Re: Syntaxy-Turvy (long, crazy)

>===== Original Message From Constructed Languages List
>
>To solve your problem with intransitive sentences, you could just have two
>kinds of intransitive sentences:
>- a SN kind, which would be passion-patient (nice to translate French "on")
>- a NO kind, which would be agent-action (I know it's strange to consider
>intransitive a sentence without subject but with an object, but as here
>it's the subject and the object that are verbs, transitivity becomes quite
>different. To solve the problem you can just use a SNO transitive sentence
>with a "dummy" subject - like a kind of 'do', an equivalent of French "on",
>but for verbs -)
I like this idea, and I had been considering it myself before.   I think that
I shall adopt it -- including the "dummy subjects" part.

>Nice idea :) . Would you make a difference between nouns that have a
>possible Intention, and nouns that have not? After all, not all verbs in
>English can take an indirect object.
Actually, I'm not sure that's true.  Though certain verbs very commonly take
an indirect object, you can add an indirect object to nearly any transitive
verb and it will have the sense of "beneficiary" or "recpient."

You can cook someone a dinner, create them a masterpiece, or explode them some
bombs.  The last sounds odd only because it is odd to think of someone being
the beneficiary of an explosion, but with a little work I bet you could think
of a context where nearly any verb could be usefully and understandably
ditransitive.

"I want to write a novel with a constructed language but I'm no good at
conlanging, only at con-historical linguistics.   Could you conlang me a
proto-language, which I can then extrapolate from on my own?"

>So you would also reverse the function of prepositions and conjunctions!
>English prepositions (at, to, in, from, since, in spite of, etc...) would
>be rendered as conjunctions in Taxy, while English conjunctions (because,
>while, when, where, so that, etc...) would become prepositions! Wow!
I had not thought of that parallel, but now that you mention it it makes
perfect sense.  Thank you again.

Back to work!

Ed

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         edheil@mailandnews.com
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