Terkunan revision

Hi!

Yesterday night, I worked through my TODO list of Terkunan and revised
it a bit.  The reason for most of the changes is to minimise the
number of roots, while retaining a typically Romance look and feel.

  a) I unified the demonstrative pronouns _kul_ 'this' and _kus_
     'that' into only one, _kul_ 'this; that'.  Further adverbs may be
     used to clarify, if necessary (but due to limited lexicon, those
     do not yet exist...).

     This helps my German brain when translating into Terkunan...


  b) I unified the relative pronoun _ki_ and the interrogative _ke_
     into _ke_.

     Think English: 'that' vs. 'that'.


  c) I unified the definite article _le_ and the 3rd person pronoun
     _il_ because _il_ constantly triggered off problems (e.g. with
     its plural, with the way contractions work, etc.etc.).  The
     resulting word is _le_ and the plural pronoun is _lez_ (there is
     no special plural article).

     Think colloquial German:

        'Der Mann spinnt.'  - 'The man is crazy.'
        'Der spinnt.'       - 'He is crazy.'

     Before this change, all pronouns could be prefixed to a noun for
     possessive meaning:

         le kan     - the dog
         mi kan     - my dog
         tu kan     - your dog
         il kan     - his/her dog

     The last one was particularly confusing I think.  Now that _il_
     has become _le_, it can obviously not be prefixed anymore because
     _le kan_ is already occupied.  So there is now an exception that
     the 3rd persion pronoun cannot be prefixed and the normal
     suffixed possessive with _de_ must be used:

         kan de le  - his/her dog

     Although an exception, is seems very reasonable to me.


  d) I introduced an irregular verb form of _es_ 'to be', namely
     the perfect participle _fut_ instead of the regular _esat_.

     The reason for this is that I found _esat_ really ugly.

     The verb _es_ is the only irregular verb and it has another
     irregular form, namely the past tense, which is _fu_ instead
     of _ava fut_ or even _av'esat_.

Please tell me what you think!

For more info:

    http://www.kunstsprachen.de/s25/

Some texts are at the very end.

Bye,
  Henrik

PS: Some features of the language that do not minimise the number of
    roots don't seem to strike me as a contradiction to my goals.
    Most notably, I have inclusive and exclusive 2rd person pronouns,
    a 'representative' 2rd persion pronoun (check the web page) and
    also honorific 3rd person pronouns.  The reason I think is that I
    just don't want to give up neither 'mi' nor 'noz' in the 3nd
    persion and neither 'tu' nor 'voz', because they are so nicely
    Romance.

--
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