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Re: Unilang: the Grammar

From:David Peterson <digitalscream@...>
Date:Thursday, April 26, 2001, 1:04
In a message dated 4/25/01 4:32:12 PM, hr_oskar@HOTMAIL.COM writes:

<< I'm interested in those 'satellite' terms; have any more details on that?
>>
It's basically the preposition system of English. Take Spanish, first. "Correr", meaning "to run", can only be used intransitively. So, if you take the sentence "yo corro en la casa" it can only mean "I'm running inside the outside", not "I'm running into the house", even though "en" can mean both. In Latin and Esperanto, this is taken care of with the accusative case (i.e., in Latin you use "in" plus the accusative to indicate movement into something, and "in" plus the ablative to indicate stasis. And in Esperanto the same thing occurs, only instead of the ablative, you use the nominative). In English, there are just sets of pairs of prepositions: "in"/"into", "outside of"/"out of", "to"/"at", "away"/"away from", etc. And even some of these have fudged a little bit, so "I walk in the house" is ambiguous. "I walk into the house", however, is not. So, whereas in a language like Spanish, you have one word to mean "enter", and you just have to use a present participle verb to describe how one enters (if one does it at all), English allows you to use any sort of motion verb that might usually be used only intransitively in Spanish and combine with a list of these satellite prepositions that help describe the motion of the verb. So, in Spanish you use a definite verb and describe the manner in which it's done, whereas in English you use a manner verb and describe the motion. More examples: In Spanish, you can say "I enter/exit/walk/go/leave running", whereas in English you'd say "I run into/away from/out of/through/around". That's the difference between satellite and non-satellite (by the way, "non-satellite" is not the term; I forget what it is. Starts with an "a", I think...). Because of this, they've done studies where they'll show a native Spanish speaker and a native English speaker the same film, and then have them describe it in their own language. The Spanish speaker will invariably have fewer manner verbs, whereas English will have a plethora. Even if, say, in the film a guy runs into a bank, the Spanish speaker will more often than not say the guy enters the bank, whereas the English speaker would say he runs into it. So, that's what I know about satellite languages. -David