Re: Hatasoe online

On Sun, 23 May 1999, Jim Grossmann wrote:

> Re:    Adjectives are merely stative verbs.  Thus we have, for instance,
> "nehasa," to be good.
>
> Sho senehasa.  "The man is good."
> Sho nehaso. . . "The good man."  (Lit., the man, the being-good-one. . . )
> Comment:   Why would we not consider "nehaso" an attributive adjective?
I don't know; what's an attributive adjective?  "nehaso" is just a form of
"nehasa", a participle, actually.  I know it's confusing with animate
nouns.

> Re:    Prepositional phrases.     What are these doing in your section on
> clauses?
> Also, why the restriction on the location of adverbial prepositional
> phrases?
I was using an outline that looked reasonable until I got to this point; I
deviate from the outline later, which describes the clumsiness of this
summary.

Why the restriction?  Well, gee.  That's a little like asking "why use a
dental suffix to make the past tense?" in English, isn't it?  *shrugs*

> Re:    Subordinate:    Looking forward to seeing your section on main
> clauses.   (You can give me a good razzing if you did describe main clauses
> and I overlooked these.)
Working on it.

> There's a lot here that I don't understand.   What's a "substitute pronoun,"
> and what differentiates it from a subordinator?
It's a pronoun refering back to "what" or "that."  For instance, "ea
onimesha ni nenifazea."

ea o-ni-mesha ni ne-ni-fazea
I  I it love  that you it did.

Now, this is highly formal.  In less formal speech, we have dialectical
variations.  In the northern Islands, "onimesha nenifazea" is more common.
In the south-west, we frequently see things like "olomesha ni nelofazea."
And among the sea-dwellsers, those who have colonized the ocean floor, the
dialect is so clipped it's useless to provide an example.

> You've got complement clauses in subject position ("Subjective
> subordination) and in object position (object position) and you've got
> relative clauses (descriptive subordination).    Have you got adverbial
> clauses like the one capitalized in "WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE, we played hockey
> with stone clubs"?
Not yet.

> Not sure I understand the role of "ni" fully.   Can you provide a
> morpheme-by-morpheme translation?
Already did.  Realize that, in English, where we'd say "I gave you what
you wanted" in Hatasoe you'd say "I gave it to you what you wanted it."

> I think the description of main clauses should come before the description
> of subordinate clauses.
I think you're right.

> Re:   "All Hatasoe sentences are SVO."    What about sentences like "Alan
> jumped," & "Mary is big?" which have no objects?    What about sentences
> like "We gave Mary a ride?" which have more than one object?    Does your
> grammar allow object complements as English does in sentences like "We made
> him a general?"    Also, is the "object" still called an object in passive
> sentences?
Grr.  Don't be picky.  :)  You knew what I meant.

--Patrick