Re: A prioi vs. A posteriori ?

James Landau wrote:
> 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.
Many natural languages do that too.  Uatakassi also does it.  Uatakassi
also distinguishes between the two senses of a sentence like "How long
have you been running?", where it could mean "How long have you been in
the process of running?" (where an answer might be, say, 30 minutes) or
"How long have you been in the habit of running?" (where an answer might
be, say, 5 years).  Uatakassi would use the present non-punctual for the
first and present habitual for the second.  Present tense is used since
it's something that holds true right now.  Either you're actually
running at the moment, or you're still in the habit of running.

I was reminded of that distinction, which I'd figured out long ago,
yesterday at work when someone asked me "How long have you been here?",
and I had to ask if she meant "How long have I been here today?" (which
was the sense intended)

> 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")
Classical Uatakassi used genitive for things like that.  However, later
dialects used the dative when the "possessed" person was of higher
status than the "possessor", so, "daughter-my" but "mother to-me".  By
the time you get to Tivets, however, the genitive was completely
supplanted by the dative, the dative having expanded gradually via
"honored person" -> "non-slave" -> "person" -> "animate" -> all

> 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!
I tend to think of the so-called possessive in English as actually being
something more like "associative", that is, indicating that there's some
association between the two nouns.  This also holds in phrases like "the
man's death" or "the woman's beauty" or "the child's illness" and so
on.  There's no literal possession there.

One of my early conlangs, in fact, did make a distinction between
"possessive" and "associative" where possessive was used for tangible
objects owned by a person (my house, my car, my clothes), whereas
"associative" was used for abstracts, people, and the like (my brother,
my intelligence, my country)

Do the Kankonians use this "ad" form with things like "servant" or
"employee" or "slave" (if they have slavery that is).  What about "my
infant" or "my unborn child"?  If they're similar in social outlook to
contemporary Americans, perhaps anti-abortionists would use "ad is" for
"my unborn child" while pro-abortionists would use "na is" for "my
fetus".

Is it only with people?  Do they use "na is" for "my body" or "my
intelligence" or "my illness"?  What about "my country"?

--
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overheard
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