Re: The Language Code
From: | Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...> |
Date: | Friday, May 23, 2003, 16:33 |
>worth looking into; there's an excellent study of linguistic number by
>Greville Corbett which I'll chase down later today.
Cool. This would be interesting reading for me.
>In Navajo, arguments are aligned with respect to their position on an
>animacy hierarchy such that the higher argument is understood to be the
>subject in the absence of overt verbal marking to the contrary. That
>is, in a sentence containing the elements 'man', 'dog', and 'kick'
>'man' will be understood to be the subject since it is higher on the
>animacy hierarchy. To get the other meaning, the verbal prefix yi-
>(indicating 3. person subject) is replaced with bi-.
I had at one time considered doing this in Bes Dis'z, but ended up dropping
it (Bes Dis'z went through several changes ans served as a good learning
experience for me about languages and assumed necessity). I had however
revived it as part of Laafaah as part of an attempt to reflect a world view
different from the English, French, Norwegian, Spanish and Russian which are
familar to my players in an upcoming GURPS campaign.
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