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Re: Chevraqis: a sketch

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Thursday, August 10, 2000, 18:23
On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, Marcus Smith wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote: > > >No articles, but 4 cases, which may be a mistake: > >nominative (transitive subject, intransitive voluntary subject): -(r)a > > (-ra if something ends with a vowel, occuring generally in names or > > irregular nouns) > > > >accusative (transitive object, intransitive involuntary subject): -(r)e > > This sounds close to an "active" language. Active language almost always > indicate this distinction by verbal agreement rather than case on the noun > though. (I don't say always, because although I've never heard of active case > marking, I don't see why it couldn't happen.) It's always nice to see more > conlangs follow this pattern. There aren't enough of us around.
A word for what it is! I'll look up the natlang equivalents. :-/ I got the idea from a Ranto on Esperanto whose URl/author I can't recall offhand.
> >I'm using "reportive" to mean something that the speaker has witnessed, > >or a "fundamental truth" (generally religious, sometimes used in > >discussing math or philosphy). "Plain" past or present indicates > > The "reportive" is usually refered to as an "evidential" rather than a "mood".
Gotcha. Thanks. :-)
> >Word order: > >Defaults to SOV, mainly because I was looking at Latin at the time, but > >can have somewhat-free word order. The subject of the sentence is often > >omitted if the listener can deduce it from context (which happens a lot > >in Korean conversation), e.g. > > > >Vanena Irezane res (Vanen watched Irezan--both people) > >Bre chimarrat ( (he) loves her) > > Can nouns be after the verb as well?
Hmm. Good point. They *ought to be. When I designed the examples I'd been looking at Japanese, which dumps the verbs at the end far as I can tell. I'll make a note of that.
> If I had a dime for everytime I've had to start from scratch because I thought > things were too screwed up.... > > Marcus
<wry g> YHL