Re: Trigger languages Re: Further language development Q's

H. S. Teoh wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 04:55:43PM -0400, Dan Saunders wrote:
> [...]
>
>>Do you know of anyway I could get that put into a larger  nutshell?  a book
>>or a webpage or something?  You have only  whetted my thirst for knowledge and
>>my searches on the internet prove  futile.
>
> Hmm, you're right, Pablo Flores' pages on this seem to have vanished
> off the net. Fortunately, you can still get at the relevant snippet
> from Google cache:
<snip>

> I'm going to save a copy of this just in case it doesn't come back.
> :-/
Seeing as one of the reasons I put up the wiki[1] was so that these
things could be collected together, you could throw it up there.

If nobody writes up something by the morning, I'll throw an article
on it up myself.

My Térnaru[2] is a simple (accidental: didn't know about triggers at
the time, but they rock) trigger language. If anybody wants an example,
it's there. It also does other nifty things with the particles to do
things like reflexion and the like.

It works slightly differently from what David described. There's a bunch
of particles, more or less like prepositions, that mark the functions of
the various noun phrases in the sentence. When you want to make
something the focus of a sentence, you leave that NP unmarked, and mark
the verb complex instead with the role of the focused NP. You can also
mark an NP with two particles, e.g.

     an-a-Lídu    íl   ták
     ACT-PAT-Lídu PAST hit
     Lídu hit himself

     Lídu íl an-a-ták.
     (It was) Lídu (who) hit himself. (uh, roughly translated)

K.

[1] http://talideon.com/concultures/wiki/

[2] It's still at http://hereticmessiah.buzzword.com/conlangs/ternaru
     for now, but should be at http://talideon.com/concultures/ternadi/
     soon.

--
Keith Gaughan -- talideon.com
The man who removes a mountain begins
by carrying away small stones...
                          ...to make place for some really big nukes!