Re: Voice, Mood, Tense, a minimalist perspective
| From: | J Y S Czhang <czhang23@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, December 30, 2003, 14:49 |
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In a message dated 2003:12:29 07:32:26 PM, cowan@MERCURY.CCIL.ORG writes:
>Gary Shannon scripsit:
>
>> But if one were to strike a happy medium between the
>> sublime and the ridiculous, which moods, voices and
>> tenses would you consider to be the minimum set for a
>> reasonably mature language of daily commerce?
>
>Minimum? Two: realis and irrealis.
Like Tolomako (natlang) from Vanuatu [see CONLANG archive and
langmaker.com for more detail {tho' a tad bit scantier than Malagasy aye-aye droppin's,
*GRRRRSSSNaRRRRrrrLSSSPPPppuTTttTeRRRRrr!*}]
BTW my all-timey fav mav natlang is Bislama... also from goo'ol' Vanuatu,
Land of the DeeeeLiciousss SeaSlug & Nice-Smelly Sandalwood...
(Ya gotta just love a language that is named after the seaslug, _le
Beche-le-Mer_, BISLAMA! *gigglabytefit!*)
--- *DiDJiBuNgA!!* ---
Hanuman "Stitch" Zhang, ManglaLanger (mangle + manga + lang)
http://www.boheme-magazine.net
Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars
leak, morpho-syntactics implode, lexico-semantics mutate, lexicons explode,
orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics
warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap...
languages are "naturally evolved wild systems...
So language does not impose order on a chaotic universe,
but reflects its own wildness back." - Gary Snyder
"Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" -
title of a chapter on pidgins and creoles, John McWhorter,
_The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_
= ¡gw'araa legooset caacaa!
¡reez'arvaa. saalvaa. reecue. scoopaa-goomee en reezijcloo! =
[Fight Linguistic Waste!
Save, Salvage, Recover, Scavenge and Recycle!]