Re: Another Sketch: Palno

On 8/26/08, Alex Fink <000024@...> wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:04:40 -0400, Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...>
> wrote:
> >I leave them out. Weather verbs, for example, don't exist- rather than
> >saying "It's raining", you'd say "rain falls". I can't think of any
> >such concept that can't be re-lexed in a more convenient fashion
> >(though I'd be fascinated to be presented with some).
>
> I don't have any convincing ones.  (Anyone?)
This morning I woke, looked at the clock, and thought
"Jam okas!"  [It's already eight!]  In gjâ-zym-byn the
same thought would have been longer (for multiple
reasons); because of its default subject rule (first person,
or the same as the subject of the last sentence) it
doesn't allow impersonal verbs.

ðy-dâ-gla-van gwe šun kǒ.
five-three-ORD.T-V.STATE already region this

The local region is the topic of which the temporal
verb is predicated, as in some weather-verb
situations {purj} ("environment") is the topic.
I render "it's raining" much the same as Logan's Palno,

bly-van pwĭm.
fall-V.STATE water

but some other weather verbs, like "it's hot",
seem to want {purj} as their subject.

jâln-van purj.
hot-V.STATE environment

Contrast,

ðy-dâ-gla i gwe šun kǒ, mǒj kâlĭfornjě-wam mĭ-i ðy-gla-van zen.
It's already eight here, but only five in California.
[lit., "but California only five-o'clocks."]

These particular kinds of sentence would be terser
if gzb allowed impersonal verbs like Esperanto, but
I suspect the corpus as a whole would be less terse;
sentences whose subject is the same as the previous
sentence probably occur more often that sentences
whose verb would be impersonal in E-o or a similar
language, especially since the primary use for gzb
is me keeping my journal.


On 8/26/08, Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...> wrote:

> Or after the third, leaving an incomplete sentence. You can't tell
> without the commas. They are absolutely required. It would be nice to
> have a way around that, but I haven't found one yet.
How are the written commas represented in speech?
Timing, stress, intonation...?  Some conlangs have
parenthetical or comma grammatical particles; parenthetical
particles are better for disambiguating arbitrarily complex
sentences, but I'm not sure they're natural enough for
humans to learn to use them in realtime.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article

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