Kevin Smith | Re: [europidgin] Tenses and plurals (was: general comments)

• Autor: Kevin Smith (“kevinbsmith”)
• Tema: Re: [europidgin] Tenses and plurals (was: general comments)
• Data: 2002-09-18 03:47
• Mesaje: 123 (a supra, presedente, seguente)

On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 09:24, George Boeree wrote:

> 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."

Hmm. I still find this use of 'va' confusing with '-va' which seems to
be a common suffix meaning past tense. I would prefer 'pa' for past
tense (easy to remember from 'pasada'), and 'fu' for future tense (easy
to remember from 'futur').

But I think I've said enough on this topic for now, so I'll try to sit
quietly and listen to other folks' reactions.

> 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.

A problem I had with Glosa was that by the time I listed all the words
that could start a noun phrase, it was a list too long to memorize.
That's the kind of complex rule that I would like to avoid.

> Verb forms are never the same as adjectives, which follow nouns.

Ah, I forgot that adjectives are inflected in LFN. Yes, with that rule
in place I can see that the boundary between subject and verb would be
clear. Of course, whether or not a pidgin should have inflected
adjectives is yet another discussion point.

Oh, wait a minute. 'saja' is an adjective, but it looks just like a
noun, or verb. Same with 'felis'. If I say:

   la unsa preda lanura boko danelo

Where is the subject, where is the verb, and where is the direct object?
I've used non-LFN words to prevent you from relying on knowing the
meaning of specific words to deduce their part of speech.
I _think_ any language needs to do one of the following to be parsable:

1. Inflect various parts of speech
2. Use special words (or punctuation) to mark boundaries of parts of
speech
3. Require the reader to use context and deduction

Are there other options?

Kevin