Re: Conlang Change and The Definite Article

Doug Ball wrote:

> Now recently, I enacted some rather drastic changes to Skerre, moving it
> from SVO to VSO (and this a couple days before my presentation--I wouldn't
> ever recommend that to anyone, but it is possible if you are
> well-motivated).   Anyway, that has made Skerre a bit unstable, so I look to
> the list's collective wisdom:
> In looking at VSO langs, I have yet to see one that doesn't have the
> definite article.  So in moving Skerre to VSO, I figured I should add the
> definite article.  However, with my beloved reduplicative plural prefix, the
> article becomes a problem, because it becomes confusing between, ta tansko
> (the race), and tatansko (races).  Looking at possible solutions to my
> problem, I'm pondering adding a suffixing definite article.  Does this seem
> natural, especially for a VSO lang?
Well, in Mungayod, definite articles are always dropped in the singular.
The only time an article appears in the singular is when it is indefinite.

For instance, for "jadhei" - soul. It falls into the conceptual gender,
so its definite article is "i". Taken out of context, here's how it works:

jadhei    -     the soul (lexical form, of course)
angjadhei -     a soul
fijadhei  -     the souls

All other case markers are infixed between the article (if present) and
the modified noun. i.e.:

fize^jadhei - near our souls (locative)
fize^lojadhei - very near our souls (proximal locative)
rojadhei - into my soul (illative)

Hope this helps.

> -Doug
--
Dan Seriff <microtonal@...>
http://members.tripod.com/microtonal/
http://mungayod.conlang.org/

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