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Re: Volition in Anohim

From:Douglas Koller, Latin & French <latinfrench@...>
Date:Monday, October 25, 2004, 14:25
Sally writes:

>Here are some verbs that are always non-volitional: > >be, exist, be ignorant of, be absent, be present, be happy, sad, blue, >fiery, stupid and a bunch of other stative verbs in T; get, sleep, fall >asleep, wake up, sicken, vomit, bleed, die, dream, have (inalienable), >beware, trip, fall down, etc.
Interesting. Géarthnuns doesn't have these kinds of grammatically hardwired volitional distinctions of course, but the word for "sleepy" is "héfürafalöb", "wanting to sleep". There is a set of adjectives like this: glozhürafalöb - hungry (wanting to eat), frozhürafalöb - thirsty (wanting to drink), batröthürafalöb - dirty (wanting to be washed), and perhaps others. One could argue, I suppose, that this usage of "üraf", "want", is akin to English or Chinese, where want bleeds into need. Still, I think to the Géarthçins mindset, sleep would run alongside your defecate and urinate disitnctions. I mean, there's sleep (It's your late afternoon art history class, the professor's turned off the lights to show slides, it's eighty degrees in the classroom, and you pulled an all-nighter the night before -- you don't stand a prayer.) and there's sleep (It's a lazy Saturday, you're racked out on the couch reading a book and you're so comfortable that you lay your open book on your chest and decide to head off to the Land of Nod for a few hours.).
>The ambivolitional verbs cover the senses: > >hear/listen to; see/watch or look at; smell/sniff; feel/touch or caress; >taste/lick
Géarthnuns marks these pairs with a prefix, "dim-", which I've never bothered to translate ("keenly, attentively doing X"?). It's only used with these basic sensory verbs: tel/dimtel - see/look at shal/dimshal - hear/listen to don't remember the others sans dictionary but: feel/touch smell/smell taste/taste For the Géarthçins, the "smell/dimsmell" and "taste/dimtaste" pairs translate into English as "smell" and "taste" respectively, since English doesn't seem make this distinction: "Do you smell smoke?" (smell) "Smell this milk. Has it gone bad?" (dimsmell) "You can't taste things very well with a bad cold." (taste) "Taste this. Does it need more dill?" (dimtaste) (and *every*thing needs more dill -- Cheerios need more dill -- that, and cream sherry). "Sniff" and "lick" would be translated differently as they're considered different phenomena. Kou