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Table of Correlatives (Was: The...the...)

From:caeruleancentaur <caeruleancentaur@...>
Date:Saturday, April 22, 2006, 14:38
>R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
>Latin, however, more often used the shorter "quo ... eo ...." >e.g. quo delictum maius est, eo poena est tardior "The greater the >crime, the slower the punishment".
>They were ablatives of 'difference of measure': "By what amount the >crime is greater, by that amount the punishment is slower"
Thanks to all for their examples. After "analyzing" the expression, I have decided to use the Latin expression that Ray showed us. I was helped in this by my recent completion of the Table of Correlatives for Senjecas. The words will be in the stative case (there being no ablative). And they belong in the "amount" column of the Table of Correlatives. An added bonus is that they rhyme! cüotôsïo = by how much notôsïo = by that much The more the merrier. cüotôsïo ovlûes notôsïo qolûes. q = /j\/ The adjectives are NOM.PL because of subjects understood: The more people there are, the merrier we will be. If the expression involves complete sentences, the verbs will be in the indicative mood. I just realized that expressions in the past were possible: the harder we worked, the less we accomplished. Now, having said that I realize that perhaps the verbs should be in the subjunctive. I was thinking of an expression in the future tense and realized that the expression in the present can have a futurity about it. "The harder we (will) work, the more we (will) accomplish." This sounds irrealis to me. Comments? I highly recommend developing a Table of Correlatives as a very good exercise for a conlanger. You can find a start under the Wikipedia entry "Pro-form." By doing this I significantly increased the Senjecan lexicon and discovered ways in which to express what might be difficult concepts. My table has ten columns (person, object, kind, place, place from, place to, time, amount, manner, and reason) and nine rows (interrogative, proximal deixis, medial deixis, distal deixis, indefinite exclusive, indefinite inclusive, universal, negative, individual). If anyone knows of other categories that might be included, please let me know. Not all of the English translations, however, consist of one word. E.g., in the "reason" column there is "why," and "therefore," but the rest of the entries are on the pattern of "for this reason," "for some reason," etc. An example of a row is the interrogative row: who, what, what kind (rather like the German "was für ein), where, whence, whither, when, how much, why. I wound up with only three suppletives in the Senjecan table, the words for here (íðu), there (tóru), and now (núu). Charlie