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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. _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail