Re: Looking for a case: counting

Thank you for the explanation about *raz*. Looks like
the form *razy*, although correct, is very seldom
used. Interesting too that Russian is the only
language I know that doesn't say *one, two, three !*
but *raz, dva, tri !* Why is it not *odin, dva, tri* ?
Maybe because *raz* is more ancient than *odin*, and
sounds better (two syllables for *odin*) ? In German,
that would be *Mal, zwei, drei* but I never heard that
? Anyway, where does *odin* come from ? Indo-european,
same stem as *one* ?

As to Ukrainian for *16 times*, I asked my wife and
she said: 'shistnadtsat' raz... raziv', so I asked:
well, raz or raziv ?, she thought again and finally
said 'raziv'. But she's more used to talk Russian than
Ukrainian I guess.

I myself also thought again, but about instrumental. I
think you're right in saying that there is no need to
differenciate formally the different possibilities I
mentioned :
- external instrument
- body part used as an instrument
- method (abstract means)
- (possibly others ?)
because normally there is no possibility for
confusion, except in very odd cases (suppose a finger
has been cut away from you, and you use it for
cleaning your ear ? would that be body part or
external instrument ?). But that doens't mean that the
concepts are not different. It is not at all the same
to open a can with a can-opener, or with your teeth,
or using some magic formula. So, ok, we can accept to
reduce these different ways, by abstraction (*by
abstraction* being an example of method) to a general
*instrumental*, but this is only a convention. If a
language uses forms like can-opener-INSTR and
magic-INSTR, the brain (or the computer) has to
understand that these ways for opening a can are
something rather different, in essence, from each
other. To break a window with a stone or to break it
with your fist are not quite the same concept, while
to break it with by throwing a stone or to break it by
throwing a bottle are very much alike.

The problem with using abstraction in language is that
we come to situations where the same word, or marker,
means very different things. There certainly can be
found a reason why the same French word *avec* (with)
can mean either *in company of (somebody or
something)*, *with the help of (something or
somebody)*, *in a certain way* (avancer avec peine =
to progress with difficulty) and other concepts (*il
est arrive avec dix minutes de retard* = he was ten
minutes late when arriving). So the real meaning
depends on the context : it's usually not too hard to
guess for a human being, but I don't think it is so
easy for a program. It has always sounded very strange
to me that Russian uses Instrumental in 'Ja rabotaju
injenerom' = I work as an engineer. No doubt that
there was may be some reason for it, some concepts
having been melted together in the language history,
but to me, opening a can with a can-opener and working
as an engineer have little to do together ! So the
excess in abstraction and synthesis looks rather
dangerous to me. My whole purpose is to re-discover
the fundamental concepts behind the masks of syntax
and morphology.

Your indications about encapsulated (and
*ex-capsulated*) iterativity in Hungarian and Slowak
at least looked quite clear to me (I first has some
troubles with the concept of *encapsulation*, but now
I see). This is very interesting, especially if both
can be combined. This means that a concept can be
incorporated in a word, by definition, and then the
same concept can be used again at the sentence level.
The first one belongs to the lexicon and the secund
one, to the speech act, and it's essentially the
*same* concept (iterativity, in that case). I guess if
it's used in a contradictory way, we come to
oxymorons, like in French 'Hate-toi lentement' (You
should hasten slowly) ? One could imagine that a verb
like 'tapoter' (to hit gently and repeatingly, by
definition) could be used in a sentence where there
would be another iterative marker again, and that
would mean something like 'doing successive series of
taps', like: tap-tap-tap - - - tap-tap-tap-tap - - -
tap-tap-tap... Now this secund iterative marker could
be encapsulated in a new verb (? tapitoter ?), and so
on...

As to adverbs, I tried to open a discussion about it,
because it looks rather complex. Maybe there aren't
any adverbial concepts at all, but it would look
rather strange, as usually every word category refers
to deep concepts, even if different concepts are
grouped into a unique category (like for verbs : they
can refer to stative or dynamic concepts, or even
other concepts yet, but normally they do not refer to
concepts like 'stone' or 'dog' or 'weapon' or
'civilization'. If there is a verb like 'to dog' in
some language, it might mean something like 'to act
like a dog', or 'to produce dogs', or whatever, but
not refer to the kind of concept we call a dog (anyway
in languages that have word categories). So I think
that there must be some deeply concealed concept under
the syntactical category of 'adverbs' too.

By 'circumstant', AFAIK, we mean parts of phrase
orbitating around the verb, but not in the first
circles like the actants do. If you say *I gave a
penny to a beggar yesterday evening in Main Street*,
*I*, *a penny* and *a beggar* are actants, they
logically complete the verb *to give*, which has a
valence of 3 (the one who gives, the thing given, the
recipient), while *yesterday evening* and *in Main
Street* are only external, peripheric complements that
can apply to nearly any verb in any sentence, so
they're called circumstants. This to speak rather
schematically. So what is an actant or not in a
certain sentence depends of the semantic of the verb
used. Verbal concepts like *to rain* have a
zero-valence, the pronoun *it* in *it's raining*
referring to nothing, and being only needed by syntax
(in Russian, I believe that one can say simply *Dozhd'
!* instead of *Dozhd' idjot !*), as if *Dozhd* was a
verb (?*Dozhdit?)

--- Racsko Tamas <tracsko@...> wrote:

[snip]

>   Yes, <raz> is plural genitive (= Gpl) form.
[snip snip snip]
>
>   The abstraction is a powerful mental feature of
> the human being.
[snip snip snip]
>
>   I'm trying to understand your term "circumstant"
[snip]
>
>   Some of your examples seem rather kinds of
> "modality" to me. I
> can encapsulate the 'slowly' into a Hugarian verb:
> <megy> 'go' >
> <megyeget> 'go slowly', <lép> 'step' > <lépeget>
> 'step slowly'.
>
>   On other hand, adverbs like <hardly> (like in <I
> hardly know>)
> can be coded into Turkic, Ojibwa (etc.) dubitative
> mood.
>
>   As I wrote in my previous posting: we --
> Hungarians and Slovaks --
>  distinguish iterativity as a modality which is
> encapsulated in the
> verb, and the interativity as an adverbial concept
> which is
> expressed by an adverbial phrase (no matter it's an
> <-ly>-word or a
> prepositional phrase). And we can combine these two
> interativity
> concepts.
[snip]

=====
Philippe Caquant

"Le langage est source de malentendus."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

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