Re: A Survey

Rob Haden wrote:
> I'm curious to see everyone's answers to the following questions:
>
> 1. Does your language(s) distinguish between active ("X breaks Y"), middle
> ("X breaks (apart)"), and passive ("X is broken (by Y)")?
Yes.

> 2. If the answer to #1 was "yes," what method(s) does your language(s) use
> to make some/all of the above distinctions?
Thagojian marks either or both of Agent and Patient (as well as some other roles)
with suffixes to verbs. Voice isn't really an applicable concept, as such.

I do have trouble differentiating middle from being a subset of passive, which is a
problem that might or might not need some attention as the development of the
language progresses.

Adjectives can derive from verbs, by use of the passive. I know for damned sure I
need more work in this area.

> 3. What method(s) does your language(s) use to distinguish between basic
> nouns and verbs of the same root (i.e. "a hit" vs. "he hits")?
There's a complicated question. Roots themselves are not intrinsically nominal or
verbal. No. Strike that. It's probably better to think of all roots as intrinsically verb-
like.

Verbs get marked with the roles of their participants. You can then make nouns out
of them, i.e. "the fact that he hits", "a thing that he hits", "a thing that he uses to hit".
Omitting the agent to make nouns like "a thing that gets hit" is more difficult, and I
may have to reinsert a pronoun I thought I had eliminated, in order to deal with it.

The chances are that such cases would be dealt with lexically rather than
morphologically, at least for ordinary objects in ordinary speech.

Actually, that same reborn pronoun would probably help me differentiate medial and
passive more easily. I may be on to something here.



Paul Bennett