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Re: Changing worldviews with language (LONG)

From:bnathyuw <bnathyuw@...>
Date:Monday, November 4, 2002, 13:44
 --- "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...> wrote:
> [snip] > > Or perhaps you might go the route of something > very adverb-dependent: eat > > me-wise pizza-ly. Some eating happened, in a > pizza-ly fashion, and was > > conducted me-wise :) Of course, this leaves open > the possibility that the > > pizza is doing the eating. > > Ah, you really should take a look at Matthew's > "bac". Its grammar is very > similar to what you describe here. >
<pricks up ears>ah, cocktail party syndrome . . .</pricks up ears> right, ok. in bac ( leaving aside the restaurant for the time being ) you could indeed use 'pizza' as an adverb modifying the word 'eat'. here's how you would do it : first, specify the topic ( what the sentence is about, in most cases equivalent to the subject of the sentence expressed in, say, english ) : |sot| I second, specify the relationship or action which is being predicated of the topic : |Banr| 'eating' finally, provide any further information about this relationship/action. in isolation this looks like a normal noun, but used after a verb is acts as an adverb : |ptata piyttsa| 'food viz pizza' ( pizza being a foreign word has to be glossed for meaning and sentence function ) |sot Banr ptata piyttsa| 'i am eating pizzaly' 'i am eating pizza' <breath></breath> now, there is another way you could express the same thing, which would be a bit more precise ( what i've just given could also mean, eg, i am eating with a pizza ( in the ethiopian fashion of using bread as cutlery and crockery ) . . . not too confusing here, but this sort of phrasing is ambiguous elsewhere ) so, first two steps are the same : |sot Banr| 'i am eating' then we add a second verb phrase along these lines : |ptata piyttsa Pant| 'food viz pizza is nourishing' so : |sot Banr ptata piyttsa Pant| 'i am eathing, pizza is nourishing' 'i am eating pizza' this is such a common way of expressing things that you can almost consider the english verb 'to eat' to correspond to the bac double verb |Bar Pat| where the english subject comes before |Bar| and the object before |Pat| <breath></breath> finally there's the question of expressing 'in the restaurant'. this can be done in various ways, and i'll explain by giving a few examples : |thabr sot Banr ptata piyttsa Pant| 'a restaurant: i am eating pizza' here, |thabr| is the oblique case of |abr| 'eating place'. at the beginning of the sentence it qualifies the whole sentence you could also be more specific and say |ghil thabr . . .| 'inside of a restaurant: . . .' |Gil thabr . . .| 'it's inside a restaurant . . .' |sot Ginl tabr Banr ptata piyttsa Pant| 'i am in a restaurant eating pizza' |sot Banr Ginl tabr ptata piyttsa Pant| 'i am eating in a restaurant, pizza is nourishing' |sot Banr ptata piyttsa Pant Ginl tabr| 'i am eating, pizza is nourishing in a restaurant' of these, the first couple are the most natural, but others could be used if you're being specific ( for instance 'i spoke to emma in hong kong' could be translated to mean i wan in hk, emma was in hk, or the conversation happened there . . . ) hope that's not too bad an explanation, bn ===== bnathyuw | landan | arR stamp the sunshine out | angelfish your tears came like anaesthesia | phèdre __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com