Re: Nauradi

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 10:00 PM, Alex Fink <000024@...> wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Nov 2008 12:07:32 -0500, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
>
>>As an engelang, gzb has this kind of optional pronoun marking.  I think
>>in my early use of the language,  I probably leaned on sex-marked
>>pronouns more than I do now.  A look at my last frequency analysis
> How is this marking implemented?  I remember gzb having a slim 3p pronoun
> inventory: on checking the grammar, just _pq, te_ and their cataphoric
> alternants _mq, nxe_ plus others which probably don't come in here.  Are the
> marked variants some form of compound?
Yes, the marked variants are compounds with suffixes or
modifier content roots suffixed to one of the basic pronouns,
most often {pq}: e.g. {pq-haxn} "the older one" vs. {pq-jxiqn}
"the younger one", or {pq-la} "the one I feel affection for"
vs. {pq-ba} "the one I feel ambivalent towards", or any of
a great many other possibilities, of which about sixteen
are attested in my online corpus (a few of which, however,
are in older text in contexts where the modern language
would probably use unmodified inanimate {te}).   Bare
{pq} occurs 120 times in the corpus, as opposed to
about 23 times those sixteen or so marked variants
occur.

> Would you characterise your current pattern of pronoun usage as more in the
> gzb spirit than the former pattern?
Yes, I think so, especially the attitudinal-marked pronouns.
Over time I've come to use the attitudinal suffixes more
pervasively in my writing.   Somehow it feels like bad style
to use an unnecessary age/sex/etc. qualifier on a pronoun
whose referent would be clear without it, but not to use an
attitudinal suffix on such a pronoun.

This section needs a little work to say that these suffixes
work on pronouns and verb/modifier stems as well, and
give example sentences rather than just words:

http://bellsouthpwp.net/j/i/jimhenry1973/gzb/semantic.htm#section6

For my next conlang I've toyed with the idea of making
attitudinality a mandatory inflectional category rather
than an optional derivation method.   ANADEW?

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/