Re: ANNOUNCE: First longer sentence in S7
| From: | Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, April 4, 2004, 17:43 |
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I had a little closer look at your site. In general,
I'm especially interested in concepts, and I noticed a
convergence between the concepts you handle and the
ones I was thinking about. Whenever reading a
documentation about a language, I like to have a
separate chapter about semantic concepts alone,
without any morphosyntactic, phonetic or whatever
considerations, because I think they make the reader
confused, but that's my opinion. To me it's doesn't
matter at all that Genitive would be marked by "ui" or
by "iu" or whatever, that's just the last layer of
paint. I'm interested in the fundaments.
I noticed that you give a special meaning to "aspects"
(but "State vs.Event" follow).
Cases are more or less what I'm thinking about too.
"Spatiorative" doesn't sound very nice indeed (maybe
"circumlative", or "circumjective", or something like
that ?) The idea of giving both a spatial and a
temporal meaning to some cases looks all right to me :
maybe you could add a "notional" meaning to ? In your
example "I think, therefore I am", rather than a
causative, I fancied something like: "thought-ABL
existence-ACC I infer" (from Thought I infer
Existence) [but you have no Accusative]. "From
thought" (notional) looks similar to me as "from the
city" (spatial) or "from 1945" (temporal), while
"thought-CAU" itches a little : I was thinking of
Causative in cases like "the wind-CAU broke the
branch" (dynamic verbal concepts, implying Time).
Benefactive and Malefactive might be unnecessary
refinements, as they could be expressed some other way
(Dative + some positive / negative particle) - and you
mention that you can add "degree affixes" to cases, so
that's not so different.
As to moods, as I said, I would had a "fictional" one
: not true regarding "real world", but having its own
consistence and laws. I also would use Conditional and
Irrealis both in main and in subordinate clause (like
in Esperanto, if I remember). For Degree, as I said
too, I would use different scales, depending on the
situation needs.
About modalities, I think that it's more that just
"personal inclination". I read (in Laurent Gosselin)
the following scheme, which I found interesting:
Instance of ! Ajustment direction
Validation ! Predicate > World ! World > Predicate
============!=====================!===================
Reality ! Alethic / Ontic !
------------!---------------------!-------------------
Speaker's ! Epistemic / Doxastic!
belief ! (subjective truth) !
------------!---------------------!-------------------
Speaker's ! Appreciative ! Boulic
desire ! (+/- desirable) ! (volition, desire)
------------!---------------------!-------------------
Institution ! Axiologic ! Deontic
! (+/- praisable/ ! (obligation)
! blamable) !
I was expecting to find something about semantic
classes, as you refer to some in your examples
(sentient, spacetime, etc), but I didn't ? To me it's
one of the very most important concepts... The real
question being: a language is very well, but shall we
talk about ? It is the referent world that determines
the language, IMO.
--- Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I'd proudly like to announce that I just finished
> the translation of a
> longer sentence in S7. It is the first sentence of
> 'The Northwind and
> the Sun'. Sorry for repeatedly translating the same
> texts...
>
> In case you are interested, the following webpage
> shows the S7 IPA-like
> text, smooth translation, close translation, and
> interlinears:
>
>
http://www.theiling.de/projects/s7/s_06.html#s_06_01
>
> Enjoy!
>
> I think I urgently need some cold beverage now and
> maybe some food (I
> forgot the time again).
>
> Bye,
> Henrik
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