Re: monovalence

On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at  8:13 PM, Henrik Theiling wrote:

> > staving Paul Bennet:
> > > Br'ga verbs each have exactly one argument. ...
> Unfortunately, I mainly created phonology and grammar outlines for S11
> so far, but no lexicon,
Same here. As stated, the problem of just coming up with which things to lexicalize
is a challenge, which I want to tackle satisfactorily before deciding which
European terms to borrow and from which languages, and *then* start coming up
with native lexicon en masse.

> In contrast to you, Pete, I don't necessarily perceive the structure
> as alien -- for me, it is a naturally elegant solution to what
> e.g. Lojban tries to do the other way around: to solve the argument
> vs. adjunct problem.  Instead of finding the borderline of core cases
> vs. secondary cases (i.e., arguments vs. adjuncts), this type of
> language has a fixed borderline at exactly one argument.  No problem,
> just a neat, simple borderline.  Combined with the concept of serial
> verb construction, it feels perfectly human to me.
>
> Of course, it's extreme, but I don't feel it's alien.
I concur, especially with the Br'ga notion of the simple, quite generic,
case-like verbs, which make the language seem quite like just another
incorporating language on the surface.

> So how did you come up with the idea?  As I said, for me, it was a
> solution to the (my?) argument vs. adjunct problem.
I was initially inspired by Inuit, Inuktitut and similarly structured languages,
with scads of compounding, incorporation and derivation. Things got
*incredibly* chaotic (early Br'ga posts may have made this more or less clear),
and I felt like it needed a serious simplification and rationalization. The
notion to make each word consist of just one noun (plus derivations) and one
verb (plus derivations) just kinda came to me, in a strange gradual way, while
I was tooling around with some of my (now discarded) example sentences.

Also gone for a Burton is the old vowel system, which had three rows after the
pattern /i y y_w M u/ and now has /i M u/ instead. That choice naturally ruled
out a bunch of lexical items, but went a long way in making the language a lot
easier for me to pronounce.



Paul