Re: preferred voices?

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:

> > 1.  Forcing same-subject marking on clauses (rather than
> > different-subject).  (Great for rhyming, though the Telen don't rhyme all
> > that often as far as I can tell).
>
>This seems to have to do something with switch reference, a concept
>I not yet understand properly and doesn't exist in Nur-ellen
>(at least not in its current stage of design).
>Especially I have little clue about how it is used.  Could you perhaps
>be
>so kind and give examples?
Sorry.  Should have done that the first time around.

Here is an active/passive pair to show the difference.  The first one has a
different-subject marker because the clauses have different subjects.  The
second one has a same-subject marker because the clauses have the same subject.

fylgan-al pallih-id ke-ng-ydla'as-sled, pala-al ke-so-galnaxlyn-ni
forest-NOM forest-ACC AsA-LOC-walk-REAL(DS), brown.bear-NOM AsA-AsP-attack-PERF
'When a man was walking through a forest, a bear attacked him.'

fylgan-al pallih-id ke-ng-ydla'as-slel, i-so-galnaxlyn-ni
forest-NOM forest-ACC AsA-LOC-walk-REAL(SS), PASS-AsP-attack-PERF
'When a man was walking through a forest, he was attacked.'

> > 2.  Keeping the focus of the conversation on a single entity, whether or
> > not is an agent or patient in any given sentence.  (Notice the different
> > between: "I have a friend name John.  John was hit by a car" vs. "I have a
> > friend named John.  A car hit John."  They have the same meaning, but the
> > focus is different.)
>
>This is done via word order in Nur-ellen.  Basic word order is SVO in
>Nur-ellen, but it can vary freely, and the focus can be kept on the same
>entity by putting it in front.
Here is an example with a different word order, to show how it is different
from passives.  The "bear" comes after the verb.  This means that the bear
has already been mentioned at some previous point in the story, but has not
been mentioned for at least couple sentences.  (Basic order is SOV.)

fylgan-al pallih-id ke-ng-ydla'as-sled, ke-so-galnaxlyn-ni pala-al
forest-NOM forest-ACC AsA-LOC-walk-REAL(DS), AsA-AsP-attack-PERF brown.bear-NOM
'When a man was walking through a forest, the bear attacked him.'

[snip examples]

>The phrase "this book" could not take any other case because _parv_ is
>inanimate.  Your example "John was hit by a car" would also put
>"a car" in an instrumental phrase because Nur-ellen does not allow
>inanimate agents, and leave the agent slot empty.
Telek does not have the by-phrase.  If you want to specify the agent, keep
it active!

>(Damn!  It is hard to find appropriate examples when one has so many
>gaps
>in the lexicon!  Must find more words.)
I make them up on the spot.  But I guess that's harder if you have a
Sindarin based lang. :-/

> > 3.  Allowing one to say what happened to someone else, when the perpetrator
> > is not known without recourse to structures like "Someone hit John".  (ie,
> > the focus stays on John in the passive, as in #2).  This is useful for
> > cases like "John got crushed" but I don't know if the "crusher" was a car,
> > tree, boulder, etc.
>
>You can always leave out the agent.  A zero-agent sentence is perfectly
>grammatical.  Something like "Beleg was killed." could be rendered thus:
>
>Veleg     dagnent.
>OBJ.Beleg kill-PAST
Telek can do this as well.  However, if the "person" who got dropped has
not been specified recently, these sentences are ambiguous.

fylgan-al pallih-id ke-ng-ydla'as-sled, ke-so-galnaxlyn-ni
forest-NOM forest-ACC AsA-LOC-walk-REAL(DS), AsA-AsP-attack-PERF
'When a man was walking through a forest, (s)he/it attacked him.'

The different-subject marking tells you that the subject of the second
clause is not the same as the subject of the first, so the man is getting
attacked, not attacking.  However, all you know about the attacker is that
(s)he/it is grammatically animate: could be a man, woman, child, bear,
lion, or mutant mulberry bush.  The only way to know that it was a bear, in
this case, would be if the bear was mentioned sometime previous in the
story.  Even then it isn't a logical necessity -- if I had also mentioned a
mountain lion, either the bear or the lion could be the attacker.

I could do the same thing, but have same-subject marking

fylgan-al pallih-id ke-ng-ydla'as-slel, ke-so-galnaxlyn-ni
forest-NOM forest-ACC AsA-LOC-walk-REAL(SS), AsA-AsP-attack-PERF
'When a man was walking through a forest, he attacked him/her/it.'

This time you know that the subjects are the same, so the man did the
attacking; but you don't know what he attacked, except that it is
animate.  Again, it could be a person, animal, edible plant, or even (if
you make really wierd interpretations) a river.

>The patient can of course also be dropped.
Nearly any argument can be dropped in Telek.

>I am considering introducing an impersonal pronoun rather than simply
>omitting phrases.  Possibly with variations on where the phrase is just
>deleted and where an impersonal pronoun is used.
In Telek, an omitted phrase is a specific reference to something already
known, while an impersonal is a reference to something that is not known
(or that the speaker is being vague about).

>I haven't worked out the gory details of syntax and verb morphology yet.
>There will probably be more to it than word order tricks and phrase
>deletion.  Surely, an Elvish language should have quite a number of
>interesting syntactic devices, and I am still collecting ideas.
Telek began as a language for non-Tolkien elves, which is why I wanted many
subtleties and word order possibilities (and the fact that I think the
latter of really cool).  The Telen are humans now, but they have many
social outlooks derived from their fairy origins.

>Yes, it sounds interesting, but find it nigh impossible to understand
>without seeing any examples.
Posssessor Raising will have to be a post of its own.  I'll try to get to
it later.


===============================
Marcus Smith
AIM:  Anaakoot
"When you lose a language, it's like
dropping a bomb on a museum."
   -- Kenneth Hale
===============================