Re: EAK - two problems

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".

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, 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"?)

> 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?

> 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.

> Even in classical Latin the ablative had to be preceded by a preposition
> if the word referred to a person (except in the 'ablative absolute
> construction'); it was only a short step to extend this to all nouns.
> The ablative merged with the accusative at an early date as popular
> inscriptions & graffiti show. The Romance use of _de_ and _a(d)_ is not
> so strange as there were sort of ancient precedents - but AFAIK there
> simply is no precedent in the Greek of any period for _apo_ (or any
> other preposition) to denote possession.
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.

Er, which leads to the problem: do you invent something forcibly, or
do you solve the problem some other way? The available resources seem
rather scant if you go by precedent.

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.

> > Would _apó_ be a resonable candidate for AEK, too?
>
> Probably as reasonable for EAK as for GSF   ;)
>
> I do not like it.
I'll have to see how I like it in the long run, too. It is,
admittedly, rather fake -- roughly parallel to Romance _de_ in
semantics, but not in historical development or precedent.

> > I'd recommend using a preposed particle of some kind.
>
> Yes, I think a preposed particle would be better, and also allow us to
> keep the attributive word order of ancient Greek. But what particle??
Aye, there's the rub.

> > E.g. using _apó_, you'd have _to apó me patró_, _to patró to apó me_
> > "my father"; _to apó to patró to mètró_, _to mètró to apó to patró
> > "the father's mother";
>
> No, you've got too many TOs in the first version - "the father's mother"
> would be:
> to apó to patró mètró _or_ to mètró to apó to patró
Oops. You are, of course, right. I was confusing myself, obviously.

> _to apó apó me to patró to mètró_, _to mètró to
> > apó to patró to apó me_ "my father's mother".
>
> 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)?

Otherwise, again, thank you for the correction.

> > Another thing that came to mind was _ek_, or maybe _pará_ ("by", à la
> > Russian possession with _u XXX est'_), or maybe even _epí_ ("on", à la
> > Finnish possession with _XXX:lla on_).
>
> There's no Greek precedent for any of these.
Then I have no good suggestion for you, I'm afraid.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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