my all-verb language

Mark Ellis wrote:

> What do you do for more "oblique" relatives?
> Things like "the room where / in which I am singing"
> or "the person to / for whom I am singing".
Well, that's something I haven't fully figured out yet.  A lot depends
on how I handle the non-relative equivalents: "I am singing in the
room" and "I am singing to/for him".  It's a problem of how to handle
obliques in general.  In the first example, it's a question of how to
handle the English preposition.  There will be a verb meaning "to be
in", and a noun meaning "be (a) room" for which I'll just use the
glosses _be.in_ and _be.room_

We can easily say "I am in the room":
be.in-ceh be.room-ho-r
- literally, "I-am-in-it it-that-is-a-room(ACC)"

And we can easily say "I am singing":
cwrian-ce

But how do we get "in the room" to modify "sing(ing)"?

I've thought of several possibilities, but I haven't settled on one
yet.  My original idea was this:
To translate "I am singing in the room", I want to use some form of the
verb _be.in_ to translate "in".  But what would be the subject of
_be.in_ in a sentence like that?  What is in the room?  My singing.  So
it's like the verb _sing_ is the subject of _be.in_.  So we make a
subject marker that says that a verb is the subject, let's
hypothetically say -g-, and we use that on _be.in_, along with the rest
of the normal inflections.  Then we would translate the sentence
something like this:
cwrian-ce be.in-geh be.room-ho-r
-literally, I-am-singing VERBSUBJECT-be.in-it it-that-is-a-room

The other way I have been thinking of to handle sentences like "I am
singing in the room" is to have a set of prefixes that add
preposition-like meaning to verbs; thus, we could take the verb cwrian-
"sing" and prefix it with a prefix like (still-hypothetical) en-,
creating a verb en-cwrian "to sing in".  Then, to translate a sentence
like "I am singing in the room", we use the new verb encwrian, with
first person subject and the room as object:

encwrian-ceh be.room-ho-r
-literally, I-am-singing.in-it it-that-is-a-room(ACC)"

If anyone can think of other ways to do this, I'm very interested!

Currently I'm leaning towards the second method.

For the first method, I haven't thought yet about how you'd say
something like "the room where / in which I am singing", but I suspect
it's deducible from the parts I've developed, but it may be awkward or
ugly.

But for the second method, it would be quite easy; we would use the
"nominally relative" form of _be.room_, turning it into a quasi-noun;
then we would modify it with an "adjectivally relative object" form of
encwrian, equivalent to "which I am singing in"

be.room-ho encwrian-ceoh
- literally, "it-that-is-a-room that-I-am-singing.in-it"


> > Rachel Klippenstein wrote:
> > If we add the "nominally relative subject" forms to cwrian-, we get
> > things like the following:
> > Intransitive:
> > cwrian-no /kurjan:no/ "he who sings/is singing" / "the singer"
> > cwrian-co /kurjanko/ "I who sing/am singing" / "I, the singer"
> > cwrian-wo /kurjanwo/ "you who sing/are singing" / "you, the singer"

> > Transitive:
> > cwrian-mom /kurjanmom/ "they who (are) sing(ing) them"
> > cwrian-coh /kurjankox/ "I who (am) sing(ing) it"
> > cwrian-ioh /kurjanjox/ "youguys who (are) sing(ing) it" [...]

> > What about nominal relative object forms? Added to cwrian-, they
> > produce forms like this:
> > cwrian-meom /kurjanmeom/ "those [songs] that they are singing"
> > cwrian-ceoh /kurjankeox/ "it/that [song] that I am singing"
> > cwrian-ieoh /kurjanjeox/ "it/that [song] that youguys are singing"
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