Re: Results of Poll by Email No. 27

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Andreas Johansson <andjo@F...> wrote:

> I don't think this holds either; there's many languages that lack a verb
"to be"
> (a copula), which express things like "the stone is red" by "the stone
red" or
> similar. Can't think of a good natlang example right now, but Kalini Sapak
has
> sentences like _tahuku aguzama_ "the men (are/were) warriors".
Maybe the predicate should be considered the most important part of a
regular sentence then.



> > Let me try to rephrase it: Whenever a verb is present, it is the most
> > important part of the sentence.
>
> Hardly. Any remotely bureaucratic text written in the west will be brimful
with
> sentences like "investigations into the alleged voting fraud in Peter's
poll
> were undertaken" where the finite verb is really just providing moral
support
> for the noun phrase which describes what happened.
Well, "investigation", "alleged", "voting", "fraud" and "poll" are all
nominalised froms with underlying verbal concepts...   ;-)  In Oro Mpaa,
which is fond of verbs, you'd probably express this sentence as

    {peter asking people voting; suspecting someone cheating this;
    someone investigate this},

where the gerunds (-ing) represent the non-finite verb forms of Oro Mpaa.
Note how the only finite (and thus information-conveying) verb is
"investigate", while all other verbs are used to identify a fact assumed to
be known already (just as the original sentence speaks of *the* alleged
voting fraud, thus implying that people already know this bit of
information.)

Then again, bureaucratese must be among the sickest and evillest forms
of communication ever to plague civilisation.  My parents have been trying
to make sense of a real estate purchase contract in English for weeks,
and they ask me for help whenever they get too confused...  Usually, I
end up just as confused as they are.   /=P


-- Christian Thalmann

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
Bitte lächeln! Fotogalerie online mit GMX ohne eigene Homepage!

Reply