Re: Pseudopassive constructions, sentences, husky Norwegians

From: "Matt McLauchlin"

> >I don't see where your problem is, actually.  The verb does appear to
agree
> >with the subject in all your sentences.  You don't say "someone", but the
> >verb still agrees with it.  The only difference between the last two
> >sentences is word order.  The meaning between the two is not that extreme
> >-- it is not unheard of for indefinite subjects to evolve into passives.
>
> OK, good.
It is good, 'cause I like this feature of your lang.

> >Since verbs mark person, could explicit ergative pronouns be dropped
(like
> >subject pronouns à la Romance)? In other words, is:
> >Teuca Áudridan. I love Audrid.
> >a valid sentence?
>
> No, just like *Aime Audrid = "(I) love Audrid" isn't a valid sentence of
> French.
Perhaps it would be good for you to break away from the Romance example. For
me, the logic behind personal verb endings has been that you didn't need
explicit subject pronouns; it was "in the verb" (Hungarian [Russian?] works
on the same premise). The Romance heavy-hitters, Spanish, Portuguese, and
Italian [Latin] (can't speak for the others) operate this way. The reason
French (also a heavy-hitter, to be sure) doesn't work (as you show above) is
that, 3-4 slots in any given verb paradigm (especially in the present and
imperfect) are going to be homophonous, albeit spelled differently. Maybe if
you said it was like German? There is overlap between certain persons in
conjugations, but there are distinct endings for various persons in a
conjugation, the subject pronouns are obligatory, and no one suggests that
you could drop them because the subject is "in the verb". Too, how about a
complete paradigm of a verb in the present tense, so we can see what it
looks like?

teuca    --
--         --
teuc      --

?

Kou