Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Hatasoe online

From:dunn patrick w <tb0pwd1@...>
Date:Monday, May 24, 1999, 19:48
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