The deliberate redundancy; was: Idioms

Redundancies below, after a short discussion of the reviled
preposition!  <G>

dunn patrick w wrote:
>
> Sally, in discussing Teonaht (incidently, I love that conlang!  I actually
> read bits of it to someone at work once and said, "isn't that beautiful?"
> He nodded slowly and backed away) mentioned some idioms, particularly the
> quirky use of prepositions.
Hey thanks!  Did you also read him bits of your own conlang? ;-)

The quirky use of prepositions is not a popular topic... I've gotten no
response to it or suggestions, so this is welcome!

> Hatasoe is similar.  For instance, the preposition pazo, meaning "for", is
> used to mark indirect objects.  "Duo", "upon", is used with the verbs "to
> walk," "to go" and "to drive" even if it's inside a structure.  And felan,
> "with", is often sued to indicate possession, particularly when an animate
> noun owns another animate noun.  "The man's brother" therefore could be
> "Pato sha" but is usually "Pato felan sho."
Well this is quite interesting.  How do you use pazo with walk?  I'm not
sure I understand your example above because you don't give long enough
sentences with each word glossed.  For instance, in Pato felan sho, what
does "sho" mean and what does "sha"?  How is "duo" inside a structure?

Another thing that T. ought to do if it is an analytic language with
lots
of prepositions is make sure that there are some verbs that we regard as
intransitive that they see transitively and vice versa.  It's so hard to
fight the "relex" problem (a "coding" for your own native language) but
you have to constantly be aware of it.  "Eat the food."  Transitive
"eat"
in both Teonaht and English.    "Give to the poor."  Intransitive "give"
in both Teonaht and English.   "Listen to the music."  AHA!
Intransitive
"listen" in English but transitive in Teonaht.  Yay!

But what about expressions that would make "eat" intransitive" and
"give" transitive"?  Grace the poor with your donation.  Bite at your
food.



> Almost all numbers are idiomatic, hence we have "ute," meaning "finger,"
> also meaning "one".  Fave, "hand," meaning "five."
I think Irina's Valdyan does this.

Also, one of the more
> interesting examples of an idiom becoming omnipresent is the word
> "kalake/kalaka"  Kalake means "salt," or "salt water," while "kalaka"
> means both "to be salty," and "to be evil, bad."  To see how this word for
> "bad" eclisped the archaic word for "evil," which is never used now,
> imagine this common enough exchange among the island dwelling Hataso:
>
> Pazhue ranehasa, ala?                   Is the water good?
>
> Male.  Rakalaka.                        No, it's salty.
Very clever!  One of the things I toyed with in Teonaht idiom was to
produce, oh what do you call them... the opposite of the oxymoron...
the PLEONASM!  So:

        the wet fish
        the feathered bird
        the hard stone
        the wet rain
        the legless snake
        the black crow

Its six miles as the black crow flies.
He's out fishing for the wet fish.
He doesn't have brains enough to come out of the wet rain.
He's caught between a hard rock and a hard place (!!! G)

These modifiers would be meaningless insofar as determining a wet fish
from
a dry fish (something on your plate maybe?), and would be incorporated
in the word.  These would become poetic words, or rhetorically
embellished
words.  I can see, now, how classifiers arose in some of the Asian
languages.
I wonder if it wasn't just this kind of process:  the flat plate, the
long pencil, the round egg.

Once I raised the possibility of having a separate word for "your
father"
and "my father."  I haven't embarked on this daunting task of
relexifying
Teonaht along these lines, but I've toyed with it.  It could be the
same principle.  "My father" would be something like "my dear father,"
and your father would be "your strong father."  I imagine a whole bunch
of Nenddeylyt words (Teonaht's mysterious source language) providing
these peculiarities.

Ah yes... I admit I began thinking along these lines with Welsh's "two
Spanish leather shoes on his two feet."  Of course, W. was invoking its
old dual number here, and not really being redundant.  T. could do that
too!  Not "your knees are knocking," but "your two knees are knocking."
"He sat down hard on his two buttocks!"

Sally
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html