Re: Sidaan Verbal System

Henrik wrote:
<<
I was busy cooking the whole
week and particularly Thu-Sat (=yesterday). :-)
 >>

Shall I send you my snail mail address, or will the food spoil by
then?  ;)

<<
You system definitely is dependent marking in this sense, and seems to
use a 'reverse' agreement system similar to Classical Nahuatl (which
is head-marking).  There was a thread on this list:
 >>

Funny.  The message you link to is a response to a system that
wasn't quoted.  But now I'm caught up.  And I think what I was
thinking of initially was not what I ended up doing.  What initially
inspired me was this bizarre language where the verb agrees with
all of its arguments, and all of its arguments agree with the verb,
so you get sentences that look like this:

Girl-NOM-ACC-DAT 3sbj.-3obj.-3i.obj.-give ball-ACC.-NOM.-DAT
Boy-DAT.-NOM.-ACC.

Something like that.  I have the actual example somewhere...  However,
verbs in Sidaan don't agree with any argument of the verb, so it's
not really similar...  Instead, I guess it's just a bizarre case-marking
system, as you pointed out.

<<
Hmm, I see no problem.  In Mandarin and Japanese (both pro-drop
langs), you often have sentences consisting of only the verb.
 >>

Ah, okay.  This was a case of my having not thought of a situation
which naturally presented itself in the data I presented.  Kind of
caught me off-guard.

Thanks for reading and replying.  :)

P.S.: That Nahuatl system is wild!  But so useful!  Imagine if you
had a language where the verb let you know just how many
arguments you were going to have by agreeing with the first
and last...

-David
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"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
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