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drinking a drink

From:Garrett Jones <conlang@...>
Date:Friday, May 23, 2003, 23:32
i have thought of this type of rendundancy ("drinking a drink"), and have
deliberated for a long period of time on how to handle it in Minyeva.
Because of the structure of Minyeva, this situation occurs more often in the
language than in English. take the derivatives of the word "to know (how to
do something)":

tone le u fe
know I  FOC it
I know it

le        tone i   va  u   fe
I  (make) know PAT him FOC it
I taught it to him

le dji  tone i   va  u   fe
I  keep know PAT him FOC it
I review him on it


- So, i have come up with a catch-all redundancy word. I have no idea what
to call it, and i don't know if it's an ANADEWISM.

zlo = [FIT] entity fitting the semantic range of the case role it is in,
with respect to the verb.

- that was quite a mouthful, but here are a few examples:

zlo te         tone i   va
FIT-the (make) know PAT him
the teacher taught him.

- the interlinear is near undecipherable here. basically, "zlo" here means
"the entity that causes someone else to know how to do something". In other
words, a teacher. the "zlo" here has the same meaning as the minyeva word
"ja'tone", which means teacher. Without the word "zlo", the sentence sounds
a little redundant:

ja'tone te tone i va.
the teacher taught him.

- with the word for "student" as the patient, it gets even more redundant,
with all the "tone"s scattered about:

ja'tone te         tone i   ji'tone-the
teacher-the (make) know PAT student-the
the teacher taught the student

- with the word "zlo", this becomes:

zlo te         tone i   zlo te
FIT-the (make) know PAT FIT-the
the teacher taught the student.

- for drinking, this looks like:

le luti  i   ja'luti da
I  drink PAT a drink
i drank a drink

vs.:

le luti  i   zlo da
I  drink PAT FIT-a
i drank a drink

what does everyone make of this?
--
Garrett Jones
http://www.alkaline.org

Replies

Matt Trinsic <trinsic@...>
Sally Caves <scaves@...>
Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>