On Sun, 24 Dec 2000, Mangiat wrote:
Is this conlang based on Uralic or Tolkienian languages? (Question based
on your choice of words)
> miylinini rinani
> little.GEN town.GEN
> of the little town
>
> but:
>
> hyene talou
> beautiful house.LOC
> In the beautiful house
>
> which is from Suiméni (Vaiysi ancestral lang):
>
> séne talu ó
> beautiful.abs hous.abs at
>
> or:
>
> sile burmouved
> sky cloudy.ALL
> up to the cloudy sky
>
> which is from Suiméni:
>
> sile burmówe it
> sky.abs cloudy.abs to
Looks good to me.
> 2) If I want adjectives to work as verbs (as in Japanese or Arabic, i.e.), I
> will translate 'the red car' as 'the redding car'. But, since my lang will
> be inflective, shouldn't the particle take the endings of nominal
> declension? I mean: let's assume 'yum' means 'car', 'sieag-' 'to be red',
> '-ul' is the particle's ending and '-im' stays for the genitive case The
> phrase 'of the red car' will be:
>
> sieagul yumim
> red.part. car.gen
>
> or:
>
> sieagulim yumim
> red.part.gen car.gen
I'm not aware of any natlang that does this regularly. I like your other
options better.
> What if the particle is not properly a particle but a contract relative
> clause (thus 'sieagul' doesn't properly mean 'redding', but 'which is red'),
> as Chinese -de adjectives (mang de ren = busy people)?
>
> Then I should translate the car's exemple as:
>
> yunim sieagul
> car.gen red.rel
>
> Are there languages which do this?
Yes. Many hundreds do this last one. I read in one book (though I can't
recall which at the moment) that the Indo-European "adjective" is unusual
in the world. It is more typical to treat adjectives the way Japanese and
Chinese do.
Marcus