Re: Existential clauses

Quoting Andreas:

<<Quoting David Peterson <ThatBlueCat@...>:

> (2) Mi gudpela.  "I'm good."
Is that _gudpela_, by any chance, derived from "good fellow"? If so, is it
perhaps rather a noun "good person" than an adj "good"?>>

Look at me...   I meant "gutpela".   How embarrassing!   Anyway, though,
in the case of the adjective I used, it is indeed "gutpela".   So you have,
"gutpela pasin" (virtue), "gutpela taim" (peace time), "gutpela tok" 
(advice).

[P.S.: I'm not sticking to Tok Pisin, which I know about.]

"Pela" isn't so much an adjectival suffix, but it does do some derivation.   
So
you have "drai", which is "dry", and you can say, "Klos i drai", "The clothes
are dry", but if you add "pela", you get an adjective meaning, "big, strong,
tremendous, extraordinary, gigantic", as in "draipela tri", "big, tall tree".

Anyway, there are adjectives like "drai" that don't take any modification,
but I wanted to show a sentence that didn't have "i" in it, because it can 
look
an awful lot like a copula.

Incidentally, this is how you do existentials in Tok Pisin:

I gat draipela tri long haus bilong yu.
"There's a really big tree near your house."

-David
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