Re: Spanish demonstratives (was: RE: yet another romance conlang)

On Wed, 5 Jan 2000 23:35:00 -0300 FFlores <fflores@...> writes:
> Same for the feminine forms. But the inanimate forms ending in -o
> can't be confused:
>         Esto es una casa.   'This is a house.'
> BUT:
>         *Esta* casa es nueva. 'This house is new'
>
> So the inanimate pronouns {esto, eso, aquello} don't need acutes.
> Same goes for another common mistake: {tu} 'your' vs. {tu'} 'you'
> is OK, but {ti} 'you(ACC.)' doesn't have an acute.
.

Ah...i get it now.  (slight LOL), what's funny is that i wrote this for
class, we were assigned to write a poem that's an acrostic of our name!
(either our real name or our spanish "spanish class name")
And "Este'ban" isn't supposed to have an acute either! :-)
I'm still not sure why i write it in...i think maybe my first (9&10th
grades) spanish teacher wrote it that way on the first day of class when
we were getting our names.  But i only found out that it's extraneous in
spanish 3, when we finally learned "leyes de accentuacio'n"....but i
still wrote it....and when i wrote "e'so", i did it on purpose because (i
thought) it had an accent!  :-)

> Yes, it depends on how you read it. But it really sounds as if
> there's
> one more beat than necessary. Probably because of the echoing effect
> of {besALAS A LAS}.
> The grammar thing is that _las horas_ is inanimate, and yet you use
> the personal _a_ accusative. It's not *wrong*, since many people do
> it; but dropping the _a_ would both ease the rhythm and 'clean' the
> syntax. Now, *_Be'salas las horas_ is ungrammatical... but if you
> insert a pause after the first word, it sounds like a weirdly
> beautiful
> vocative, IMHO. Of course, it's your poem! :)
>
> --Pablo Flores
/ax/ !  This is the same thing i get from my highschool Hebrew teachers
when they ask me to show them if i've written any more poetry in Hebrew -
"it's off a bit, but if you think it needs to be that way, it's okay".
Although in Hebrew it's usually the vocabulary that does that....like how
was i supposed to know that the verb _lehahhaziq_ isn't stronger than
_litfos_, but actually weaker?  it has the root HhZQ "strength" in it
after all!  And i never knew that the word _mei`eiver_ doesn't only mean
"across".....
i need a word....i should probably make a word in Rokbeigalmki for this:

imagine you're sitting on the east edge of the Henry Hudson bridge (which
goes N-S between Manhattan and the Bronx, over the Harlem River).  and
you're watching the sun rise, eastwards.  below you, the river goes
"forwards", towards the sun, for a bit, and then makes a right-angle turn
towards your right, southwards.  and the sun is rising from behind that,
making the line between you and the sun go along the W-E part of the
river, but leave it when the river turns.

i originally rejected _mei`eiver_, because that connoted to me the idea
of being on one side of the river and looking acorss it, parpendicular to
the river.  So i picked _mei'ahhorey_, "from behind" because it seemed
like a better, more general description.  but my senior year hebrew
teacher said no, _mei`eiver_ would actually be perfectly fine, and so
would another form of it, _mei`evrey_, which seems to be somewhat
plural-like, so to me that made me think of something coming from both
banks of the river - but still perpendicular.  ohwell.

i guess that's why it's better to write in a conlang, so you're the
ultimate judge of what each word connotes!


-Stephen (Steg)
 "survival is insufficient."