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

• Autor: George Boeree (“cgboeree”)
• Tema: Re: [europidgin] Re: Tenses and plurals (was: general comments)
• Data: 2002-09-18 12:57
• Mesaje: 134 (a supra, presedente, seguente)

I basically agree with Bjorn that the -va/-ra system is easiest in that
it is consistent and reduces the numbers of particles floating around a
sentence.  In this case, I think is is also best to make it "required,"
even if other words also indicate past or future.  The same thing
would apply regarding the plural -s.

In the course of looking at a word-for-word translation of the Tao-te-Ching,
it was clear that Chinese leaves so much to context that there are often
dozens of ways of interpreting a sentence.  On the opposite extreme
are languages like Finnish that tell you every little detail.  I lean
towards the Chinese structure, but I think it is important to avoid having
to ask "did he mean one person, or several, or people in general?" and
"was he talking about a past event, or one going  on right now, or
did he mean something hypothetical?"

In LFN, the ONLY grammatical suffixes are -s, -va, -ra, -r, -da, and
-nte.  Six!  And with these we avoid endless confusion, word
order details, and so on.

George

europidgin wrote:
>  Just a crazy idea:
>
> What about a pidging or "pijin" without any tense-system at all.
> I guess that most pidgins didn't have tense at the beginning. And I think
> travellers get by without it.
>
> The speaker if really needed can always express time in other ways
> (yesterday etc.)
>
> The creole could then introduce a few simple rules, first of all
> past tense I guess.
>
> If the majority is for an isolating system I think that I prefer
> "pa" and "fu". But suffixes are in my humble opinion a better solution.
> I think that all these small words make it difficult and slow to read a
> text.
>
> Bjorn
>