Re: Kioshu Conlang Compliments!

En réponse à Jeff Goguen <princetaliesin@...>:

[snip interesting explanation]

>
> The reason why I have many different annexes and translate them as
> English prepositions is that it is not always possible to distinguish
> such relationships between the subject and object of the sentence
> through context in Kioshu. The theory here is that these words would
> have evolved with similar meanings to things like prepositions in
> English to help sort out these relationships. I suppose another way to
> do it is to have separate verbs for such things.such as having "to
> throw" be a different verb from "to throw (to someone)". I,
> personally,
> prefer my method as it means I have less verbs to come up with. :-)
> But
> I also like the structure of it.
>
So if I understand correctly, the annexes, rather than marking a function of a
word in a sentence, mark a relation between two words, one being the subject.
This sounds like an interesting difference compared to prepositions and
postpositions which usually mark a relation between the *verb* and the object
(except in cases like "of" after a noun for instance). Personally I find the
idea very interesting. I just wonder how you do when the relation is not with
the subject. For instance, let's take a sentence like "John cleaned the room
for the guest". It's the whole action which is done for the guest, and thus
should be related to him. "John" himself is not directly related to the guest.
So in this case it would be more sensible to have a linking mark between the
verb "cleaned" and the noun "guest". Or do you take things grammatically and
consider that the relation still involves the subject? :))

Anyway, I find the idea quite nice... prepositions that link the noun to the
subject rather than the verb...

> As for colloquialisms such as "give up", or "catch up", etc. These are
> things that, if we translated them literally, wouldn't make much sense
> to non-English speakers. Someone would probably translate "give up" as
> "quit" or "resign" in Kioshu. "Catch up" would probably be something
> like "move faster so that you are abreast of me", complicated though
> that may be.
>
Neededn't be. In French "catch up" is "rattraper", litterally "re-catch", but
the connection is not seen anymore and "rattraper" is considered as an
independent verb, just happening to be homonymous with the verb "rattraper"
which does mean "recatch" (i.e. something fell from my hands, but I caught it
before it hit the floor). So the fact that English cannot render something as a
single verb (except a phrasal verb) doesn't mean it cannot be done in other
languages :)) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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