Re: Language uploaded, finally...

Andrew Chaney wrote:

> Well, the 2p inanimate (& 3p inanimate) would be used most
> often in poetry.  "Oh rock, you are so very solid..." something
> like that would us the 2p inanimate.  But "Oh sky, ..." would
> use 2p animate since the sky would be seen as animate.  And since
> Ihro does not have grammatical, set, permanent gender, it's really
> up to the speaker to decide whether he wants to use 2p animate or
> inanimate for the antecedent.  Thus, water might be considered
> animate but ice inanimate, etc.
Ah, okay. I just wasn't imaginative enough I guess.

> Or if you wanted to imply that someone was figuratively dead,
> you might speak of them in the 2p inanimate.  To take an example
> from the current American political scene:  the people making
> jabs at Al Gore -- comparing him to a tree, etc -- would probably
> talk about him in the 2p inanimate.
That's a nice thing to have grammaticalized. (Well, not for
Al Gore, but... ;)

> > 1. Subject and object of transitives are marked with NOM
> >    and subject of intransitives too. That is, there is
> >    no distinction at all between them. (This seems to be
> >    the case judging from your example below.) The OBJ-POSS
> >    is only used for objects of prepositions and possession.
> of a preposition or in the possessive.  So, #1 would be correct.
> The wording is a little awkward, isn't it...
To be frank: Yes. :) Though, I got it in the end, so it's not
_that_ bad. And they tell me thinking is good for your brain,
so I think I came out a better person as well. :)

> > If this is it, you could call the OBJ-POSS case something
> > like "prepositional-possessive". Including the word "objective"
> > makes one think it marks objects of transitives. At leaste
> > that's what I thought.
> Yeah, I guess that would be better.  I'll have to go change that.
Or call it something shorter like "oblique", or.. hmm.. what
were the two Romanian cases called again?

Or if you want something unique, call them "coral" and "oblique",
since you use nominative for all core cases. :)

> > It is a bit unusual to have a marker for all NPs in subject
> > and object position when there is no distinction between them,
> > though not unlikely I guess.
> The -a nominative case ending is a holdover from Proto-Ihric which
> distinguished between an ergative case and an absolute (absolutive?)
> case.  Over the years the inflections for erg & for abs merged into
> the -a for nominative, and given a few more decades/centuries the
> -a for nominative will probably merge with the -a stem vowel for
> nouns.
Aha! Very neato. Historic and future changes already figured out.
I like that!

daniel

--
<> "As far as I'm concerned <> daniel.andreasson@telia.com <>
<>  I prefer silent vice to <> Daniel Andreasson           <>
<>     ostentatious virtue" -- Albert Einstein             <>