Re: monovalence
| From: | Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, February 21, 2006, 1:13 |
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Hi!
Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@...> writes:
About a year later, I had a similar idea and called it S11. There was
some discussion, too:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0503a&L=conlang&I=-3&P=3993
The main idea I had is already summarised in the thread about Iljena:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0407C&L=CONLANG&D=0&H=0&I=-3&O=T&T=1&P=35586
Indeed, S11 would allow noun-verb-verb-verb constructions, too. There
may even be a class of words that can substitute a noun-verb fusion,
namely adverbs. There is something here:
http://www.kunstsprachen.de/s11/
Beware: no examples, and possibly a bit dry to read because of that...
I was positively surprised to see a text in Iljena in the relay. I
did not know that the grammatical structure was virtually identical to
what I think S11 will have to look like. Currently, I gather that
Br'ga (Paul), Iljena (Pete), Q~'u^pl! (Adam), Oro Mpaa (Christian),
and S11 (myself) are languages of this kind.
Unfortunately, I mainly created phonology and grammar outlines for S11
so far, but no lexicon, so there are no sample sentences yet, just
theory (I even composed a bison grammar, but no lexicon...). Like
Paul, I also often think about how to split verbs that are 'naturally
transitive' to me into intransitive structures.
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.
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.
**Henrik
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