Re: Intrusive Articles!

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@F...> wrote:

 > I completely agree with your liking of this feature. Indeed, it's one of
 > the features that the first instance of Maggel had that I kept in
its new
 > incarnation! :))

What?  That implies a degree of strangeness I had not
reckoned with.  =P



 > And despite their strangeness, those features are probably the most
 > realistic in Maggel, since, although they are written separately in the
 > script, prepositions and the articles are phonological prefixes, and
it's
 > thus normal that nothing can go between them and the noun (even if it
 > creates the strange word order adjective + preposition + article +
noun :)) ).

Phew.  So it makes sense after all.  ;-)



 > How does it happen in Jovian when you put a fronted adjective for
emphasis
 > in front of a noun in a prepositional phrase? (I suppose Jovian has
 > prepositions of course :)) ) Do you get the word order preposition +
 > adjective + article + noun?

Well, the article is usually necessary to mark the case
and thus the role of the noun phrase.  If you have a
preposition, though, it already fulfills that role very
nicely, so the article is usually dropped from speech,
unless one wants to stress (in)definiteness or the
directionality (locative/lative).  The reason for this is
my slight obsession with efficiency.  ;-)

In that sense, I can well imagine phrases like |muode cun
lauze| [mu@d kum blawz] "with much praise", as in Latin.

(Bad example, though.  This would be expressed with the
oblique case: |muode ni lawze| [mu@d ni lawz].


It seems that native speakers of English tend to use "in"
for "into" most of the time, so the lack of that
distinction can't be too detrimental to a language,
especially since there's a mechanism (the article) to
make that distinction if desired:

Doerwe in dowu.
[darv in do:v]
"[He] sleeps in[side] [the] house."

Veine in dowu.
[vejn in do:v]
"[He] comes in[to] [the] house."

Jaege un laefte in en dowu.
[jajg @m blEft in en do:v]
"[He] throws a stone into the house."

Jaege un laefte in ei dowu.
[jajg @m blEft in e zo:v]
"[He] throws a stone inside the house."



-- Christian Thalmann