Re: Test and more.

At 10:27 pm -0800 17/12/99, abrigon wrote:
>I wonder how a lingo would look if the subject and verbm or
>subject and object were in the same word.
If the subject's a pronoun, there's hundreds (probably thousands) of
natlangs that do just that - all the Romancelangs, modern Greek, Persian,
the Semitic langs, all the very many Bantulangs (they even include pronoun
objects in the verb), all the Turkic langs etc etc.

I'm not, alas, nearly so familiar with native languages of the New World,
but I understand that the polysynthetic ones go further and incorporate
noun subjects within the verb and, I believe, in some (many? / all??) cases
the noun objects also.

But I'm not sure how just subject & object can get into the same word,
without their being incorporated into the verb.

>
>Like below sort of.
>
>I went to the store.
>
>WentI to Storethe.
Well, as I said, thousands of languages have "wentI".

Suffixing the definite article is not unknown either, cf. Romanian:
magazin (shop) - magazinul (the shop)

>
>Since in many ways The is just a refining of the word Store. Just
>tells us it is a singular store
>versus a plural.
No, no - it tells us that it is definite, not indefinite!

'the' can be used with plural as well as with singular, e.g.
magazin  (shop)   - magazinul  (the shop)
magazine (shops)  - magazinele (the shops)

Basque similarly suffixes the definite article.  Indeed, Basque goes even
further and 'to-the-shop' is IIRC all one word.  But I'd have to look out
my notes to verify this.

>
>Of course then why do we have The/Thee at all?
Eh? 'the' and 'thee' are two very different words.

Quite literally thousands of languages do, in fact, manage without a word
for 'the'.

As for 'thee' - it sort of depends what you mean.  Why do we need 'thee' as
well as 'you'?  Well, modern spoken English (except in the north of
England) manages quite well without 'thee' - but many people find the
distinction useful.

>Or I/We/They as well?
Well, er, sometimes it's kind of nice to know who is doing what  :)
But many east Asian languages, at least, (e.g. Chinese & Japanese) do not
habitually use 'I', 'we', 'they'.  The words are used only for emphasis to
to avoid ambiguity.  If it's obvious from the context who's doing what, the
pronouns are not used.

>
>Of course when you use Went, you sort of assum that he is
>walking
Not necessarily - it depends how far away the shop is.

>but
>am I?
Dunno.

>Also I does not tell you what gender is the subject?
Nope, it doesn't.  I believe some languages do have different words for 'I'
according to the sex of the speaker, but it seems pretty uncommon.  But
different masculine & feminine forms for 'you' are so uncommon - the
Semitic languages have them & so do quite a few African langs.

I've found that nearly all of the ideas conlangers come up with are 'out
there', so to speak, in natlangs*.  IMO where the skill or craft comes is
in our choosing of the 'ingredients' of our conlangs, the proportions of
each ingredient and how we blend them all together    :)

*Exceptions are, of course, when a conlanger deliberately experiments with
some other non-human thought mode that an "alien" might have, e.g. Jeffrey
Henning's 'Fith' which is a stack-based language.

Ray.







=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
=========================================