Re: me and my languages

On Mon, 10 Sep 2001, Douglas Koller, Latin & French wrote:

> A fave word in Géarthnuns is "swö", an adverb which is used to
> cushion a negative statement that might be unpleasant to the
> listener. It often translates in English as "I'm sorry" or "I'm
> afraid that...":
>
One of my favorites of the few words that I've designed so far is "mu",
which requires a bit of explanation.  Simafira has two question particles.
One is used to mark a portion of the sentence specifically being
questioned - "_You're_ taking the car?" as opposed to "You're taking the
_car_?"  The other simply turns the statement into a true-or-false
question: "This meal is very good, yes/no?"  (I'm using English
equivalents; I haven't quite gotten to inventing the words for these
concepts yet!)

A response of "yes" is answering "true" to the statement; "no" is "false".
However, there is a third option, "mu", which I borrowed from an obscure
bit of hacker-speak.  It essentially means, "I cannot meaningfully respond
yes or no."  Thus, the phrase, "Do you still beat your wife?" would
probably garner the response, "Mu!" in Simafira.

--
  Steve Kramer           ||           scooter (at) buser dot net          ||
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