Re: TRANS: Happiness (& a question for Christophe)

Hi!

Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...> writes:
>
> i(l) ([i] before a consonant, [il] before a vowel): demand/discovery form
> y(l) ([i"] before a consonant, [i"l] before a vowel):
> uncertain/speculative form
> a(l) ([a] before a consonant, [al] before a vowel): status quo/state form
>
> Again, horrendously fuzzy.  I use the symbols
> !
> ?
> .
Ah, ok.  Then this triad is basically the same that you use for other
systems of the language, like in your posting about structure
particles.

> to guide the semantics.  Hence, for <ferun> it becomes
> ! invent, create
> ? search, quest
> . find, discovery
>
> (I haven't been consistent in keeping the English definitions all nouns,
> but since you can verb-ize these nouns using the causative particles, I
> figure it's no big deal.)
Yeah, I'm used to that since Tyl-Sjok has the same word types as
Tasratal. :-)

> Tasratal being pretty new,
Preparing your participation in the new relay? :-) I did not dare to
go for S4 yet.  I fear too much work... :-)

> Let us know what you come up with, ja?
Ok.  Here's a small overview of what I have.  So far, I only have some
`nice' particles for forming actions and events.  They add aspects to
the stative lexicon forms.  I made the decision to (mostly) only have
states in the lexicon, no real actions.  Quite unrealistic from the historical
point of view, of course, but it's an arlang. :-)

The modifying particles to a state X are the following:

   la X   - inchoative:  to become X
   lu X   - resultative: to make something X
   lw X   - durative:    to be in the process of (being) X

E.g. Tyl-Sjok has no base form for `to cook'.  Instead:

   tulu     - to be hot like boiling water
   la tulu  - to become boiling
   lu tulu  - to bring to boil
   lw tulu  - to boil

So that's the basis, but I'd like the system to have particles for
meanings of entities not only for states and actions.  And these
should be nice.

I liked your modifiers, because the facets you can have for a base
noun are really nice, because the meaning is sometimes only slightly
shifted, providing a fine-grained and seemingly quite regular system.
In German, there are some prefixes (er-, be-, ver-) to verbs that are
usually not translated into English, because the shift is so small and
an English equivalent would be longish.  Yet they are at least a bit
regular.  But also quite rare, so I can barely find examples...

E.g.: both `verdreht' and `gedreht' = `turned'.  `verdreht' implies
that some previous order was destroyed, while `gedreht' only means
that something was basically turned.  (I don't say you cannot express
this difference in English, e.g. by a phrasal verb, but the German
system is so morphological that it is nice for puns without obviously
expressing the meaning directly).  Tasratal modifiers seem to address
that issue.

I'll see what I can do in Tyl-Sjok, which has no morphology.

**Henrik

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