Re: conlang servey

On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 06:57:21AM +0000, Andreas Johansson wrote:
[snip]
> As mentioned, Tairezazh lacks a passive. English passives with an explicit
> agent would be rendered by changing the syntax of the corresponding active
> sentence. Ones without an explicit agent are handled by Tairezazh's
> liberal-minded failure to require that transitive verbs have subjects; you'd
> say what amounts to "him saw" for "he was seen".
Ahhh. This feature is *quite* Ebisedian. :-)  Ebisedian allows you to
elide just about every noun in a sentence, as long as it is clear from the
context. None of the noun cases are "required" in any given sentence. In
fact, a sentence consisting of a lone verb is both grammatically correct
and semantically meaningful -- it draws meaning from its context.

> Oh, and in defiance of linguistic universals, Tairezazh prepositions govern
> the nominative.
Ebisedian defies linguistic universals in not *having* a nominative case
(nor an ergative/agentive case, nor even having any noun in a "focus"
position for that matter), and in not distinguishing between core and
non-core cases. Or one might argue that it only has core cases.

> The language allows some scary, albight less than Georgian, initial
> clusters; eg [dZdad] "tall", [kstrOl] "son".
[snip]

Scary. And I was thinking of introducing [lr`] as an initial cluster in an
Ebisedian daughter lang...


T

--
One who has not yet appreciated the beauty of language is not worthy to
bemoan its flaws.