Re: Neither here nor there.

"H. S. Teoh" wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jun 01, 2001 at 12:19:52PM -0700, jesse stephen bangs wrote:
> > bjm10@CORNELL.EDU sikayal:
> >
> > > When puzzling over Praxian article endings (indefinite, definite, and
> > > demonstrative), for the life of me, I could not figure out just HOW they
> > > differentiated between local demonstrative "this thing" and distant
> > > demonstrative "that thing"--then it hit me.  Praxian does not distinguish
> > > between local and distant!
> >
> > This is actually attested in real languages.  Ancient Greek had one word
> > "entautha" meaning "here" or "there," and words "erkhomai" and "eimi"
> > meaning "to come" or "to go."  And they weren't even nomadic ;-).
> [snip]
>
> My conlang also has a single verb of motion that can mean either "come" or
> "go", or even both. For example:
>         muu'j0       lyy's   eb3'   loo'ru
>         village(org) go/come I(cvy) countryside(rcp)
>
> This can be translated either as "I went out of the village into the
> countryside", or as "I came out from the village into the countryside"
> depending on where the listener is when he hears this. The verb here is,
> in fact, acting as both "come" and "go". :-)
My conlang has this too, working in much the same way.

I had the idea a while back for a general motion verb, that, as the name
suggests, would encompass a very wide range of motions - "walk", "run",
"stop", "wait", "come", "go", etc. - depending on the context it's used.
One of my friends gave me the inspiration for this, he sometimes uses
the English verb "tarry" in the same sense, albeit with a smaller range
of meaning. He is aware of the "proper" meaning, also.

--
Robert

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