Re: Syntactic Differentiation of Adverbial vs. Adjectival Adpositions

I'd like to do this "I ate the fruit on the table" sentence as well.

In Urianian I think the ambiguity may be resolved quite simply by
using two different case endings:

Egem frege pildu - I ate the fruit that was on the table, with a
locative u-ending.

Egem frege pildi - I ate the fruit while I was at the table, with an
instrumental i-ending. You don't eat the fruit *with* the table,
exactly, but the instrumental case encompasses a somewhat wider range
of meanings than the preposition "with".

However, in a real conversation, I don't think the sentences would be
as simple as this. If I were conversing with my Urianian friends, I
would say something like:

Freged lian pildu, it egem - that fruit lying on the table, I ate it.
(fruit-dem.acc.pl lie-act.part.nom table-loc.sg 3p.acc eat-1s.pret)

Frege egem sitni baru pildia - the fruit I ate sitting in front of
the table. (fruit-acc.pl eat-1s.pret sit-pass.part.ins front-loc.sg
table-gen.sg) - That was very precise though. Normally I think you
would omit "baru" and put table in the instrumental as above.

In Urianian, as a well-marked language, the word-order is very free,
giving you many opportunities for shifting them about for emphasis, a
feature I think the Urianians are likely to exploit rather extensively.

As for Suraetua, I don't have a general word for fruit, and perhaps
they didn't use one, to let me pick 'apple' - kalaku.

Kalakuwe onglam ij ianjit (apple-pl table-loc eat i.did.to.them)
Kalakuwe onglamen ij ianjit (apple-pl table-loc-adv eat i.did.to.them)

BTW, I am thinking of scrapping the auxiliaries in Suraetua, although
I love them very much. Sacrificed on the altar of realism.

I am also thinking that perhaps some Uralic language has existed in
Uriania at a remote time and thinking of constructing something based
on Décsy's postulated protolanguage. But perhaps I should do a proper
job with the others first.

LEF