Re: Prescriptivist grammar

On Sun, 23 May 1999, FFlores wrote:

>=20
> Ha ha! This is exactly what the missionaires did with
> Mapuche/Mapudungu (which I mentioned in another post). They
> made it fit into the Latin pattern. A Father Havestadt
> wrote a grammar where the language inflects its nouns
> and pronouns for all the Latin cases, even the ablative,
> and the verbs are "conjugated" after the Latin model,
> with tenses named after the Latin ones. I don't know
> about Denden, but Mapudungu is a highly agglutinative
> language with almost none of the features of Latin
> grammar, so the result must have been both hilarious
> and useless. Imagine how this guy could have analized
> words like
>=20
>  kutranfororkey "they say he has a toothache"
>  r=FCngk=FCkonfemtuaymi "you will immediately jump back inside"
>=20
When studying Himalayan languages I often had to work
with these 19th century grammars - they are hilarious
(there are Hannah's grammar of Tibetan comes to mind),
but some of them are still awe-inspiring because of their
painstaking accuracy!

>=20
>=20
> > Really quite a fun project :-). I've also lying somewhere the
> > rudiments of a real, native, Denden prescriptive grammar...
>=20
> In Denden? I'd like to do that for and in Drasel=E9q, but
> such things require a proper set of pedantic high-sounding
> words and phrases that I don't have :-). But it could be
> in the form of commandments, say "Thou shalt not say _n=FCmp_".
>=20
I'm afraid that of the native grammar by Master Hinadan only=20
a Dutch translation survives. Chatyan pedants just use the
Classical language, and they're set. They have quite an original
style of writing such works, though: every rule is given in=20
an aphorism with a larger commentary by the author himself. None
of the endless commentaries Panini has inspired, the author
did it himself.

>=20
> --Pablo Flores
>=20

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt