Re: Telek Nouns

At 00:45 29/04/00 -0700, you wrote:
>Here is a description of the morphology and some syntax of nouns.  This
>started
>out as a description of morphology in general, but it was getting too long
for
>a single post.  I'll discuss verbs probably next weekend, then do sentence
>level syntax sometime after that.
>
>Nouns can be divided into classes on the basis of gender and
>alienable/inalienable possession.
>
[snip of very interesting stuff]

>
>What do you guys think?
>
Well, as we say in French: "les grands esprits se rencontrent"!!! ("great
minds think alike", but the French saying sounds stronger than the English
one to me...) My personal language Chasmäöcho happens to distinguish
between animate and inanimate nouns, as well as alienable and inalienable
possession!

Like in Telek, it's generally quite obvious what noun is animate and what
is inanimate. Generally speaking, everything alive (including plants and
even microbes, unlike Telek) is animate, as well as parts of the body and
everything that comes from an animate without transformation. The rest is
inanimate. As for abstractions, they are generally inanimate, while
feelings are animate. Things that are not alive but seem to move by
themselves can be animate or inanimate, there is no way to be sure. Gender
is grammatical in Chasmäöcho, so you have exceptions to the rules I gave
(languages are animate for instance) and you cannot change a noun's gender
at will. It is also important for agreement with verbs (verbs in Chasmäöcho
agree with both subjects and objects, and their genders are reflected in
it) and with one of the three classes of adjectives, the AR- adjectives
which agree with the nouns in gender. So, except for a few differences, the
gender system of Telek and Chasmäöcho are quite similar!

Inalienable possession works the same way in Chasmäöcho and Telek: body
parts and kinship terms are always inalienable, plus a few others (like
"home" - so you see that inalienable possession in the language has nothing
to do with actual inalienability in real life :) -). As for gender,
inalienable possession is very grammatical and only partially semantic. The
main difference between your system and mine is that Chasmäöcho doesn't
have an "indefinite possessor" affix. When the possessor is irrelevant,
inalienably possessed nouns are completed with the short form of the third
person plural possessor suffix.

Well, funny that we came up with similar ideas like that :) .

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org
(ou : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepages/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html)