Re: Noun and noun or noun

At 10:07 AM 5/20/99 +0200, Joshua Shinavier <Ajshinav@...> wrote:
>>Sylvia Sotomayor wrote:
>> Maintaining a collective plural gets to be interesting when dealing with
>> abstract nouns, and I would tell you more, but I haven't worked it all out
>> yet.
>
>I'd be interested to hear what you've got so far.  Arove"n tends to shy away
>from plurals for abstract topics.  For instance, two "thoughts" together are
>also a thought, singular, although a more complex one; if they are thought
>separately or deliberately kept apart in some way then you use the plurals.
>
Well, one thought was to turn them into actions. One feature of Kelen is
that it doesn't have the grammatical category of verb. But, semantically,
there are still a number of action words. When I was much younger, I read
too many books on Zen for Westerners, and I still vaguely remember this
concept of a 'thing-event'. So, when trying to figure out what a collective
plural could be, this concept came back to me. I'm not sure if Kelen is
actually going to do this, but, in the meantime, here are some possible
examples:

ja soun = a thought
ne soun = many thoughts
an soun = thinking, or maybe the conscious mind. hmmm.

ja ra = a step
ne ra = many steps
an ra = motion, movement, going

ja kiuw = a touch, a tap
ne kiuw = many taps
an kiuw = touching, feeling, etc.

Like I said, I'm still thinking about this.

Sylvia

Sylvia Sotomayor
sylvia1@ix.netcom.com
http://pw2.netcom.com/~sylvia1/