Artyom Kouzminykh: Answers & proposal

> >I have eaten - I 'own' an 'eat' - there is food comfortably inside me
> >(yum!)
> >
> >The cat was fed - perfectly transparent, when you consider that 'fed' is
a
> >past participle. I am sure we all agree that 'the cat was feed' makes no
> >sense.
>
> What about prases like "I have been beaten" and "The justice had not been
> done" (I'm not sure it's totally correct, but ... who owned who in such
> cases?)
Bear in mind that these are passive sentences, with an unmentioned agent.
The agent would normally be marked by the preposition 'by'.

I have been beaten - the unspoken agent is in a state of owning a beating of
'I'.

Justive has not been done - the unspoken agent is in a state of not owning a
completed justice.

[does anyone else think these paraphrases look ugly? Anyone want to create a
ridiculously wordy conlang based on these?]

> >Fabian wrote:
> > >And how is having an accusative form implicitly more difficult than
> >having a strict word order (every language must have one or the other)?
> >I have nothing against cases in a conlang, even 5-6 - 'cause it IS
> >"natural" in Latin, and Latin is a real base for a Romance conlang. But
> >cases in IAL - is it so necessary?
> >
> > >I have nothing against tenses in a conlang, even 5-6 - 'cause it IS
> >"natural" in Latin, and Latin is a real base for a Romance conlang. But
> >tenses in IAL - is it so necessary?
> >
> Sorry, I tried to say "cases", not "tenses"!
I know you were talking about nouns, and how you apparently prefer to have
inflected nouns to represent different parts of speech, instead of having
nouns.

My paragraph was a deliberate parody, not a correction. I was pointing out
an inconsistant approach in how you design your nouns compared to your
verbs.

You seem to find it acceptable to inflect verbs, but not nouns (or have I
got this the opposite way round?). I was subtly pointing out that you are
proposing one system for nouns because it is 'simpler', but are proposing an
opposite system for verbs because that opposite system is 'simpler'!

Consider the following conceptual equivalents:

noun            verb
preposition     auxiliary verb
inflected case  inflected tense

Now, this isn't an absolute thing, as many languages have both prepositions
and inflected cases. But consider that a language that uses inflections is
going to have a lot fewer words in any utterance. Conversely, a language
that uses prepositions and auxiliary verbs extensively (and no inflections)
is going to have every word in a dictionary in an easy-to-look-up format.
The only real question is which of these really *is* simpler.

---
Fabian
I know you understand what you thought I said,
But I'm not sure you understand that what you thought I said
is not what I meant to say.