Re: R: Comments required ... please : )

At 02:03 PM 6/29/2000 +0200, Mangiat wrote:
>Yes, I know about Euskara. I thought to use this possibility about two
>years ago, with one of my 10K conlang sketches, even before I ever
>heard of the Basque tongue. Indeed I do not like very much all those
>words with the same ending - Latin: illustribus hominibus, and so on...-.
>Probably I'll work this way: Erg. Abs. Gen. and Dat. with agreement --- Loc.
>and All, lately derived from locative postpositions with the Abs. case,
>without agreement (i.e. only the last word of a noun phrase takes the case
>ending).
>
>HWAT DOST THOU THINK ABOUT YONDER THOUGHT?
I had the same feeling about Hwendaaru: that multiple successive words with
the same case suffix sounded too repetitive, especially since some of the
case suffixes were bisyllabic, with the stress falling on the first
syllable of the suffix rather than on the root.  But I needed some kind of
agreement to make the syntax work (I wanted to be able to have attributive
adjectives either preceding or following their head nouns, as I mentioned
in a recent post).  So what I ended up with was a small group of "core"
cases (all of which have monosyllabic, unstressed case suffixes) and a
larger group of "peripheral" cases.  For core cases, the adjective and noun
both have the case suffix, regardless of which comes first.  For peripheral
cases, the last word of the noun phrase has the full case suffix, and any
others have a special "oblique" suffix (which, like the core case suffixes,
is monosyllabic and unstressed).

- Tim

------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith

"To live outside the law you must be honest."
        -- Bob Dylan