Re: isolation vs inflection & other features

At 21:52 25/04/02, Kala Tunu wrote:
>From: ebera <ebera@...> wrote:
> >>>
>We could say 'a bikini girl on the beach' or like Chinese 'girl bikini beach
>shang' shang being a locative marker.
><<<
>i'd thought it'd be: "beach shang da bikini girl." i think you're mixing
>chinese
>and khmer syntaxes.
I don't mix Chinese and Khmer. I don't speak a word of any of them. I just
have a small grammar book on Chinese which I have read last year. I have
certainly not paid enough attention in refering to it. All my apologies to
Chinese speakers!

Anyway, it doesn't change what I meant. Chinese has the same level of
case-marking than any other language.


> >>>
>[...]
><<<
>i kind of agree, but you're "ramming open doors" here as we say in french. :-)
I don't ram open doors. I don't know where open doors are. I've never read
any book on general linguistics. I far prefer the 'feel the truth on your
own' method. Here I just tell you what I 'felt true' from my one-year
experience and wait your comments to make it better (what you've done).
BTW, I'm French too.

Don't underestimate my modesty, it's my main quality :)

> >>>
>As I know, case-marking applies to all human languages, at least on Earth.
><<<
>what to you mean by "case-marking"? if you mean "tagging", then learn some
>modern khmer: a big surprise awaits you. unless you consider serial verbs are
>case tags.
Case can be marked by a preposition, an affixe or a postposition. Sometimes
word order can be used to ellipsis these 'spoken' markers. As for Khmer, if
serial verbs are of the kind 'is the owner' then sure I would consider it a
preposition for the possessive case.

>i incerely doubt Lojban is not speakable.
Sure lojban is speakable since there are a lot of translations in it. It's
just a pain to learn the vocabulary, especially verbs with their so long
associated cases which must be learnt by heart. If it were thaught to kids
at school, I can already hear the cries of the children who can't memorize
verbs, and the faces of their teachers who can't do better!

> >>>
>Is there a more recognized name than 'empirical'?
><<<
>"empirical" means to me that i would have learned and mastered many natlangs.
It was meant to mean 'empirical naming'. You don't tell me much on how
professional linguists dealt with this classification.

> >>>
>Why should my conlang implement adjectives if it has a genitive case?
>It sounds messy. With genitive being 'undefined relation with noun',
>I should not need a defined relation like quality (adjective) or
>ownership (possessive).
><<<
>depends on what you mean by "genitive": attributive? possessive? relative?
Cases marking relations between nouns, I see genitive as the undefined
case. Just like the undefined article. When you say 'a dog' you speak about
one specific dog but you don't specify which one, and haven't done
previously. Using genitive, a speaker tells his listener there is a
relation between nouns, but doesn't tell which one. It's supposed to be
obvious. If not, the speaker should use one of the defined cases
(possessive, locative). So for 'a girl in bikini' you could say 'girl
bikini' and for 'the girl's bikini', 'bikini girl'. This, of course, is
pointless if the genitive case is marked in the same way than possessive.

> >>>
>Context should provide this information (the noun for 'blue color' is
>rarely an
>owner and 'John' isn't a quality).
>If not, paraphrase would be enough. Any argument to make me implement
>adjectives?
><<<
>you're basically advocating the famous "white horse" chinese aphorism.
>adjectives "freeze" a predicate into a "permanent" attribute of a noun. in
>other
>words, adjectivization un-aspectivizes a predicate: an animal "that eats meat"
>in a permanent way is "carnivorous".
To my eyes, you're describing me the fact that carnovorous is an
agglutinated word (carn: meat, vor: eater, ous: adjective case) and the
fact that it has the strict definition of animals that always eat meat.
What I meant was to use unmarked genitive when it makes sense and adjective
case (quality relation) otherwise. With the preceding word order, 'a
carnivorous bird' would be 'bird carnivor', leading to the confusion with
'the carnivor's bird'. So here we should use the adjective case. Except if
carnivor is only a quality and a carnovorous animal in general can't be
refered to as 'a carnivor'.

------ ebera