Kevin Smith | Tenses and plurals (was: general comments)

• Autor: Kevin Smith (“kevinbsmith”)
• Tema: Tenses and plurals (was: general comments)
• Data: 2002-09-17 15:47
• Mesaje: 112 (a supra, presedente, seguente)

On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 05:37, George Boeree wrote:

> Then, let's go ahead with an isolating tense system:

> e dona  -- gave
> va dona -- will give
>
> (in which case, "and" could be changed to i, and "go"
> could be changed to vade or other form.)

I definitely am in favor of this concept, but I don't understand the
logic of these particular choices. 'va' should be the past tense, for
compatibility with full LFN. Perhaps 'ra' could be the future tense,
again for compatibility.

I don't think the full and pijin versions of a language should have
different words for "and". I can live with 'e' or 'i', but it should be
consistent. Since LFN already uses 'e', I would vote to keep it.

> And let's eliminate both the -r of the infinitive and
> the -ia of the abstract nouns in one step with:
>
> lo -- abstract noun

Unless word order is going to tell you which word is the verb, I think
we should keep the -r ending as the verb marker. My biggest complaint
about Glosa is that you can read a sentence and not be certain where the
subject stops and the verb starts. How will EP handle this, if not by
always using the -r for verbs?

I haven't thought about abstract nouns enough to know whether I would
want to eliminate -ia or not. Probably so, but it may depend on my
figuring out the word order issues.

> One more:  How about eliminating the plural and using the
> indefinites plus a plural "the:"

Glosa does this, and it is...ok. I think I would prefer to keepe the -s
for plural nouns, but could be convinced to drop it.

> li -- the, plural (or le, as in French, if the third
> person singular pronoun turns out to be el)

I would have thought that 'la' would be the singular definite article,
and 'las' would be the plural.

Kevin