Re: Here, *Here*, and There, *There*

On Fri, Jun 28, 2002 at 09:42:45PM +0200, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
[snip]
> > As non-straightforward as possible? Hmmm... <shameless self-plug>have
> > you
> > had a look at Ebisedian grammar? ;-) </shameless self-plug>
> >
>
> Yep! Although to my defense, Maggel is a language which, in its first
> incarnation, I had created when I was 15 (a trip to Ireland. teenagers are
> really impressionable ;))) ). I am currently just reviving it, by making it
> even worse than it was (at that time my linguistic knowledge was pretty scarce
> and the Maggel of that time looks like an ill-disguised Latinate language in an
> irish coat).
[snip]

Heh. Believe it or not, one of Ebisedian's earliest roots came from my
conceptual struggle with the concept of passive verbs. At the time, I was
toying around with the idea of a simple SVO language (didn't know the
terminology then, but that was the idea), and how it would express various
simple concepts in the Ferochromon universe. Soon, I noticed that the
concept of passive, as well as the concept of subject/object, introduced
ambiguities about who did what. I found the designation of subject/object,
and esp. indirect object, too arbitrary and unpredictable.

Originally, the then-nameless Ebisedian had a 3-case system which
basically is a subset of the 5-case system today, with the same semantic
designations. (Arguably, they aren't really cases, but semantic markers
for disambiguating verb arguments. But "case" is a nice, short term that
gives a close-enough approximation, so I'll live with it for now.)

(It might be interesting to note that when I was pondering these things, I
was contemplating purely grammatical structures -- I had no words, no
phonology, nothing. In fact, I never expected Ebisedian to become as
full-blown as it is today; I was merely regarding grammatical what-if's at
the time. Eventually, I *did* come up with a handful of words, but most
were just names, and I threw most of those away after I decided on
Ebisedian's phonological structure.)


T

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