Re: Group Conlang

On Mon, 12 Oct 1998 13:29:17 -0300, Pablo Flores
<fflores@...> wrote:

>To everybody: I think it's time that we decide on some basic
>issues, namely gender, evidence, tense, and aspect. I'll restate
>my proposal with a slight modification:
>
>
>Gender (for "nouns" and maybe agreeing modifiers)
>
>person (sentient being)
>animate (animal or vegetal)
>thing (physically perceivable)
>concept (an action or abstract object)
If "person" is a gender, then we can't distinguish between two =
participants
in the same action by gender. It might be valuable to have distinct =
genders
for (e.g.) buyers and sellers, teachers and students, or other categories
of people likely to occur in the same sentence together. On the other =
hand,
Jarrda gets by with just animate, inanimate, and abstract genders (but it
uses the numerical classifiers as pronouns).

>Evidence (for all PoS's)
>
>actually perceived (you saw it/listened to it/etc.)
>indirectly perceived (i. e. by its effects)
>hearsay (they told you about it)
>hypothetical (you don't imply it's real or it happened)
>
>These would be suffixed. Gender would be compulsory,
>not evidence (and evidence would go first,
>root + [evid_tag] + gender_tag)
I like these; how about "doubtful" in addition (possible, but you don't
believe it)?