Re: OT: Negation as the indicative standard

Doug Dee wrote:
> I seem to recall reading somewhere that no natural language does this, but
> one comes close, in that a negative sentence needs a negative particle and a
> positive sentence needs a positive particle, so that both are equally marked.
>
> Now, if only I could recall where I read that and what language was alleged
> to have that feature . . .
I could see that evolving from phonetic mergers with auxiliaries.  For
example, a partial example is in English, where we have /wont/ vs.
/wIl/, /h&v/ vs. /h&v@nt/ (which might become /h&nt/ in a future
dialect), /du/ vs. /dont/, /dId/ vs. /dIdn=t/ (future /dInt/?), etc.

Then, you'd have to analyze the affirmative and negative as equally
marked.

--
"There's no such thing as 'cool'.  Everyone's just a big dork or nerd,
you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." -
overheard
ICQ: 18656696
AIM Screen-Name: NikTaylor42