Re: Lahabic Syntax

H. S. Teoh wrote:


>I see. Well, the thing about my conlang is that noun modifiers are
>actually inside a relative clause -- you can't have a standalone modifier
>in the main clause.
[snip examples]

Telek works the same way.

>You *could* see such a sentence in native prose, as "red" is sometimes
>used as idiomatic jargon referring to philosophical or scientific
>entities. But "red" would *never* be interpreted as a modifier of "horse",
>because of a phenomenon in the language I call "implicit conjunction".
In Telek the color must be nominalized to appear in a non-predicate
position, in which case it would mean something like "redness" or "being
red" depending on the context.

>In fact, strictly speaking, there aren't any explicit conjunctions in the
>language -- instead, there are divalent and trivalent correlatives which
>can be used when you want to explicitly emphasize a conjunction. The
>native speakers find it utterly redundant to specify more than three
>explicit conjunctions, and would simply use a mixture of implicit
>conjunctions and correlatives.
Telek also has no true conjunctions.  Conjunctions are expressed with
verbal morphology between sentences -- the switch-reference marking I've
posted about a couple times.  Noun phrases are coordinated by the use of
verbs with meanings such as "be both", "be joined together", "be without,
exclude", etc.

>Interesting. It seems that my conlang is *lacking* attributive adjectives;
>hence, you need to use a periphrastic relative clause construct to express
>it.
It isn't exactly lacking attributive adjectives, but just expressing them
in a different way.  Your relative clause (and the ones in Telek) are
functionally equivalent even though not structurally so.



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Marcus Smith
AIM:  Anaakoot
"When you lose a language, it's like
dropping a bomb on a museum."
   -- Kenneth Hale
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