Re: Comparison of philosophical languages

On Saturday 18 January 2003 04:04 pm, Christopher Wright wrote:
> Dennis paltalge:
> >I believe Sylvia Sotomayor's Kelen is verbless
> >also.
>
> Close, but not really, as I understand it. There are some four
relation
> words (I think that's what she called them) that function as verbs.
I
> forget how individual action types worked (most languages' verbs).
And I
> know what I do because of the last relay.
Hi,
Kélen has four psuedo-verbs, or copulae, and no other verbs or
verblets. These are LA, which states existence or equivalence, and is
usually translated as 'be'; PA, which states that a whole has some
parts, think 'have'; SE, which states that something is passed from a
source to a goal, though both the source and the goal are optional,
think 'give' or 'send'; and NI, which states that something has
undergone a change in state caused by some optional agent, like
'make' or 'do'.

Actions consist of one of these plus some sort of oblique phrase with
the specific semantic content. For example, 'go' is an idiom composed
of NI and the directional case marker 'rá':

órra ñamma rá;
past NI+3ps-agent to.
'He went.'

órra ñamma rá áke ho antánre;
past NI+3ps-agent to there INSTR quickness.
'He went (there) with quickness.' or
'He ran (there).'

(The aspect-marker órra is used here because NI doesn't inflect for
tense/aspect.)

Speech is an idiom of SE plus an understood noun for speech plus the
comment marker 'ien'.

temme ien ....
SE+past+3ps-source+3ps-goal comment:
'From her/him to her/him:' or
'She/he said to her/him:'

More formally:
temme ansóri ien ....
SE+past+3ps-source+3ps-goal words comment:
'She/he said to her/him:'

temme ho anúma ien ....
SE+past+3ps-source+3ps-goal comment:
'She/he said loudly to her/him:' or
'She/he yelled to/at her/him:'

Does that make sense? I keep revising the grammar explanations on this
topic because they all seem inadequate.

-Sylvia

--
Sylvia Sotomayor
sylvia1@ix.netcom.com

The Kélen language can be found at:
http://home.netcom.com/~sylvia1/Kelen/kelen.html

This post may contain the following characters:
á (a-acute); é (e-acute); í (i-acute); ó (o-acute); ú (u-acute);
ñ (n-tilde);