Re: Leropho part 2

At 12:19 20/04/00 +0200, you wrote:
>Two days ago had part 1, now the continuing story of Leropho,
>the team-effort language.
>
>COMPOUND VERBS
>
>Another example: "kourochianou Katavo" means
>"kouro chiotainou Katavo" "God gives us light."
>
>Note here that chi- is a ditransitive verb.
>When it incorporated its direct object, "kouro," it became
>a merely transitive verb and so its indirect object was promoted
>to direct object.  Otherwise it would have been "kourochiainou."
>
>(*note: if we go with the Active structure, this should not happen
>-- indirect objects should always be indirect objects regardless
>of the number of arguments of the verb.)
>
This reminds me of an idea I had to make compound verbs in Chasmäöcho. In
Chasmäöcho, under certain circumstances, the object of a verb is
incorporated in the verbal complex itself, before the subject prefixes. It
would be easy then to make a compound verb by making the object part of the
stem. I think that's not far from what you're doing and I like this idea.

Leropho reminds me of an old language of mine, Astou, which is the language
of the Ddastem /Dastem/ (formerly written Dhastem), a civilisation living
on a now disappeared island in the Atlantic Ocean that gave the legends of
Atlantida. This language is written with modified form of the Greek
alphabet (for instance, a few letters like beta and omega are used for
prepositions only - beta is the preposition /b(@)/, omega the preposition
/Z(@)/ if I remember correctly -, and some letters have different values
than usual, like psi for /S/, eta for /h/, and a dot above a consonnant
makes it voiced, like pi for /p/ and pi-dot for /b/). One of the strangest
feature is the verbal system, using tenses moods and voice not unlike IE
languages (I have an active and a middle for instance), but with agreement
with both the subject and the object on the verb (only the subject in the
middle). I remember also that the persons' system was quite different from
the usual 1st, 2nd and 3rd persons...

If someone's interested in it, and if I can come up with a nice
transcription system to be able to write about it in e-mail, I can post
about it later.

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org
(ou : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepages/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html)