Re: Lunatic Survey

David G. Durand wrote:
> It has been very private most of my life -- My parents and brother knew,
> and no one else...
That's two more people than know about me!  I told a friend once.  She
gave me kind of an odd look, but didn't say anything about it.  Part of
me seems to think that people will persecute me or something, even tho
intellectually, I know that my friends would probably think it odd, but
not more than that.

> I love the way the rules of language surprise me when I work out the
> consequences -- I like regular languages where the interaction of phonology
> and morphology makes for apparent irregularity -- just as I always liked
> irregular verbs in spanish, because most of them weren't _really_ very
> irregular, but followed patterns.
Are you referring to the stem-changing verbs (e.g., sonyar-suenyo)?

I also love that surprising part.  I discovered a while back that I
could disambiguate pronouns in sentences like "John told Bill that his
dog died", by a system originally devised just because I thought it was
cool - multiple case-marking.  I also earlier discovered that that
allowed me to have a nice form of agreement with subordinate clauses,
for example: I killed the man who hit my brother = I-erg killed man-abs
he-erg-abs hit brother-my-abs.  The he-erg is subject of killed, and
also carries absolutive marking to agree with man-abs, since it refers
back to man.  It therefore allows the subordinate clause to be seperated
from its head (tho this is rare): man-abs I-erg killed he-erg-abs hit
brother-my-abs.

--
"Public media should not contain explicit or implied descriptions of sex
acts.  Our society should be purged of the perverts who provide the
media with pornographic material while pretending it has some redeeming
social value under the public's 'right to know.'" - Kenneth Star, 1987
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