Re: Verbal distinctions

Quoting Chris Bates <christopher.bates@...>:

> Andreas, what does your language do when the subject of to live and the
> person who wants it to happen aren't the same? eg "I want him to
> live"... In this case your adverb the way you use it below wouldn't
> work...
Paraphrase with the verb _zrón_ "want, desire"; _ta zrón shu seno ken_ "I want
that he lives" ("is alive" might be a better translation of _ken_, BTW).

> I'm just curious is the way that is said involves the same
> adverb or if a completely different construction has to be used. And for
> that matter, what if the tenses are different? How do you handle
> sentences like "I want/wish that he had lived"?
Same; Paraphrase with _zrón_; _ta zrón shu seno kenk_ "I
want that he was alive" (assuming I get the English correctly - I take it to
indicate a wish that "he" had been alive at some past point in time).

It wouldn't be ungrammatical to say _ta zrón shu ta ken_ "I want that I live"
for "I want to live", merely really weird. Sounds like one's speaking of some
separate "I" - an RPG character, perhaps.

There are also instances where one would use an actual infinitive, more like
English. Apparently not within the context of wishing or wanting things, tho.
Here's an example from one of the very earliest pieces of Tairezazh I wrote:

Tan graif sens kenener
ta  -n graif sen -s  ken  -en -er
1st PL need  3rd ACC live INF DAT
"We need it to live"

The dative infinitive is as seen used to indicate a goal.

Another example form my webpage is _sena tshei stanens_ "she loves to dance",
where _stanens_ is accusative infinitive of _stan-_ "to dance". It wouldn't be
absolutely impossible to say _ta zrón kenens_ "I want to live", but it's
simply not done. It wouldn't help with your examples either, since there's no
way of getting in a "he" as subject of "to live".

                                                                 Andreas

> >On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 02:12:33PM +0200, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Quoting vaksje <vaksje@...>:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>>[snip]
> >>>
> >>>
> >>If I'm reading this arightly, what you suggest is at least on the surface
> very
> >>similar to what happens in (my conlang) Tairezazh. You'd get _ta ken_ "I
> live"
> >>and _ta ken zent_ "I want to live". _Ken_ is still the finite verb -
> putting
> >>this in the past tense yields _ta kenk_ "I lived" and _ta kenk zent_ "I
> wanted
> >>to live".
> >>
> >>
> >
> >This is indeed what I meant. Does Tairezazh have any other words in the
> >same category as _zent_ or is it a closed cateory (thus lexically
> >restricted), with plain infinitives used for the remaining cases?
> >
> >
> >
> >>However, _zent_ "to want" isn't syntactically a verb at all - it's an
> >>uninflectable adverb. Perhaps your -k could be interpreted as an
> adverbizer?
> >>
> >>
> >
> >Yeah, the concept of an adverbizer seems logical, since information is
> >added to an existing verb, instead of rearrganging them into an
> >infinitive structure.
> >
> >
> >
> >>                                                            Andreas
> >>
> >>
> >
> >--
> >vaksje.
> >
> >
> >
>

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