Re: Active again.
| From: | BP Jonsson <bpj@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, April 1, 2003, 17:22 |
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At 22:59 29.3.2003 -0500, Sally Caves wrote:
>My confusion has
>always been that I considered even function words as serving some semantic
>purpose. I have trouble seeing semantic and grammatical (or syntactical) as
>distinct,
Yeah, I have the same problem.
At 14:21 31.3.2003 -0500, Sally Caves wrote:
>The pronouns, because they are so old, and
>so hard for me to change, have the old nominative/accusative case markings:
>y, "I"; ol, "me"; fy, "thou," fel "thee"; etc. The emphasized pronouns,
>which do make a distinction between A and E, are taking over in colloquial
>Teonaht, and stand at the head of a sentence:
You mean that the non-emphasized pronouns are old in the fictional
timeline of Teonaht, or that they are old in terms of Teonaht as a
conlang you have worked on for decades?
If it is the latter it's utterly cool. Could be both of course.
Sohlob is only five years old (as old as my son, incidentally :)
but I've got totally attached to a handful of words. I'm currently
overhauling the entire system of pronouns and determiners (as well
as the entire derivational and verbal morphologies for the umpteenth
time) and try to bend things so as to be able to keep _zal_ "that, the",
when properly it should become _zad_. OTOH I've discovered that "one, a(n)"
is actually _hah_, which makes for some interesting sandhi phenomena
when it is attached at the end of words.
Moreover, after reading this thread I think Sohlob is becoming
active rather than ergative!
And I have to stop pronouncing Teonaht as [te:O"naxt]! I know {ht} is /T/,
but how is it stressed?
/ B.Philip Jonsson B^)
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mailto:melrochX@melroch.net (delete X!)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No man forgets his original trade: the rights of nations and of kings sink
into questions of grammar, if grammarians discuss them.
-Dr. Samuel Johnson (1707 - 1784)
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