Re: Degrees of comparation

Steve Kramer wrote:
>On Mon, 3 Sep 2001, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > I recently realized that from an internal POW, it'd make a lot of sense
>for
> > Tairezazh to have "negative" degrees of comparation, that is inflections
> > signifying "less" and "least". So, taking _dair_ "beautiful" as example,
>the
> > full range of comparation 'd be:
> >
> > tshedair    most beautiful
> > dadair      more beautiful
> > dair        beautiful
> > medair      less beautiful
> > sizdair     least beautiful
> >
> > (All to be stressed on the _ai_)
> >
> > Are there any natlangs with a similar system?
> >
>And if I may pile another question on top of that one...are these
>inflections just for comparative purposes ("less beautiful than X") or for
>declarative purposes as well ("X is ugly")?  I'm looking into the latter
>possibility in Simafira; going with a small number of roots, and
>inflecting them heavily to derive many other related words, not just
>comparatives.
If you said, say _Bob ai medair_ "Bob is less beautiful", people'd ask "Than
who?" (unless it was obvious by context, of course). If you said _Bob ai
sizdair_ it'd likely be interpreted as "Bob is least beautiful of all", but
it'd sound somewhat odd. So, mostly it's just used for comparation.

                                                Andreas


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