Re: Ray Brown ples notar!

Ray Brown ha notat.

At 10:18 am -0800 19/1/01, jesse stephen bangs wrote:
[....]
>
>I understood the whole thing without any trouble at all,
So did I, tho I didn't read it till several hours after some list members,
it seems.

>although I was
>confused about the grammatical structure.  Is there any verb
>agreement?
Verb agreement is not normal in conIALs. I was interested to note that the
preterite is apparently identical with the perfect participle, as so often
in English.

> There seems to be article agreement: "la filia" vs. "li
>litteri", but otherwise no gender agreement.
Methinks you are mistaken.  In Bob's mail it is definitely "li filia".
There's no gender agreement.

>I also seemed to spot
>inflecting prepositions ala Italian or Spanish,
Well, contractions rather than inflexions: del <-- de li, al <-- a li.
Exactly the same is found in Novial.

[....]
>
>> > Yo va vermen sentir li manca de su presentie!!!!
>> > I will truly [to] feel the lack of her presence!!!
>
>"vermen" cognate to Sp "verdad" or L "vere" ?  How does "manca" mean
>"lack?"  I would have guessed it had to do with the word for "to eat."
Doesn't look much like "eat" to me - but looks quite a lot like French:
_manque_ (masc.) 'lack', _manquer_ 'to lack'; Italian _mancanza_ lack,
_mancare_ 'to lack'.

>> > > > It is Occidental.
I guessed that also   :)

Now back to Bob's letter.

I must thank Bob for letting me & other Speedwords afficionados on this
list know about the death of Reginald Dutton's daughter.  IIRC she was his
only surviving descendant and her death marks, so to speak, the end of an
era.

For those who do not know, I learnt Speedwords by correspondence course
from Reginal Dutton himself in the late 1950s.

Apparently, by that time his daughter was helping on these correspondences
courses and Bob wonders if she may not have been my correspondent rather
than Dutton himself.  I must confess the writing on the envelopes and the
comments I received in reply to queries looked far more like the spidery
writing of an old man rather than the neat writing of a young girl  :)

So I'm fairly certain the replies were from Dutton himself; but quite
possibly his daughter posted some of my replies.

I never knew her; but Bob came to know her in the last few years as he
tirelessly tracked down all surving info on Speedwords in his endeavor to
revive the system and put it on the internet.  I guess from his mail that
he must've come to know her well and I send him my condolensences at this
sad loss.

Some old-timers on this list will know that Bob & I, alas, have rather
different opnions about the merits of Speedwords and I do not wish to
rehearse them here again.  Indeed, I think it would be wholely improper to
do so on this sad occasion.

I do sincerely send Bob my condolensences and thank him that, despite our
past differences, he thought it worth informing me specifically, besides
the list generally, about the death of Dutton's daughter.

May she rest in peace.

Ray.



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