Re: Conlang Shadows

Dan Sulani wrote:
>>>>>
This got me to wondering, how would our various conlangs deal with
>the following situation:
A person is outside on a cloudy day. Suddenly the clouds part, the sun
shines, and a shadow appears. What has happened? Obviously, if one uses the
sun
as the subject of the sentence, one could say that it "caused, made, etc."
the shadow. But what if the _person_ were the subject of the sentence? What
would the verb be? (Assuming that one did not want to express the idea that
the person was "casting" the shadow like a fisherman "casts" his net.) Or
maybe one would want to keep that association! Would there be differences
between humans and non-humans? Animate shadows versus inanimate shadows?
Other distinctions? Or maybe some grammatical structure other than
subject-verb?
<<<<<

My conlang Pisina has a special "lucitive" case for that one :-)
I mean: I have a special ending making any noun into a semantic role (or
"case"). For instance, when associated with the attribute "shadow", the
concept "light" has a specific role. So I would TAG the noun "light" to make
it the semantic role LIGHT (and I can make any role a subject):

Man has-shadow @-light-TAG (of) sun.
"The man has a shadow with its LIGHT (of) the sun."

Or:

Shadow of man has-light-TAG (of) sun.
"The shadow of the man has the sun('s) as its LIGHT."

Or

Sun has/makes-light-TAG shadow of man.
"The sun has/makes-LIGHT (of) the man's shadow."

I can make any noun into a case: a POT when I'm cooking (or confining or
preserving), a DOOR when I'm exiting (or closing or slamming), a PROJECTILE
when I'm throwing, a LANGUAGE when I'm talking. Pisina is the 1000-case
language. ;-)