Re: Group Conlang

On Mon, 12 Oct 1998, Pablo Flores 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)
>
> I like "classifiers" better than gender, and optional
> rather than compulsory.
>But I don't understand if your
> gender-markers are the way of showing noun part-of-speech;
> I like some easy way to recognize the nouns.
So do I : I've experienced through Asian languages that syntactic deixis (i.e. :
the cross-reference to parts of speech) is the only part of language that gain
being free of any ambiguity.
It's very safe to KNOW who you're discussing of.
It's very dangerous to GUESS it through Byzantine mazes.

>
> > 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)
>
> I prefer plain adverbs, not grammaticalized evidentiaries.
> Obviously, hypothetically, possibly, ranomly, guessingly.
Well, Pablo is more Japanese-like than you are:-)

Mathias



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