Re: English "another"/Conlang Question

On Wed, 8 Aug 2007 15:38:58 -0700, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:

>I have a series of nouns that are supposed to be derived from
>a combination of this /i/ particle and a noun.  It forms what I've
>called instance of action nouns, or object nouns, or various types
>of nouns, something like this:
>
>tei "to dance" > itei "(a/the) dance"
>moi "guava tree" > imoi "guava fruit"
>kavaka "to write" > ikavaka "book"
>
>In a sentence, you would do it this way:
>
>Ka hava ei i imoi.
>/past eat I OBJ. guava/
>"I ate a guava."
>
>Have I done this wrong?  Should there be no object marker?
>I wouldn't have thought so, but thinking about "another" has
>given me pause.  Any thoughts?
What's the semantic development supposed to be here: how did |OBJ. write|
come to mean 'book'?  Without knowing any Kamakawi, it feels like it might
be a development of a headless relative with OV order and a gap after the
object particle: |OBJ. 0 write| '(thing) that's written', or whatever.  So
if we imagine an origin like that I'd totally expect another _i_; the one
that's already there was historically buried inside another clause.

The development that you'd need to go the other way, dropping the _i_
because it (diachronically or whatever) *is* the same _i_ that marked the
object in that clause, doesn't seem as plausible.  So we might posit that
pre-Kamakawi used for instance 'dance (v.)' for 'dance (n.)' by
zero-derivation, which in and of itself is completely fine, but then for
some reason when it started appearing in object position it glommed the
object marker onto itself, which nouns other than these zero-derivations
didn't do, and this glomerate form generalized to be used in all positions.
 Why would that happen?  I can't think of a reason.

Or was the _i_ just supposed to contribute the semantics of 'object of'
giving rise to e.g. _ikavaka_ 'book = object of writing'?  That just feels
*really* wrong to me in a way I can't quite describe convincingly.  You're
going from "the noun to my right is an object of the verb of my clause" to
"the noun I form is itself an object of the thing to my right", so that at
some abstract level you're reversing the arguments of the "object-of"
relation, which just isn't the sort of slip I can see a word ever making.
It seems to require abstracting the meager semantics of "object-of" away
from their instantiation in syntax altogether too much.

I don't know if you remember the time we were trying to coin a word for
'command' in Kalusa, and among the proposals were things like _kagorota_
|IMP.+speak|?  That felt wrong in largely the same way, which I did an
equally poor job of describing then.

Alex

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