Re: Negation?

At 17:15 07/07/99 -0700, you wrote:
>Patrick Dunn done wrote:
>
>>My language Hatas-Oa, the notes of which have been lost, had no negative
>>forms.  To say, "don't shut the window!" you'd have to say "let the window
>>remain open."  It required a strange sort of precision, actually.
>>
>>"Do you want somethiing to drink?"
>>"I am satisfied."
>>
>>"Do you want some tea?"
>>"I like coffee."
>
>Very interesting.  Reminds me of Laadan, in which it is allegedly impossible
>to directly contradict someone (although, as we've discussed on this list,
>that's not strictly speaking true).
>
>It seems that the Hatas-Oa system would work for concepts that have
>opposites ("open" and "shut", for instance), but that it would run into
>problems with non-polar concepts.  How, for instance, could you express
>something like "John is not my brother" or "It didn't rain yesterday"?
>I suppose you could come up with non-negative paraphrases which would
>get those ideas across (e.g. "John is someone else's brother", "It was
>sunny yesterday"), but of course those don't convey exactly the same
>meaning.
>
>Hatas-Oa speakers must have a rather unique understanding of truth-
>conditional semantics...  :-)
>
        That's why I want to have such a feature in Tj'a-ts'a~n: I don't want the
Sky People to have such a true-false logic.

>Matt.
>
>------------------------------------
>Matt Pearson
>mpearson@ucla.edu
>UCLA Linguistics Department
>405 Hilgard Avenue
>Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
>------------------------------------
>
>
                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html