Re: Kélen website now up!

Sylvia Sotomayor wrote:
>
> Finally.
> The latest (greatest) version of Kélen can now be found on the web at:
>
> http://home.netcom.com/~sylvia1/Kelen/kelen.html
Hmmm... upon closer inspection of Kélen's copulas, I realized it was
quite similar to a system I had once planned to include in my conlang:
to isolate all inflections of nouns and verbs into separate words that
I'd call articles and vectors, respectively.

Articles would inflect after number, definiteness and case, while the
vector would carry information about the person, number and gender of
both subject and object, plus tense and mood markings.

So a sample sentence would be <VEC give ART apple>, which could mean "We
used to give you all apples" or "One would never give her that apple"
etc., depending on the inflections of the vector and the article.  This
would have the pleasant side effect of leaving the words <give> and
<apple> completely untouched and recognizable, while introducing a
certain potential for misunderstanding due to the high information
density in the vector.

If you don't regard "give" as a verb but as a noun describing an action,
the vector can be seen as a copula rather than a verb-describing
particle, so you'd end up with more or less the same idea.

Hm.  I'll probably save the vector system for my freaklang, should I
ever actually get round to creating it.


--  Christian Thalmann

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