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Re: How to do "But/However"

From:Harold Ensle <heensle@...>
Date:Sunday, March 12, 2006, 17:21
On Sun, 12 Mar 2006 15:04:59 +0100, taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-
conlang@...> wrote:

>In all the Indo-European languages I've had a look at, "but/however" are >standalone words. In logic/semantics, "but" is considered yet another >"and". The difference in using "but" instead of "and" is that the "but" >says that something else was expected than what actually happened. > >a) X and Y. >b) X, expected Y but got Z. > >I'd hate to copy Indo-European usage here, so what other ways are there >to to get the effect of "but"?
This is an interesting problem, for example, in Arabic, there is no word for "but" and one is forced to use just "and"; In Finnish, there are two words for "but" and the choice of which to use depends on the degree of contrast. I suppose you could use "and" and then have something in the following clause to indicate that it was unexpected. In my conlang this is done in a very strange way. I have the word "vari" which means basically "instead of", but only retains this meaning when the following sentence is in the subjunctive (since the action does not actually occur). But if the following sentence is in the indicative, it must actually be occurring, thus forcing it to be an "and" that should not have been. "vari" thus ends up meaning "but" in that environment.

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John Vertical <johnvertical@...>