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.
>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
>reasonable certainty, and the probable mood indicates some doubt (I stole
>that from Japanese, too). The present and present probable are used to
>speak of the future as well.
The "reportive" is usually refered to as an "evidential" rather than a "mood".
>Adjectives/adverbs appear *before* the phrase they modify (head-final,
>with postpositions, and I hope to heaven I'm not getting this reversed).
Right order. But don't worry about getting that order wrong. Lots of
languages are inconsistant in this area.
>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?
>"the daggers that Vanen likes" becomes
>"Vanen (subject) it (resumptive? pronoun) liking (verb becomes
>participle) that (comes at the end of the phrase)"
Yes, "resumptive pronoun" is the right term.
>Sorry this looks so screwy. :-/ It's a slow and rewarding, but
>sometimes painful, learning process....
If I had a dime for everytime I've had to start from scratch because I thought
things were too screwed up....
Marcus