Re: EAK - two problems

Philip Newton wrote:
> On 5/20/07, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
>
>> I see problems occurring, however, when the indefinite is the
>> subject. How do distinguish (other than by stress & or intonation)
>> between "What's happening" and "Something's happening"?
>> (Assuming that both "What" and "something" is _ti_)
>
> My first inclination was to say that indefinites cannot come before
> the verb, even if they are the subject, so you'd have _Ti sumbain-_
> "What's happening?" vs. _Sumbain- ti_ "Something is happening".
I had thought along similar lines, but there are, as you note, problems
.....

> But I'm not sure whether to introduce such a concept into a caseless
> (and therefore, more reliant on word order) language -- the place
> after the verb probably looks too much like an object,
It probably does, unless we have a verb-first language like Welsh or
Gaelic - but that I think would be somewhat un-Greek. It seems to me
that we shall need a fairly strict SVO word order if EAK is a truly
isolating language.

> and I'm sure it
> wouldn't be too hard to produce an ambiguous sentence if subjects can
> be elided. (Say, _Se <eat> kai <drink> ti_ = "You eat and drink
> something", or "You eat, and something drinks"?)
Yep, the only way you could avoid ambiguity would be with repetition of
subject and object: se fage ti kai se pie ti.

>> I had thought of using _apó_ also, but it's odd and there's no Greek
>> precedent for it.
>
> Could there have been in the alternate universe that produced EAK?
Of course there could be, but that would push the divergence of the WHAT
(western Hellenic alternative timeline) from our world timeline back
into at least early Koine, if not into late classical. Once we do that,
then all sorts of things can be done. But I want to keep the language in
our alternative universe practically the same as in our universe until
the 1st century CE - after that each can go their own way.

Probably in at least some, if not all, of the Hellenic languages of
Italy, Gaul and Spain in that alternate universe will have lost the
genitive and, indeed, all case endings - but how they would cope with
possession, I do not know nor, in fact, is it relevant to EAK. That's a
problem for any conlanger who wishes to "discover" one of these
Helleniclangs of the WHAT universe   :)

I'm still pondering possession - Thinks: a Latin without inflexions is
so much easier   ;)

>> VL _a(d)_ did not replace the ablative, it replaced the _dative_,
>
>
> Ah, I was thinking of _Libera nos a malo_ in the Lord's Prayer, which
> I thought I had heard would have been straight ablative in older Latin
> (_from_ evil). Perhaps I either misremembered, or this is an
> exception.
You may have read that somewhere, but if someone wrote that he/she was
being erroneously pedantic. It is true that Latin _could_ express it
without the _a_ (short for _ab_), but even in the Classical period
_a(b)_ was used if the noun denoted an abstract concept and, indeed,
*must* be used if it denotes a person.

If you think the Greek 'apó tou ponèroú" means "from evil" then the
Latin could be _a malo_ or just plain _malo_. But if you think the Greek
means "from the Evil one", which seems to me more likely, then the Latin
_must_ be _a malo_. In any case, the 'Pater Noster' is a more or less
_literal_ translation from the Greek, so the preposition would not be
likely to be dropped and, indeed, there is no reason IMO to drop it.

But the Romance _a_ is derived from Latin _ad_ (a form still retained in
Italian before vowels). Latin _a(b)_ largely died out in VL, giving way
to _de_ - but there are odd survivals, e.g. Italian _da_ <-- de a(b);
French _avec_ <-- ab hoc.

[snip]
>
> Ah, so this is a difference -- later Romance use of _de_ was
> foreshadowed but there was no similar phenomenon in Greek to take
> advantage of.
Precisely.

> Er, which leads to the problem: do you invent something forcibly, or
> do you solve the problem some other way?
I am, as you see, resisting all temptations to invent something
forcibly. So yes, I am trying to solve he problem some other way.

> The available resources seem
> rather scant if you go by precedent.
Agreed!

> I laud your attempt, however, to make the language as realistic as
> possible by looking for existing things to use as models, rather than
> conjuring a _deus ex machina_ out of thin air to fill a perceived
> hole.
Thank you.

[snip]
>>
>> No - we shouldn't have the repeated _apo_ in the first example. We need
>> "the (of the( of me )father) mother" -
>> (a) to apó to apó emé patró mètró _or_
>> (b) to mètró to apó to apó emé patró _or_
>> (c) to mètró to apó to patró to apó emé
>
>
> Can you mix-and-match "to <specifier> <noun>" and "to <noun> to
> <specifier>", as in (b)?
Yep - it was OK in the ancient language, so it's OK in EAK


--
Ray
==================================
ray@carolandray.plus.com
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu.
There's none too old to learn.
[WELSH PROVERB]

Reply