Re: Appositives, more gender, careers

On Sun, Sep 10, 2000 at 03:42:58PM -0400, Nik Taylor wrote:
> Fakaltinátas núsal "Thomas R. Wier":
> > You can, of course, break that language univeral (most universals are
> > statistical anyways).  But what's the motivation for it? That's the important,
> > and interesting, thing about conlinguistics for me:  coming up with novel,
> > but reasoned, structures for a human language.
>
> Well, Watakassí does that to some extent.  Names do not inflect,
> instead, the "name word" inflects.  Names are preceded by a specific
> word, depending on what the name refers to.  For instance, a man uses
> "nús" (derived from _nlakús_, "man")
[snip]

Interesting concept. I suppose that will prevent a lot of name butchering
that happens when you try to inflect a foreign name according to native
inflection rules. Though it might pose an ambiguity problem if the foreign
name is long and happens to coincide with an actual word in your conlang
when transliterated. Unless there's a way the lang marks out the exact
boundaries of the name?


T