On Sun, 27 Apr 2008 13:06:11 -0400, Carl Banks
<conlang@...> wrote:
>
>Bimo, dorahay,
>
>I have a brief description of Bowtudgelean (version 0.1) at
>
http://www.aerojockey.com/blog/bowtudgelean1.html
>
>I'm curious how common some of my "innovations" are. I've read a lot of
>conlang archives and never saw much discussion about these particular ideas.
>
>1. Bowtudgelean has ten states of definiteness. Most languages only
>distinguish between definite and indefinite; mine distinguishes
>different types of definiteness and inflects nouns, pronouns, and
>adjectives accordingly:
>
>First Person: is or includes the speaker
>Second Person: is or inlcudes the listener
>Nominal: the word is a name
>Referred: something recently spoken of
These are clear.
>Indicated: a limiting adjective (or phrase) follows
This seems to be purely a matter of morphosyntax, with no pragmatic
component.
>Local: the thing is near the speaker
>Remote: the thing is distant from the speaker
Demonstratives -- clear.
>Past: the thing happened in the past
>Future: the thing happened in the future
These seem to be tenses and independent of the noun being definite.
(OT: it seems that the English past tense marker is reverting to an aspect
marker, but perfective rather than perfect.)
>Indefinite: indefinite
Clear.
>Adjectives agree with nouns and pronouns in state. That's why there is
>a first person state: the adjective gets a different state ending in
>that case. There are no nouns in first person state of course (except
>for appositives; but appositives take adjectival endings).
>
>I got this idea from Arabic, which has three states. (Though it's not
>the same thing, because the construct state in Arabic carries no
>semantic value. Still, construct is somewhat comparable to indicted
>state in Bowtudgelean.)
>
>
>Carl Banks