Re: Looking for a case: counting

On Sun, Feb 15, 2004 at 11:53:44AM -0800, Philippe Caquant wrote:
> I don't think that 'with a hammer' is an adverbial concept. I never
> thought of hitting something 'hammerly'. It is instrumental. It is
> something quite different from 'many times', which is a process
> quantifier as I said.
It is not that different.  Both are modifiers applied to the action of
the sentence; ergo, both are adverbials.  Adverbial modification isn't
necessarily done with an adverb; ask any English teacher with "with
a hammer" is, and they'll tell you it's an adverbial prepositional
phrase.  (Prepositional phrases only come in two varieties: adjectival
and adverbial, and "with a hammer" is clearly adverbial).

In fact, many concepts that we express in English with prepositional
phrases are expressed with actual adverbs in other languages.  In
Esperanto, if you talk about saying something "in French", you literally
talk about saying it "Frenchly".  So I don't find the idea of hitting
something "hammerly" at all far-fetched.

> My opinion is that if somebody wants to make
> out a language (which is a very hard and long task),
> he should ask himself first whether it wouldn't be
> interesting to do it more logically that natlangs do.
> Otherwise, what could be the interest ?
Are you kidding?  In the first place, "logical" isn't always cut and
dried; witness the vast quantity of effort that is continuing to go into
the development of Lojban even after ca. 50 years.  In the second place,
when the goal is to create an artlang (as opposed to an auxlang or a
formal loglang), it would seem pretty boring to try and make it
"logical".  The exceptions to the rules, the oddities scattered among
the vocabulary and syntax - those are the very things that *make* a
language interesting.

-Mark