Re: Do you want a French "little" or a Dutch "little"? :))

Siyo!

--- Ihekwike Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> :

>
> So to bring back the subject to conlang matters,
> I've been wondering how you
> people thought about the quantifiers in your
> conlangs, and if you actually
> thought of those problems of presupposed value of a
> "little" in your conlangs.
> It may be a nice thing on which adding some cultural
> specifications, that
> wouldn't appear clearly at first but would be very
> important for the actual
> understanding of the language.
>
Good point!  That was actually one of the very first
things I thought of in Kayasanoda.  I had been
contemplating the problems posed by the existential
and universal quantifiers in second-order logic, how
you can't distinguish between "There are few" and
"There are a lot" because, since they exist but don't
point to everything of that kind, they're both
assigned the quantifier (E) .

However, one of my aims with Kayasanoda was
minimalism, so having a huge number of quantifiers at
hand like English was out of the question.  I settled
on five quantifiers (a very handy number in
Kaysanoda).  I took five terms and "Kayasized" them
from Cherokee.  By coincidence, the term for "none"
ended with -ne, which I also use for negation purposes
in other contexts, but having taken it from French.
Here are my root words:

kadla= all, complete, entire, etc.
kodi= many, much, a lot, etc.
kada= some, several, etc.
kida= few, little, a couple, etc.
line= no, not any, etc.

Note that there is no distinction between number and
amount--agglutinating the roots into what they
quantify suffices pragmatically.

Dana
Clint


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