
>
>I'm not trying to say that it's impossible that grammatical categories
>called "imperativ" can never be applied to 1st person; that would be
absurd.
>Only that they're never commands. And since commands are the most typical
>usage of imperativs, I view these (and yes, 3p too) as "marginal" or
>"idiomatic", or indeed "non-true" usage.
>
>The Finnish "3p imperativ" actually used to be optativ, but was reanalyzed
>after the other forms fell out of usage.
Well...actually when I looked at it for avesta, instead of trying to
expand a imperative to other persons, I actually expanded the optative
to second person....like "Let it be that you give me a cookie" assuming
that the listener will get the message.

>AFMCL, in uwjge orders are expressed with the help of specific 2p
>pronouns... so "eat your veggies!" would look something like "you-IMP are
>eating your veggies". (Sorry for the lack of translations, but my lexicon's
>still very unstable.)
This is an interesting idea....thus making it mutually exclusive of other
pronouns. What would happen if your verb was in the past tense or
conditional and you used the imperative pronoun with it?

Harold

Replies