Re: How to do "But/However"

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.

Reply