Re: LW again -- Noun and verb

Zesefde Thomas R. Wier  <trwier@...> ta 2002.08.28. her 13:47:18 -5h:

> Quoting Mau Rauszer <maurauser@...>:
>
> > Zesefde Thomas R. Wier  <trwier@...> ta 2002.08.27. her 13:31:57
> > -5h:
> >
> > > Quoting Mau Rauszer <maurauser@...>:
> >
> > > Do all nouns have male and female forms? If so, why? One would
> > > think that this is more a property of adjectives agreeing in
> > > gender with a noun.
> >
> > Technically they can. Male forms are usually used for living things (in
> > the
> > usual meaning) but cats see world as a *living* one and so the elements
> > can
> > be either male or female. They think all duat, darkness is the child or
> > manifestation of Duat, the concept/"god" of darkness created by Ingonyama
> > from the soul of Wiyanyama in the beginning.
>
> Okay, I hadn't realized that this language is spoken by a race
> of cat-like creatures;  I gather that these cats are not much
> like Kzin.  But it does not follow from a claim that the world
> is living that the world is also gendered, unless you further
> stipulate that fact.
Well, gender of 'inanimate' concepts is mainly used in poetry/literature used as a
way of personalization. And so, those are gendered according to their nature.

> > > > Tenses : historical past - past perfect - past - present - future -
> > future
> > > > perfect.
> > >
> > > Is the future perfect considered a tense for mophological
> > > reasons?
> > Probably...
>
> I ask, because "future perfect" is usually a label given to
> a morphological or syntactic construction that has both future
> tense and perfect aspect, and as such is not a pure tense.
Oh I see. Yeah, and they use it as if it were a true tense.

> > > > Aspects: Habitual - Continous
> > >
> > > These aspects usually pattern together in languages.  A more
> > > common split is perfective / imperfective.
> > Yeah but there they are different.
> How?
I mean in LW those 'habitual and continuos' are different, the
perfective/imperfective distinction is built into the tenses and habitual /
continuos exist as two adverse aspect.

> > > > Voice: Passive: -lu. Used when the action happens to the subject.
> > >
> > > Is there an antipassive? How about an instrumental-focuser?
> >
> > Antipassive? It's probably just the unsigned "normal" form.
>
> That is not what the term <antipassive> is usually taken to
> mean (though of course you can label your feature that, if you
> so desire).  An antipassive is a valence-changing operation on
> a transitive verb that, like the passive, makes it an intransitive
> verb.  Unlike the passive, which demotes the agent and promotes
> the patient to subject, the antipassive does the reverse, demoting
> the patient to an optional peripheral phrase and keeping the agent
> as the subject.
Well, in lW there's no need for an antipassive because all verbs can be intransitive
- although some of them are never used that way - and transitive. So there
isn't transitive verb like English only transitively suffixed verb.
--
Mau
Ábrahám Zsófia alias Mau Rauszer
    |  http://www.hiaqimau.tk  |
"Yú lawe ta mau taqe yibali amis qi ú neb dagu tawiy iq." -- Kipling