Re: Conjunctions

On Thu, Mar 21, 2002 at 01:57:17PM -0800, Bob Greenwade wrote:
> At 11:48 PM 3/16/02 -0500, Matthew Kehrt wrote:
> >After reading part of the "Missing Words" thread, this came to mind.  It
> >seems that a lot of languages have similar words for conjunctions- mostly
> >short, vowel-rich syllables.  I was wondering what your languages use for
> >conjunctions.
[snip]

I haven't fully worked out all the conjunctions for my conlang yet, but so
far, there are two main ones. Well, three, if you count "implicit
conjunction" (more below).

1)      keve    [k&B&]

Closest English translation for this is probably "and then" or "and so".
It usually means "and", but with quite some cause-effect overtones. This
conjunction can only ever be used to join sentences; you cannot use it to
join nouns (_<noun1> keve <noun2>_ is incorrect).

2)      zo      [zo]

This word also means "and", but is used only between nouns, and only for
emphasis. The language has what I call "implicit conjunction" -- meaning
that two adjacent noun or noun-phrases in the same case is automatically
treated as though there were a conjunction between them. You can string
together a long list of nouns with no intervening word (as long as they
are in the same case), and it would be understood as the equivalent of the
English "A, and B, and C, and ...".

When you use _zo_, it carries a very emphatic tone. E.g.

1) Without _zo_:
        ki-b3z3t33'   cu-b3z3t33'   loo'ri.
        [1]woman(cvy) [2]woman(cvy) outside(loc)
        "A woman and another woman are outside."
        Just your regular way of describing that two women are outside.

2) With _zo_:
        ki-b3z3t33'   zo  cu-b3z3t33'   loo'ri.
        [1]woman(cvy) and [2]woman(cvy) outside(loc)
        "A woman AND another woman are outside."
        This sentence would be strongly emphasizing that there was another
        woman with the first.

[Aside: the _ki_ and _cu_ prefixes are not articles, but "tag" markers.
They are used mainly to disambiguate pronouns (or nouns, as here) of the
same gender, number and case. The translation I gave above uses the
indefinite articles, but they could just as well have been rendered "The
first woman and the second woman ...". These tag markers are actually
derived from words for colors. So, in an ultra-literal way, you might
think of the sentence as "Woman-tagged-red and woman-tagged-green are
outside". Of course, native speakers do not actually associate any skin
color or other color connotations with this purely grammatical device.]


T

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