Re: DISCUSSION, QUESTION: Verb conjugation by location

On Mon, May 27, 2002 at 08:51:20PM -0500, Peter Clark wrote:
[snip]
> the best of my knowledge) are not found in Russian. Namely, distinguishing
> to/from based on person--to/from me, to/from you, to/from him--with single
> affixes. Thus, "I sent him a letter" would be rendered (roughly) as "I to-him
> from-me.sent letter."
>         The fun with such a system is the range of nuance that it permits. For
> instance, it could be conceivable to say "I to-him from-him.sent letter."
> That could either mean that I passed on a letter from person B to person A,
> or that I returned the letter to person A, context disambiguating.
[snip]

Hmm. This sounds awfully like my conlang's noun case system. Although I
probably pushed it to the limit in my conlang, where *everything* fits in
a 5-case system:

The originative marks the "from" noun,
the receptive marks the "to" noun,
the conveyant marks the moving noun,
the instrumental marks the motivating noun
the locative marks the location.

To quote from my *ahem*magnum opus*ahem*:

        "One way of visualizing this is to imagine the conveyant noun, which
        had just come from the originative noun, currently inside the
        locative noun, being propelled by the instrumental noun towards
        the receptive noun."

The noun cases of every sentence operate according to this model. So, for
example, in a verb like _le's_ "to go", the originative noun is always the
originating location, the receptive is always the destination, and the
moving thing is always in the conveyant. So, to say "I went outside",
you'd refer to yourself in the conveyant case. However, to say "I saw a
house", you'd refer to yourself in the receptive case (because you just
received the sight of the house). Furthermore, to say "I spoke to her",
you'd refer to yourself in the originative case, because you are the
origin of what was said.

When you're pulling something, you'd be in the instrumental (the
instrumental case is the "propelling" case); whereas if you merely jerked
a rope quickly, you'd be in the receptive case (since you're pulling it at
yourself).

Of course, for more details, a PostScript version of my conlang's
reference grammar (said "magnum opus") is located at:
        http://quickfur.myip.org/~hsteoh/conlang/grammar.ps

The section on noun cases is 2.1.3 as of this writing, although you'll
want to look at chapter 4 (basic sentence structures) to really see noun
cases at work.

Note, however, that this is work in progress. This stuff is prone to
changes, small and big.


T

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