George Boeree | Re: [europidgin] Tenses and plurals (was: general comments)

• Autor: George Boeree (“cgboeree”)
• Tema: Re: [europidgin] Tenses and plurals (was: general comments)
• Data: 2002-09-17 16:24
• Mesaje: 113 (a supra, presedente, seguente)

Hi, Kevin.

Kevin Smith wrote:
>  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.
Va is used in French and other romance dialects for a constructed future,
from the word for "to go."
E is an adaptation of the French ai, the first person singular of aver,
"to have."  Using "a" would have been clearer, except that "a' is
also pretty universal for "at, to."
If "va" and "e" appeal to everyone, then LFN itself would have to change
to keep up!  I am not suggesting that pijin and LFN should use different
grammatical forms!
>
> 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?
Word order easily takes care of the problem.  All nouns have a word
like "the," various definites and indefinites, numbers, possessives, or
prepositions to mark it as a noun.  Verb forms are never the same
as adjectives, which follow nouns.  The verb clearly ends with the
next noun phrase.  It is actually a challenge to come up with a sentence
that doesn't work this way!
>
> 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.
Spanish does in fact use "lo" this way.
>
> > 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.
I myself agree on this, as well as keeping the tenses in -va and -ra --
but enough people seem to want isolaing versions to warrant the suggestion.
>
> > 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.
Las would be fine -- though if there is no plural in -s, there is no need
to use -s in this regard either!
>
Best to all,

George