Re: Requesting some challenging sentences

--- caotope <johnvertical@...> wrote:

> Okay, this is somewhat off the topic (with respect
> to this thread, not
> the list), but - I think I missed your point on the
> complement of
> "to". Why exactly can a verb not be its own
> complement? I'd think the
> copula was pretty much *defined* as the binary
> operator for which a =
> b and b = a are equal (or as the verb that *is* its
> own complement).
> (Unless you want to get philosophical on how you
> perhaps cannot
> include "equality" in the defition of the copula.)
Actually, I had thought of the Soaloa word "to" as
meaning "has the attribute" (as I translated in a few
early examples on the page) so that we could say
"Apple has the attribute red" but not "Red has the
attribute apple." No equality is meant by this
meaning. A different word altogether would be needed
to say "An apple is a fruit" because what we'd really
be saying is "apple is a member of the class fruit"
which is also not equality. In Soaloa, two things
cannot be equal unless they are instances of the same
thing, and then they can only be equal if they are not
distinguished. Thus we could say "an electron is
(equals) an electron" since they are all the same when
not distinguished by location, but we could not say
"This electron is (equlas) thyat electron since we are
implying something that distinguishes them.

And now that I think of it, yes, that is a
philosophical stance. :-)


> Anyway, it seems to me that you have a sort of
> animacy hierarchy in
> place, approx. pronouns > nouns > adjectives, and
> "ebo" (or
> complementary verbs in general) is used when the "A"
> word is higher of
> the hierarchy than the "S" word. Is this correct?
> Would "anlu to devu"
> be ungrammatical?
"Anlu to devu" translates "New has-the-attribute
house" which is ungrammatical. It should be "House
has-the-attribute new." or "Devu to anlu."

But then, it's all subject to change, anyway. ;-)

--gary

>
> John Vertical
>

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