Re: Chevraqis: a sketch

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