Re: Tatari Faran comparatives
From: | Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> |
Date: | Tuesday, April 17, 2007, 0:57 |
Hi!
Sorry for answering late -- traditionally, your posts are interesting,
well-written and long, so I took the heuristic liberty to reserve some
time before I could read your post with the necessary rest. :-)
H. S. Teoh writes:
>...
> 1) _puru_ and _sutu_ may appear in adjectival position to indicate a
> comparative quantity:
>
> tiki puru sei tsuni baran kana upi ipai ira.
> rabbit more CVY find morning now here at COMPL
> There are more rabbits here this morning.
> ['ti'ki pu4u sej . 'tsuni ba4an kana ?u'pi ?ipaj ?i4a]
>
> buneis sutu sei tsuni upi ipai ira.
> mushroom less CVY find here at COMPL
> There are less mushrooms here (than before).
> [bu'nejs:utu sej . tsuni ?u'pi ?ipaj ?i4a]
This does remind me of the Mandarin structures for 'many' which is
different in structure from what I'd use in English or German:
Ni3 de shu1 hen3 duo1.
lit. 'you 's book very numerous'
'You have many books.'
In a similarly different way, Tatari Faran's 'less' and 'more' seem to
map to English structures. But in those sentences, the similarity of
correspondance may also be due to the different predicate 'find'. Of
cause, using 'find' isn't far-fetched at all (Swedish is very similar
(but uses middle voice)).
Ok, this was probably impossible to understand because I just gave my
raw braindump, but -- nice work! :-)
**Henrik
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