Re: Looking for a case: counting

En réponse à Philippe Caquant :


>I don't think that 'with a hammer' is an adverbial
>concept. I never thought of hitting something
>'hammerly'. It is instrumental.
And instrumental *is* an adverbial concept. You may not agree with it, but 
it is part of the definition.

>  It is something quite
>different from 'many times', which is a process
>quantifier as I said.
I just consider it to be a temporal mark. I don't see the point of such a 
useless distinction.

>I very well understand that 'times' is a plural noun,
>syntactically, in French like in English, like in
>Russian (mnogo raz) - but NOT in German for instance
>(vielmals).
So what? "vielmals" is obviously originally a noun phrase. So your example 
proves nothing, except that German has more compounding capacities than 
English or French. But that we already knew. Also, as Andreas rightly 
pointed out, "adverb" is a morphological concept only, i.e. it refers only 
to surface forms. You can't use it to refer to semantic concepts. And if 
you do, there's just no way you cannot put temporal, local or instrumental 
noun phrases among "adverbs" (adverbials, as Andreas wrote correctly). 
You're making a distinction that is semantically meaningless, only because 
your L1 does it. You look like those people of the Encyclopédie who 
classified languages as "straight-going" and "retrograde" depending on 
whether they went "in the direction of the thought process", and "against 
the thought process". Of course, to be "straight-going", a language had to 
have SVO word order, relative clauses after the nouns they complete, 
adjectives usually following nouns, i.e. be like French. So they thought 
that everybody thought in French, and languages that didn't follow French 
rules went "against the thought process". We luckily know better nowadays.

>  I just say that 'many times' is an
>adverbial concept, and I cannot see that my mother
>tongue is blinding me in that respect, as we say in
>French 'de nombreuses fois'.
Which is basically the same form as "many times", without a preposition. 
It's this absence of preposition that makes you think of this form as more 
adverbial than "with a hammer". Your analysis at the beginning of your post 
shows it very clearly.

>I maybe misunderstood the point, but I thought that
>people were trying to realize semantic concepts in
>conlangs.
Yes, and your reply is wrong in that way: it doesn't treat semantic 
concepts but surface forms.

>  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.
Why? What is "logic" to begin with? You can define many kinds of logic, 
none being better than another. And logic cannot describe the world. So 
what's the point of trying to do things logically? It has been tried over 
and over, and failed (only Lojban/Loglan can be said to be a success, but 
nobody ever claimed such languages are actually humanly learnable :)) ). 
You should take that as a hint that it is *not* a useful goal.

>Otherwise, what could be the interest ?
It's like you were saying that painting landscapes is uninteresting because 
landscapes are around us already.

>Anyway, if I had to make a conlang (which is not the
>case at the moment, as I'm only studying these
>problems), I would ask myself: shall I decide that
>'many times' will be a noun expression, and if so,
>what case shall I have to use - question open -), or
>shall I decide that it will be, either an adverb,
>either just an iterative mark on the verb (and I think
>this would be the solution I would adopt, even if it
>is NOT so in French or English).
I fail to see what this is supposed to mean. You can make it whatever you 
want, it doesn't mean anything apart from different surface forms. It 
doesn't *change* the semantic notions. Japanese encodes politeness in 
verbs. Does it make it semantically different from the politeness used in 
French, which is encoded in nouns only? No. Surface forms say nothing about 
semantic concepts. Which is why instead of answering to questions about 
semantic concepts with considerations of surface forms (as you did), I 
advised you to think deeper and recognised that semantically the 
distinction you made was meaningless.

Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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