Re: Hatasoe online

Hi, there,

    Some comments on Hatasoe.

Re:   Sound system.   Looks sensible to me.


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?


Re:    Prepositional phrases.     What are these doing in your section on
clauses?
Also, why the restriction on the location of adverbial prepositional
phrases?


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.)

There's a lot here that I don't understand.   What's a "substitute pronoun,"
and what differentiates it from a subordinator?

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 sure I understand the role of "ni" fully.   Can you provide a
morpheme-by-morpheme translation?


Re:    Sentence Structure:

I think the description of main clauses should come before the description
of subordinate clauses.

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?

Do you mean that SVO is the basic word-order?


I know that this is just some preliminary notes;   hope the comments aren't
too premature.

Jim