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Re: No more plural? No, more plural!

From:Remi Villatel <maxilys@...>
Date:Monday, August 15, 2005, 22:57
tomhchappell wrote:

> By the way, later in that thread you'll see people recommended > Greville G. Corbett's book "Number" to me. I can now recommend it to > you; it discusses some of these questions with great clarity.
I'll think about it when Shaquelingua will be "finished"... well, when its grammar will be stable --if it ever will. Right now, I'm avoiding like a plague any form of paper on grammar. I want Shaquelingua to look like alien so my imagination is my only inspiring "book" and I still have a lot of pages to read! Besides, I hate the grammarians. ;-) [---CUT---]
> Nice. Marking the "determiner" (or "article") -- a newish idea, to > me -- rather than either the verb or the noun (strategies I mentioned > in that post you referred to.)
Not so new for me since almost everything is marked on the determiner (quantifier) in Shaquelingua: number/quantity, gender, case and even more. It's even less than new since --apparently-- I kind of rewrote the system of determiners from spoken French. I struck me the day before yesterday while I was reading some web-paper on grammar. I started to hate the grammarians at this very moment, I don't know why... ;-) [---CUT---]
>>indefinite: >> COLL:DU z(#) a couple/pair of >> DSTR:DU s(#) each of two >> COLL:PL r(#) all of several >> DSTR:PL g(#) each of several >>definite: >> COLL:DU tx(#) the couple/pair of >> DSTR:DU kx(#) each of the two >> COLL:PL vr(#) all the >> DSTR:PL kv(#) each of the >>Where (#) represents the case marking. > > > Looks really, really nice. > The kind of thing I'd want to "steal", > if it were stealing from a natlang.
You're welcome. Apart from the collective/distributive distinction, it's plain French or German. Two languages that I know and that carry some kind of marking on the determiners, although none are as compact as Shaquelingua can be. [---CUT---]
>>(Interlinear lexicon and explanations are here: >>http://perso.normandnet.fr/maxilys/cakesar/gram-12.html
> Nice site.
Thank you.
>>Do not wander in the rest of the site which is outdated.)
> Just because it's "outdated" doesn't mean it doesn't have some > interesting ideas!
Errr... I plead guilty. I knew that people would sneak around just because I said "Don't go". That's what I always do. [---CUT---]
> I understood about the difference between > "each of ..." and "some of ..." DISTR plurals. > But you might want to make it clearer to the user of the language > how that distinction is marked in Shaquiean.
Be patient. Right now, I'm re-working the pronouns to introduce the new Rational/Irrational distinction. I'm also cooking some alien mixture in order that the quantifiers don't look so "Europaish"... and there's that fifth page on shaquean grammar that I can't finish writing because I spend too much time restarting from the begining all over again. Lot of work in the pipe and still only 24 hours per day. I asked for 36 but nobody listened. -- ================== Remi Villatel maxilys_@_tele2.fr ==================