Re: Verb order in Montreiano

On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Roger Mills wrote:

First: thanks to all the people who've suggested reading on the Ainu
language.  :-)

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> >Will look.  And hey...I could try to brush up my German, even though I
> >suspect a year of it really isn't adequate for reading anything technical
> >or difficult.  OTOH, who knows...my advisor keeps recommending _Lehrbuch
> >der Topologie_ to me, and most of the vocab I can identify pretty quickly
> >as math terminology, it's the grammar that'd get me.  Either that or the
> >first chapter, which he says is the hardest because it tries to give you
> >an intuitive feel for the subject in layman's terms.>
>
> Give it a try-- I bet you'll surprise yourself.  Prior to grad school, my
> German consisted of the memorized lyrics from a recording of Brecht/Weill
> songs as sung by Lotte Lenya.  Very clear diction, though dialectal ([IS]
> for _ich_, e.g).  Then I had to tackle a lot of anthro/ling stuff in German,
My boyfriend does that sometimes but I think it's American sloppiness,
since I've heard him produce the sound in _ich_ (that's the IPA symbol I
can *never* remember, darnit!  and my browser refuses to play the sounds
this time...).  But then, foreign language isn't his strong point.

Tangent: After we'd started going out he once told me "ich liebe dich"
and I sat there trying to figuring out why the "sh" wasn't quite [S]
(though I couldn't tell you why then) and wondering what the heck he was
talking about.  =^)

> in particular the gospel of Austronesian linguistics, Dempwolff's
> Vergleichende Lautlehre.  It turned out to be highly formulaic and
> repetitive (lots of Malay examples helped), and while I wore out the
> dictionary, I did get the information right. The grammar tends to sort
> itself out.  (I should mention that I flunked my first German proficiency
> exam-- the rat who admistered it used a passage on Child Development, a
> page-long text consisting of maybe 3 sentences.  Dempwolff's style by
> comparison was almost simple-minded.)
Reminds me of the German CASE test I took after my one year to determine
whether I had qualification: the 2nd part had this horrendous reading
passage with every fifth word missing, and you had to decide what the
missing words were (multiple choice, 4 or 5 choices, I forget which).
Granted, the CASE is supposed to be able to test for all levels of
proficiency or something, so we probably *weren't* supposed to understand
a whole lot, but all I got out of the reading passage was some queen and
her husband the king (I *swear* it said König, unless it also means
something else...?), and she was writing to a Herr Doktor psychologist?
something? because the king had started insisting on wearing nothing but
green, and she would have to dress him in things other than green, or....

If this sounds at all familiar to *anyone* out there I would love to know
what this incredibly messed-up sounding story actually *did* mean.
<shaking head>  It didn't sound like any fairytale I knew of....