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Rex May - Baloo wrote: > > on 3/3/02 8:45 PM, Rob Speer at rob@hidden.email wrote: > > > On Sun, Mar 03, 2002 at 05:40:22PM -0800, Mike Wright wrote: > >> Can we tack "sa" onto an adjective "xxx" to mean "a/some xxx > >> one/ones"? For example, "blusa" to mean "a blue one/some blue ones" or > >> "zosa" to mean "a male/some males". I'm thinking of something like: > >> > >> Go ten tri kan, han byelsa kai du kalasa. > > > > I wouldn't reuse "sa" for that - it could make the word attach to > > another word you didn't intend. I know that ambiguity isn't a problem in > > Ceqli, but it seems this would happen fairly often. > > > > But this brings up an interesting point. How much are the grammatical > > classes distinguished in Ceqli? I know that adjectives are actually > > verbs, but can you use verbs as nouns as well? Can you use nouns as > > verbs? Is the only difference whether they're inside a t-clause or not, > > which would be the same as in Lojban? > > After the initial appreciation of the elegance of the loglan morpheme's > noun/adjective/verb roles, I came to feel that while the verb/adjective > equivalence made perfect sense, the paradigm: > > le mrenu the man > mi mrenu I am-a-man > da mrenu gotso He goes in a man-tupe way. > > Was not useful. Far better to let a nounish word like hamer operate this > way: > > To hamer The hammer > Go hamer. I hammer (use a hammer, or hit as though with a hammer) > > As English does, and let > > Da bi hamer > > Mean "It's a hammer". I have no problem with this, but I can imagine that it could result in some degree of ambiguity with nouns in both the subject and object slots. This happens all the time in Mandarin, and we rely on context to resolve the issue--including picking the most "reasonable" interpretation. Is there a need/desire for Ceqli to be more explicit than this? As a related issue, now that I've learned "vo" as a "nominalizing particle", I see that there is also "ka", which "nominalizes verb". What is it that "vo" nominalizes? Adjectives? Adverbs? And, should there be a "verbalizer"? If not, then perhaps as many words as possible should be defined as being primarily something other than nouns, and then nominalized using the appropriate particle? Then we'd have "hamer" (v) and "hamerka" (v). And what about changing adjectives into adverbs, and vice versa? My tendency would be to define as many adjectives as possible, then have an "adverbalizing" particle. (Like "-ly" in English.) Japanese has a native adjectival form, ending in "i" (e.g., <utsukushii> = "beautiful"), in which the "i" is replaced by "ku" to form the adverb (<utsukushiku> = "beautifully"), and even a nominalized form (< utsukushisa> = beauty). The weakness of Japanese is that new sets of words of this type are no longer being coined, so there are now two additional ways of forming adjective/adverb pairs using different particles following nouns. Ceqli, being designed from the ground up can be more regular, and equally unambiguous. It seems impossible to have the relatively uncluttered appearance of Mandarin and still eliminate ambiguity. Which is more important? It seems that now is the time to decide. -- Mike Wright http://www.CoastalFog.net _____________________________________________________ "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese." -- Charles de Gaulle