Re: Non-static verbs?

On Thu, 17 Aug 2000, SMITH,MARCUS ANTHONY wrote:

> On Thu, 17 Aug 2000, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> > My version messed with this somewhat: if you said "rain put the fire out"
> > (for example--I did some morpheme-generation for a few hours today, and
> > then burned out!--so the words don't actually exist yet), most Qenaren
> > (fictitious country) speakers of Chevraqis would mark either "rain" as
> > voluntary and "fire" as involuntary, or both as voluntary.  Reason: it's
> > a throwback to the mostly-animistic religious views that prevail in the
> > area.  An Avren (neighboring fictitious country) would probably mark both
> > as involuntary.
>
> Seems rather similar in concept to the Algonkian gender system. Each noun
> is either animate or inanimate with the basis coming from their mythology.
> Basically, things with power are animate - that include people, animals,
> man-made things that run on their own (like steamships and cars, as
> opposed to sailboats and carriages), some trees, some fruits, etc.
> Everything that does not "have power" is inanimate -- rocks, some trees,
> some fruits, clothing, etc.  There are interesting cases that cannot be
> predicted, like (IIRC) strawberries are animate, but blackberries are
> inanimate.
Neat!  I should throw in a couple unpredictable cases, too, then, for
"realism"--though possibly my twisted mind is sufficient, but you never know.

There are a couple other cases I'm playing with--locative (also
non-ownership possesive, and "ownership" is sort of a relative concept,
too) and genitive (ownership possessive, though maybe there's already a
name for ownership-only and I haven't found it yet).  No genders.  I
decided that cases were complicated enough for me to experiment with, to
start.

Must find out more about Algonkian, though.  So many languages, nat or
con, to learn!  It almost scares me when I browse the web for conlangs
because there's just too many of them and I only have so much time....<G>

YHL