Re: personal enclitics

1.    Love the way you conjugate prepositions.  You obviate possessive
pronouns in an elegant way.
Wish I'd thought of this.   :-)

2.    If you use "to" to identify both patients and destinations, you may
need to make sure that transitive and intransitive verbs are always
distinct.   Otherwise, "I'll walk to the dog" and "I'll walk the dog" will
look too similar.   This is not really a problem;   you could just have two
verbs for the two senses of "walk."   In general, your intransitive verbs
should have only intransitive readings, and transitive verbs should only
have transitive ones.   IIRC, natlangs vary when it comes to whether any
given verb can or cannot have both transitive and intransitive readings.
IIRC, in some languages, every verb can have both transitive and
intransitive senses;  in others, no verb does.

3.    Also, you'll have to assign meaning to verbs in non-English ways.
"run" for example won't have the idiomatic English sense of "govern."

I'm running this outfit.
I'm running to this outfit.

4.    There are examples where the verb has the same sense in both readings.
This is not a big problem;  you could just have an affix that makes a
transitive verb intransitive, thus eliminating the ambiguity without
creating distinct markers for patient and destination.

I'm driving the car.
I'm driving to the car.

I'm driving-intrans car.
= I'm driving to the car.

I'm steering the boat.
I'm steering to the boat.

I'm riding the elephant.
I'm riding to the elephant.

I'm throwing Herbert.
I'm throwing (something) to Herbert.

5.    How would you write "I followed Herbert to the car."?    What would
make it different from "I followed the car to Herbert."?

6.    Your "make X Y" constructions recall English constructions with
"change...to" as in "Herbert changed Sally to a frog."   I don't see any
problems with this offhand.

OOPS, out of time,

Jim





I'd like to run this aspect of Bulyth grammar by you all.

Kansú had a set of suffixes which could be added to verbs to make the
subject clear (as the verb did not inflect for person in the past and future
tenses). 'Aasesay, a language derived from Kansú generalised these suffixes
as verbal inflections. However, Bulyth used the suffixes a lot more, and
they crop up in all sorts of places. Ironically, they are only rarely used
on verbs!

They are basically enclitic forms of the pronouns:
        pronoun enclitic
Is      su              -s
IIs     thu             -th
IIIs    rho, rha                -r
Ip      neth            -m
IIp     ca              -c
IIIp    ta              -t

They are often added to prepositions, ar "of, from" can be conjugated as
ars, arth, aryr, arm, arc, art; this is the closest Bulyth comes to having
possessive pronouns. However, a different construction is more often used.

The prepostions la, which strictly speaking means "to" is often conjugated
to be the pronominal object, even when the object is not indirect, since
pronouns do not inflect for case: su yngaseu lath "I called you", literally
translated is "I called to you"

This is also used in sentances of the sort "to make X Y", "to make Y to-X"
in Bulyth: thu puleu rechnai lar "you made her queen", lit "you made queen
to her".

The enclitics can also be added to nouns. In this case, they make a
"genitive" construction.
The normal genitive construction expresses "Arhyn's house" as "house-him he
Arhyn", cabor rho Arhyn adding the enclitic to noun and adding the pronoun
afterwards. In less formal speech the pronoun is ommited: cabor Arhyn
"Arhyn's house" or cabos "my house". For statements like "MY house, not
yours" where the owner is emphasised, the enclitic is added to both noun and
pronoun: cabos sus.

They can also be added to verbs, emphasising the subject when there is a
pronoun object: ta theut su "they helped me". However, the construction with
la is more common, even with sentences of this type: ta theu las.

They an even be added to question-words, making it clear who the enquiry is
about. Since the verb to be is not used in the present tense, this is
common. "Pardon?" is math, the conjugated form of ma "what" (cf. British
"you what?") and modoth, the second person form of modo "how" is used for
"how are you?".

Are there any con- or natlang examples of this? And does having conjugated
pronouns make Bulyth a Celticonlang ;o).

Any thoughts are welcomed,

Dan



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Lo deu nu preca êl'aisún necoui.  God prays at noone's altar.

Dan Jones: www.geocities.com/yl_ruil/
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