Re: conlang servey

Teoh wrote:
>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.
>
This is, to some extent, doable in Tairezazh too. You could say simply
_staksek at es kasteg_ "killed in the square" to mean something like
"killing occured on the square" or "people where killed in the square". And
of course there's verbs like _kresht_ "rains" that cannot take any subject
or object at all.

> > 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...
I think definitively you should!

                                                   Andreas

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