'And' and 'and' (Was: Re: Logic in Languages)

On Fri, Jun 28, 2002 at 09:02:06AM -0700, Marcus Smith wrote:
[snip]
> There are languages with multiple types of what English uses "and" for.
> For example, in the Athabaskan language Slave, they have plain-vanilla
> "and", "and" implying only two participants are involved, "and" indicating
> that both individuals were in the same event, and "and" indicating that
> though there were multiple individuals they were not acting as a unit or
> group.
Ebisedian has different conjunctions for nouns and verbs/sentences.

The nominal conjunction _zo_ is only ever used emphatically; Ebisedian has
"implicit conjunction", where nominal conjunctions are usually dropped
except to prevent ambiguity or for emphasis.

For verbs/sentences, _keve_ is used for "and". It actually implies more of
a forward momentum than the English "and"; it might be better translated
as "and so" or "and then".

[snip]
> When dealing with coordinated sentences, there are languages where the
> conjunctions tell whether the two clauses have the same subject or not,
> or dictate the tense of the second conjunct relative to the first.
[snip]

Interesting. I should come up with something like that for Ebisedian :-P


T

--
It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
-- Sammy