Re: Adpositionless conlang?

"David Peterson" <ThatBlueCat@...> wrote:

> <<I heard get* you = "I heard from you"
> She needs wood want* building house = "She needs wood to build a house"
> He poured wine put* glass = "He poured wine into the glass">>
>
> The first to notice is that at least for these first two, at least, there
> often is no adposition--it just so happens that English uses them
I do have the chance to say "I heard you", but it means something
different from "I heard from you".

As for the second sentence, yes, I could do with
"She needs wood <some conjunction> she wants to build a house",
but the idea was to link the two things closely with a single
verb phrase.

Now, noun incorporation is really a good idea. I'll have to see
if it fits into the language (which in principle is not very
fond of compounding) and in which cases.

The language has no morphological case marking. There's only
plain nominative-accusative word-order-based alignment (SVO).
What I did think about was having the possibility of dropping
the subordinated verb when context was clear, in the same way
as English allows one to say "I'm working this Saturday" with
no preposition of time/location.

    Bukurys ai tsicha da-mye.
    bukur-y -s   ai   tsicha da=mye
    kick -3s-PRF PART sand   1s=face
    "(He) kicked sand (into/at) my face."

(the complete form would use _emi_ "give*" or some similar
subordinate verb before _da-mye_.)


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.angelfire.com/scifi2/nyh/index.html
  "The future is all around us, waiting, in moments
   of transition, to be born in moments of revelation.
   No one knows the shape of that future or where it
   will take us. We know only that it is always born
   in pain."  -- G'Kar quoting G'Quon, in "Babylon 5"