Re: Two Questions for OurTongue

On Mon, 7 Jul 2003 10:52:22 +0200, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

>Not bad :) . Your "wa" looks just like the topic marker in Japanese, and
>has the same meaning. Was it intentional?
Not really, although Patrick Ryan derives the Japanese topic marker also
from Proto-Language *fha.  There is evidence of such a marker in many
languages, including Proto-Indo-European.

>Well, the only problem here is the change of word order. For the formant to
>be -u, you need to put "wa" after the verb. This would be difficult to
>explain. However, what could happen is that in the original construction
>you give: "meî wa dapá", the "wa" stops being felt in association with the
>pronoun, but with the following verb instead. This is very realistic. In
>this case, it would lead to the formation of a formant u-, i.e. a prefix.
One of the constraints for OurTongue is that it uses only suffixation.  My
inspiration for the mediopassive formant -u is the Uralic languages, which
have exactly the same formant for mediopassive verbs.

Perhaps in Pre-Proto-Uralic, the "wa" particle modified the verb instead of
the (pro)noun?  If Pre-OT did the same thing, it would give:

Meî dapá wa.  'I hit concerning.' > 'I am hit'?

Are these semantics realistic?  Also, however, the Proto-Uralic -u formant
was supposedly a reflexive formant at first, which then became a
mediopassive formant.

- Rob