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Re: idea: environment pronoun

From:Garrett Jones <alkaline@...>
Date:Monday, April 15, 2002, 21:41
> Sturnan, being already developed enough to quash such a basic change, > would probably mimic it by having two subjects. One would probably be the > normal "it". When the verb is intransitive, the subject would come after > the verb. (This in no way makes Sturnan ergative. At least, I won't admit > that it does, not in a dozen or so years.)
That is what i am planning on my word order doing in Minyeva... i call it syntactically ergative, morphologically accusative. So, do you have something against being ergative? :P
> Vot welku ikerag. > It rain make-3s.
this "it" would be the environment pronoun (in Minyeva).
> Vot Dasen asag. > It Jason is.
this "it" would be the indefinite person.
> Halvag vot. > Happens it.
i assume this "it" would be referring back to some previous event, so "it" would be a standard pronoun. Like: "arg, i just stubbed my toe!" "well, 'it' happens." (it referring to toe-stubbing)
> If you're not going to denote a thing by extra words or by infixes, > you'll probably denote it by word order. Or you could leave it to whoever > is unlucky enough to come across to figure out. > > The slightly confused > Chris Wright
-- Garrett Jones http://www.alkaline.org