Re: HELP: a few questions

On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 03:26:46PM -0700, JS Bangs wrote:
> H. S. Teoh sikyal:
>
> > There is one problem with this scheme, though. Right now, there is no way
> > to distinguish between direct and indirect discourse, since both would
> > require the use of the same grammatical construct using _ti_ and _timi_.
> > I'm tentatively turning a blind eye to this issue, but I really have no
> > idea how I might resolve it. :-/
>
> Why is this a problem? Yivrian has no indirect discourse, but I've never
> felt bad about it. Who says every language has to have every construction?
True. Perhaps I should just leave it as it is. :-)

> You can read about my shameless lack of indirect discourse at:
> http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/yivrian/verb_classes.htm#Complementizers
[snip]

Interesting. Reminds me of relay6.5, which I have just completed the
Ebisedian entry for, where the lack of indirect discourse made it
necessary for me to invent an epicene singular 1st person pronoun. I had
never imagined I needed such a thing before, since one would never refer
to oneself in the epicene (esp. in Ebisedian culture which is particularly
nitpicky about using correct genders---I mean, they inflect all body part
names for gender, etc.).

Fortunately, because I chose to use the nice proper noun prefixes which
have unique forms for all genders and numbers, this didn't become an
obstacle---all I had to do was to legitimatize the use of an epicene
prefix on the 1st person pronoun. :-)


T

--
Why can't you just be a nonconformist like everyone else? -- YHL