Re: Subject / Object / ?

En réponse à Christian Thalmann :


>But in spoken French, from what I've heard, the subject
>vs object distinction is even marked with a case suffix!
>Observe: /lOm/ "the man (ACC)", /lOmi/ "the man (NOM)",
>as in /lOmi vwa lotROm/ "the man sees the other man". ;-)
That's incorrect. The /i/ you're referring to (written "il") is not a 
suffix to the previous word but a prefix to the verb! It's easy to check: 
there's one big intangible rule in Spoken French, which is that the stress 
marks the *last* syllable of the phrase (stress is phrase-based rather than 
word-based in French). Anything after the stress belongs to the *next* 
phrase. And if you add stress to your phonetic description (otherwise 
correct), you arrive at:
/'lOm i'vwa lot'ROm/. The /i/ is a subject-agreement prefix to the verb (if 
you don't believe it, ask a French person to speak slowly. Most will do 
that by exaggerating pauses between phrases, and will cut the sentence as 
such: /'lOm/, /i'vwa/, /lot'ROm/. It wouldn't be like that if the /i/ 
belonged to the previous phrase). Spoken French is a polysynthetic 
language, which like many other polysynthetic languages indicates a lot of 
the sentence's structure through affixes on the verb (mostly prefixes but 
also a few suffixes). The phrases whose functions are indicated on the verb 
often don't receive any special function marking (indirect object do 
though). Agreement and word order are normally enough. And for the phrases 
whose functions are not indicated on the verb, they receive case prefixes 
to indicate their function (which are misnamed as "prepositions" ;)) ).

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.