Re: Phenomena

Barry wrote:
>conlan-@listserv.brown.edu writes:
>>- Do as Tagalog does (since it's kind of a model for
>>  trigger languages, and Saalángal in particular, I
>>  guess). What does it do?
>
>
>Well the partial reason it sparked my question on it, was my Tagalog book
>tells how "penomenal" sentences are constructed. The book says:
>
>Sentences whose predicates consist of verbs stating certain acts of
>nature, when inflected as -um- verbs, don't show a subject phrase.
>
>ulan - rain
>umulan - it rained
>umulan nang malakas - it rained hard
>umulan sa bundok - it is raining in the mountains.
>
>Since i'm not at allfluent in Tagalog i cant give you the rest of the
>examples (they go into the -in- verbs,), so perhaps Kristian can help me
>out here.
Well, I'm not fluent myself. For what its worth, the parallel to
the '-um-' infix in Boreanesian is an agent nominalizer. I know I
have said this before, but I'll say it again; I see languages with
the trigger system as basically languages that only have predicate
nominals because the notion of subject vs object does not apply.
So if I applied this to Tagalog, the '-um-' infix is basically an
agent/actor nominalizer. E.g., <bili> 'buy' -> <bumili> 'buyer'.
Similarly, you have <ulan> 'rain' -> <umulan> 'the thing performing
the act of raining'. This is exactly how it works in Boreanesian -
though a bit more extreme.

>Anyway, since Saalangal is meant to be based off of an austronesian style
>system, and not a daughter or sister language to any existing ones,, I
>have added in things where I wanted (like the -re- infix for phenomenal
>sentences) .
I have noticed quite a number of infixes in Salaangal. Use of infixes
is extremely rare among the natlangs of the world. Even Tagalog only
has two. How many does Salaangal have? Isn't there something about a
language not having more infixes than prefixes and/or suffixes?

-kristian- 8)