Re: New Language Sketch (was Re: Conlang Gender)

"Thomas R. Wier" wrote:
> Yes, but there are lots of other things that could "make sense"
> for certain constructions.  The point is not to say something makes
> sense, but to explain why the data is the way it is, why the language
> acts the way it does.
Well, my point was that it was not all that odd, not that it's
necessarily the best way to do things.  There's sense in using
nominative, too.  IMHO, the dative makes more sense (that's why I've
always liked the Spanish _me gusta_).

> Perhaps diachronically, but in the current stage of the language, there
> is no easy way to predict which case should be supplied except
> simply to say that particular verbs just require dative or genitive or
> whatever.
Well, I suspect that there ARE patterns, like perhaps verbs of
experience (like recover) tend to take dative subjects.  Besides, I like
to think of many things in language being determined by more-or-less
arbitrary selection of several possibilities, like the theory of Swahili
genders here: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/swahili/swahili.html
- if a noun could logically fall under more than one, there's no way to
predict which one it will fall in:

"Thus for example one can explain the inclusion of terms for small
animals in Class 7, but this does not entail that all terms for small
animals must be in this class. Entities in the world may be classified
in myriad ways; small size is just one among many possible criteria for
classification, and there is no a priori basis for predicting which
characteristics speakers will regard as most salient in a given case.
What this type of analysis does show is that the groupings that are
found are semantically motivated rather than arbitrary."

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