Matt Pearson wrote:
> The comitative case (marked by the suffix "-a" or "-ia" on the
> noun) is used to indicate a participant who is accompanying
> another participant in an action, or an instrument which is
> aiding in the performance of an action. For example:
Sounds good.
> A second option would be to express "without" by negating
> the noun phrase in the comitative case, thusly:
>
> Na luiha tun ypena ietoti
> the.Erg old.woman Neg stick-Com walk-Neg
> "The woman doesn't walk with a stick"
> "It's not with a stick that the woman walks"
>
> However, this seems to convey the wrong meaning: The sentence
> seems to imply that the woman walks with SOMETHING, but that
> this something happens not to be a stick. (My instinct is that
> "without" means something slightly different from "with" + "not",
> or "not" + "with"... Is that right?)
It's a matter of scope of negation. You might want to read
(in lieu of plowing through all of Horn's _Natural History of
Negation_) the negation chapter in the Lojban grammar, which
pretty clearly lays out the issues.
> The only other thing I've been able to think of is to express
> "without" periphrastically, using a noun or a verb. For instance:
>
> Na luiha eta itak kloha ypen
> the.Erg old.woman walk the.Com lack-Com stick
> lit. "The old woman walks with the lack of a stick"
I like this one.
> Anybody know how such languages express "without"? How do
> people express "without" in their conlangs?
In Lojban it's a predicate: x1 lacks x2.
--
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org
Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! / Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau,
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau / Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.
-- Coleridge / Politzer