Re: Gzarondan vindicated.

Hi!

"Adrian Morgan (aka Flesh-eating Dragon)" <dragon@...> writes:
>...
> Which discuss tense marking on nouns and articles. Quote: "In
> Chamicuro (Arawak, Peru), the definite article encodes a (clausal)
> past/non-past tense distinction, independently of the verb (which
> usually has no tense marking at all) (Parker, 1999)".
>...
Oh, funny! :-)

> Firstly, whereas English draws a distinction between articles,
> determiners and pronouns, there is no such distinction in Gzarondan.
> I've chosen to use the term "articles" to denote the word class
> corresponding to these categories, which in Gzarondan grammar is a
> completely indivisible word class.
What about 1st and 2nd person pronouns?  Can they function as
articles, maybe indicating something like 'me, the king' instead
of 'the king', like an apposition?


Actually, spoken German also does much of this.  Instead of 'er'
('he'), people say 'der' ('the'), so the definite article may be used
as a pronoun.  Using the real pronoun in spoken language often sounds
very awkward to me, like using the wrong register (namely, written
German).  The rule applies to the whole set of articles/pronouns in
all cases, gender and number:

  Der          hat der          den          schon   gegeben.
  The-m-sg-NOM has the-f-sg-DAT the-m-sg-ACC already given
  He           has to-her       him          already given
  'He has already given it to her.'

However, for 1st and 2nd person, there is no such thing, since there
are no 1st and 2nd person articles.  Therefore, the normal pronouns
are used.

In many situations, the indefinite articles can also be used as
'pronouns'(?), meaning 'someone' or 'something', or 'one of that'.
Also note that the word for 'one' is the same as for 'a' in German, so
quite some overloading here in spoken language. :-)

To go further, the words for 'this' and 'that' in spoken German are
also derived from the articles.  They are 'der hier' (lit.: 'the here'
= 'this one') and 'der da' (lit.: 'the there' = 'that one').  And as a
determiner: 'der _ hier' and 'der _ da'.  Some dialects (notably
Saarlandian and Western Palatinian) have compounded this construction
so strongly that the words are never separated, even as determiner:

   Der da    hat mich geschlagen!
   the there has me   hit!
   'That one hit me!'

   Der Kuchen da    schmeckt gut.
   the cake   there tastes   good.

Saarlandian order appied to High German (speakers do that...):
   Der da Kuchen schmeckt gut.


So, that's just my anadewism comments. :-)


>....snip.....a lot of interesting stuff.....snip....
> Incidental: the "exception" alluded to here is that the masculine
> gender would indicate the commencement of the action while the
> feminine gender would indicate its conclusion. Hence:
Well, that's strange, I'd say. :-)  But funny.

>....snip.....a lot of interesting stuff.....snip....
> When this form of indicating possession is used, the article belonging
> to the possessed entity *must* be explicitely stated. For example in
> this sentence:
>
>     Maniu ya tan-ryn cynt -- I want your sword
>
> there is absolutely no way that the article "ryn" can be removed and
> made implicit. If you tried, you'd get something like this:
>
>     Maniu ya tan cynt -- I want you [who are] the (masculine) sword
Ah, that explains my question about 1st and 2rd persons!  Very nice,
and very consistently and logically applied principles.  I like it.

> However, you *can* mark the possessing entity as nominative, bearing in
> mind that the meaning of the sentence will be different. This is called
> the "retropossessive" form. For example, compare:
>
>     Ren-ryniu cynt -- her sword
>     Reniu-ryn cynt -- she with the sword
Why would you not simply swap it?  Like 'the sword's her'?  Maybe

      cynt-ryn
or    ren cynt ryn

**Henrik

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