Re: Relatives, interrogatives and other such particles

On 4/22/06, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
> English and several other Indo-European languages conflate the
> interrogative and relative particles (who, where, what, etc. can be
> relative or interrogative depending on context and maybe intonation).
> Some other languages distinguish them (including some IE languages like
> Greek: hos, hopou, etc. vs ti, pou, etc.).  Are there languages that conflate
> the interrogatives or relatives with some other series -- maybe
> the indefinites (who? = somebody, where? = somewhere,
> what? = something...) or indifferents (who? = anybody, etc.)
> or even the demonstratives?
Colloquial German allows this -- using some interrogatives (was, wer,
etc.) as shortened frms of indefinites ([et]was, [irgend]wer = irgend
jemand): "Hast du was zu essen?" = "Have you what to eat?", more
standardly "Hast du etwas zu essen?" = "Have you something to eat?".
"Guck mal, da kommt wer" = "Look, there comes who", more standardly
"Sieh mal, da kommt jemand" = "Look, there comes somebody". In my
opinion, this is most common with "was" (what) as an abbreviation of
"etwas", and particularly in the construction "was zu(m) <verb>" =
"something to <verb>" or "something with which to <verb>".

> I'm considering an approach for my new language where the
> indefinite particle acts as an interrogative in question sentences.
> A yes/no question just has "ftu" before the verb; a more
> specific WH-question has "ftu" before the verb and "shti" after the
> questioned element.  In non-question sentences, "shti" means
> "some, any".  This makes it tricky to ask things like
> "Do you have any cats?" -- the most straightforward way would
> be ambiguous with "Which cats do you have?"
I could imagine this in German, too -- *"Hast du welche Katzen?",
which in standard German is "Do you have which cats?" (and sounds
ungrammatical, since you have a yes/no question plus a WH-word), as
colloquial for "Hast du irgendwelche Katzen?", i.e. "Do you have any
cats?", or more literally "Do you have any kind of cats?".

I probably wouldn't say the sentence above, but compare "Er hat welche
mitgebracht" for "He brought some [of them -- say, worms for a fishing
expedition]" (pretty close to French "en" in "Il en a apporté avec
soi" -- partitive pronoun?), using the interrogative "welche" (which)
as an indefinite pronoun.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>