Re: A prioi vs. A posteriori ?

On Fri, 7 Feb 2003 16:48:09 +0000 Joe <joe@...> parisen:


>On Friday 07 February 2003 5:22 pm, James Landau wrote:
>
>> I actually decided to keep each verb in Kankonian in its real tense.
>> Therefore, you say "Ad alhas wan azirethen az penkas abamas bolmas" (She
>> taught the class that starfish eat clams) instead of "Ad alhas wan
>> azirethen az penkas abamen bolmas" (She taught the class that starfish ate
>> clams). If a Kankonian person heard you use the "abamen" form, s/he'd
think
>> that starfish no longer pry open clam shells, perhaps due to a major upset
>> in the ecosystem. Also suggestions take the future tense in Kankonian, as
>> do any sentences with the word "wafin" (to suggest).
>
> So, I take it that if Starfish went extinct, the latter sentence would be
> acceptable.
 As I wrote yesterday, the "abamen" form would indeed be the correct form of
the sentence if starfish were to go extinct. I tried writing my response to
this on the LISTSERV site where this is centered and located, but, after
reading through the list of posts today, I now see that my response never
showed up. It was submitted and then went into the nowhere zone.

 Keeping everything in its "real" tense seemed only logical and natural for
what was supposed to be a language that came from the natural senses. I felt
of this as correcting a flaw in natlangs that I didn't really understand. For
example, one thing I was intent on changing when creating Kankonian was that
genealogical relations could only use "ad" (to) rather than "na" (of), so "my
sister" became "surten ad is" (sister to me), not "surten na is" (sister of
me, with "na is" being the usual construction for "my"). Mulling over the way
people always explain "my", "your", etc. as denoting possession/ownership, it
seemed so offensive when thinking about people being spoken of thus
(especially in reference to one's children) -- PEOPLE SHOULDN'T BE PROPERTY!
And so you have the "brother to me, father to me, daughter to me"
construction (at least in modern Kankonian -- I'm thinking of making it so
that it used to be "na", but they changed that during the revolution, sort of
like the feminist reforms in English and German.)

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