Re: Saalangal stuff

Roger Mills writes:

>We were given similar advice when learning Indonesian-- which also avoids
>the 1st per. sing. pronoun like the plague.  All pronouns are omitted
>whenever possible. When speaking to or about "superiors", there are
>deferential forms, though I suspect younger speakers may be getting away
>from that.
Interesting! I wonder, does Indonesian use triggers at all? From what i've
read i cant tell. I found one site that seemed to show that word order
shows the emphasis.

Anyhow, it's quite understandable in Saalangal. I mean, even in English
where the focus can be shown from intonation, it sounds strong and
accusative. I guess the agent trigger could be comsidered something like
an accusative also.

From what i've read Tagalog also avoids using the agent trigger as much as
possible, preferring the patient triggers more often.


The other three triggers arent used quite as much (beneficiary,
instrumental, locative). But they do find their way into speech and
literature from time to time (in literature, the agent trigger is used
quite a bit).