Re: Prescriptivist grammar

Boudewijn Rempt <bsarempt@...> wrote:

> This remindes me of mr. Ma's grammar of Classical Chinese -
> based on Latin into the details. I found it so enthralling that
> I created a Latin grammar of Denden, too, full of paradigms like:
>=20
> do    ego
> do    me
> edo   mei
> do    mihi
> do    me
[snip]

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

 kutranfororkey "they say he has a toothache"
 r=FCngk=FCkonfemtuaymi "you will immediately jump back inside"



> Really quite a fun project :-). I've also lying somewhere the
> rudiments of a real, native, Denden prescriptive grammar...
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_".


--Pablo Flores