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Re: Grammatical Summary of Kemata

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Wednesday, December 12, 2001, 2:37
Quoting Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>:

> > A noun (except names and such) always has an article suffixed to it. > > > > The articles are: > > Singular Plural > > Definite Indefinite Definite Indefinite > > Normal form -le -ne -zu -su > > Unique form -ti -pi -la -ho > > Normal negative form -ha -no -ro -vai > > Unique negative form -wu -re -ko -li > > > > The unique articles denote that the noun as a unique specimen of its > > kind (or several of them). The unique form of a word sometimes has > > an idiomatic meaning, such as "raidole", the house, vs. "Raidoti", > > the world, or "nezerne", a lord, vs. "nezerpi", a king. > > > This is just plain, plain cool. I wish I'd thought of it myself! :-) > I especially like the idiomatic meanings you've cited. Any other > notable ones?
Yeah, I think so too. It would allow you to disambiguate an English sentence like: (1) Sally would like to marry a Norwegian In one rendering of this sentence, the NP "a Norwegian" is both nonidentifiable and nonreferential (any ol' Norwegian will do); in another, nonidentifiable but referential (she has a particular Norwegian in mind). I've been trying to think up a way to make this kind of distinction in Phaleran, too. ===================================================================== Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier> "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n / Dept. of Linguistics mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..." University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought / 1010 E. 59th Street and not complete one road that has no turn" Chicago, IL 60637 Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers

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Rune Haugseng <haugrune@...>