Re: A'stou part III: the Personal System and the Verb (LONG)

At 21:06 01/06/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>> It's quite a strange system isn't it? I guess it's very well-suited for
>> political debate :) . What do you think of it?
>
>Bizarre!  :-)  Very intriguing ideas, altho it seems very artificial to
>me.  Are there plurals of some of these persons?
>
No, the persons don't really mark number (though the persons like
"inclusive nos", "exclusive nos" and "vos" are naturally plural as they
always refer to groups). "ego" can be used as well for "I" and "we", while
"non-ego" is like "you" (at least in standard British English) in respect
of number. As for their artificiality, the A'stou I present here seemed to
be quite like Classical Latin, so maybe it had been engineered to please
more the Dha'stem.

>> - active voice: suffix -ia- just after the verbal root,
>> - middle voice: no suffix (yes, in A'stou the middle voice is the unmarked
>> one!).
>
>Stranger and stranger ....
>
:))

>> - present tense: infix -n- after the first vowel of the root,
>> - past tense: infix -sh- after the first vowel of the root,
>> - future tense: infix -k- after the first vowel of the root.
>
>Groovy!  Infixes!  Viva los infixes!  :-)
>
I agree!

>> On the
>> other hand, the "narrative" mood is the mood of stories and quotations.
>
>Interesting.
>
>> For that, you have
>> to precise the name of the person you talk to, if the context doesn't make
>> it clear).
>
>That's a pretty cool restriction.
>
Thank you very much. I like it too.

>> NOTE2: Of course, intransitive verbs in active voice have only the active
>> subject endings, not the object ones.
>
>Since intransitive verbs couldn't make a distinction between active and
>middle, why wouldn't they just take the unmarked (i.e., middle) voice?
>In fact, if you did that, then the active prefix would make sense - it
>would be a transitivity marker.
>
Intransitive verbs can make the distinction between active and middle voice
(the subject affixes are not exactly the same) because the middle voice is
not only reflexive but shows also the the beneficiary of the action is
identical to the subject. As an intransitive action can still have a
beneficiary, the distinction exists still, even if not with all verbs. And
it's true that quite a few intransitive verbs are "deponent", as they have
only middle voice forms. Maybe a former stage of A'stou made a
differentiation between intransitivity and transitivity, but it evolved to
something different (active vs. middle), while keeping some morphological
traits of the previous system.

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org
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