Re: Phenomena

At 14:08 02/03/00 -0800, you wrote:
>CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
>>Would "iisáw'an" with a subject mean "<whoever> was raining"?
>
>
>Yes, exactly.
>
>So, a sentence like  "It was raining frogs" (I'm reading a page on weird
>weather phenomena , in case you are wondering), would translate as:
>Iisáw'an yu biw pakéka - Frogs were raining.
>
Did you see something quite strange with impersonal verbs like 'to rain'?
When they have an actual subject ("frogs" in your example), the impersonal
verb is considered too impersonal to have any kind of personal subject, and
thus the sentence "frogs were raining" is not correct. You have to say "it
was raining frogs", putting the subject at the place of an object, and
still using the dummy subject 'it' which has in fact no meaning. French
uses the same kind of forms: "il pleut des cordes": It's raining ropes
(equivalent to the English expression: "It's raining cats and dogs"). Yet,
you can say in a metaphoric way: "les insultes pleuvent": It's raining
insults, as if in a metaphoric meaning, a real subject was acceptable, but
not when describing a wheather phenomenon.

It may be an interesting feature, what do you think?

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org
(ou : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepages/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html)