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Re: Leropho part 2

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Wednesday, April 26, 2000, 10:25
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)