Re: Unilang: the Grammar

On Thu, 26 April 2001, Henrik Theiling wrote:

> But the other usages I found quite the same as in English:
>
>    ni3 gen3 wo3 lai2!
>    you with me come
>    Come with me!
>
>    ni3 dao4 wo3 zhe4-li3 lai2!
>    you to   me  here     come.
>    Come to  me!
>
>    ni3 dao4 ta1     na4-li3 qu4!
>    you to   him/her there   go.
>    Go to him!

Except that gen1 and dao4 are both verbs!

Dao4 means to arrive. So you can have:

Wo3 dao4le.
I arrive-PERF.
I arrived.

Wo3 dao4 jia1 le.
I arrive home PERF.
I arrived (at) home, or I came home.

Ni3 dao4 ta1 na4li3 qu4.
You arrive he(his) there/that-place go.
More literally, You arrive (at) his place there, or You go to his place there.

In the last two sentences, "home" and "there" behave like objects of the verb. Is
it possible for verbs to serve as prepositions or for prepositions to act like
verbs? I don't really understand what's going on here syntactically, but I
don't think there's a preposition or prepositional phrase in these sentences,
although you can translate dao4 as "to." You can even omit dao4 and use qu4 as
your main verb. "Ni3 qu4 na4li3" is equivalent to "Ni3 dao4 na4li3 qu4," "You
go there."


Likewise gen1 (it's first tone, not third) means to accompany, or follow:

Ni3 gen1 wo3 lai2.
You accompany I come.
You accompany me coming, or you come with me.

Here you can tranlate gen1 as "with," but you can often translate it as "and".

Ni3 gen1 wo1.
"You accompany me," or "You and I."

Ni3 gen1 wo1 yi1qi3 qu4 Tai2wan1.
You accompany me together go Taiwan.
You and I go to Taiwan (together).

So we've got verbs acting like prepositions, and verbs acting like conjuctions.
Now that I think about it, I'm not sure if Chinese has either. Can anyone
explain any more clearly what's going on here?

BTW, as a newbie, I have to say I'm glad to have found this list. I can actually
muse aimlessly about things like this to people who actually seem to care,
unlike my "normal" friends, whose eyes glaze over ;). Now if I could only keep
up with the volume. The number of posts here is incredible.

-Weiben