Re: Grammatical Summary of Kemata

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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