Re: Subject / Object / ?

On Monday, September 13, 2004, at 09:24 , Christian Thalmann wrote:

> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, John Cowan <cowan@C...> wrote:
>
>> Remember that you are talking to a francophone, for whom this
> procedure is
>> essentially impossible due to the wide separation of spoken French
> and written
>> French, which Christophe has himself characterized as "two separate
> languages"
>> on many occasions.
>
> 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". ;-)
No, no - this is faulty analysis.

In the interrogative form we have /lOmvwatilotRom/. The -i- has attached
itself to the allomorph -vwat-. What we have here is the development in
colloquial French of a mandatory _verbal_ subject complement; such verbal
complements are, of course, compulsory in non-interrogative sentences if
there is no noun subject. In the Rheto-Romance branch, such verbal
complements are compulsory in all environments; colloquial French seems to
be going the same way.

{sigh} Why do people keep trying to pretend that French nouns have case
forms? I recall seeing once in a book:
NOM.  le garçon
GEN.  du garçon
DAT.  au garçon
ACC.  le garçon

(I kid you not!)

BTW - just to return to the subject line  :)

If we had got subject & object confused at school, the headmaster had a
simple technique for bringing home the point. If, for example, the guy
sitting next to me was "Smith" (only surnames were used in those days), he
would simply say:
"Brown, hit Smith round the head!"
"Smith, hit Brown round the head!"

His theory was that even the most obtuse boy could spot the difference:
the hitter is the subject & the head being hit is the object  ;)

Of course, such simple lessons have now long been banned in UK schools!

Ray
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"They are evidently confusing science with technology."
UMBERTO ECO				September, 2004