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Rex May - Baloo wrote:
>
> But I'm still wondering if two 'stop' words, transitive and intransitive,
> might prove useful. They would be equivalent to 'poho' and 'pokaw,' I
> suppose.
Won't the main verb always tell you whether it's transitive or not?
> Any good mandarin words handy?
None I can think of. Mandarin doesn't have many suffixes or
prefixes--or particles, even. It mostly uses auxiliary verbs and
adverbs. Even the few aspectual particles (-le, -zhe, -guo) are
derived from verbs.
Li and Thompson list five prefixes, one infix, and seven suffixes. Of
the noun suffixes, three (-er, -zi, -tou) are no longer productive in
the modern language. Verbal suffixes are generally verbs, themselves.
Most Mandarin verbs are either transitive or intransitive by meaning.
A verb like "chi1" ("eat"), which can be either, is considered
transitive when it's actually followed by a direct object. But this
seems irrelevant, as transitivity appears to have no particular impact
on the syntax. One potential conceptual problem comes from the fact
that new Ceqli verbs are defined in terms of English verbs, and the
transitivity of the English verb tends to be automatically transferred
to the Ceqli verb, along with many derived meanings. This is going to
be very difficult to avoid.
For example, English "look" is intransitive, but Mandarin "kan4" can
be either intransitive or transitive. In the transitive meaning,
English requires the addition of the preposition "at". (And Mandarin
doesn't have a separate verb for "see". This is handled as a
resultative verb, "kan4jian4", literally "look-perceive". Likewise,
"hear" is "ting1jian4", "listen-perceive".)
I see that Ceqli "xau" is both "see" and "look", but "hear" and
"listen" are "tiq" and "traitiq", respectively. Then shouldn't "see"
and "look" be "xau" and "traixau"?
Is "smel" a noun or a verb? If you've been consistent in using "to"
with verbs in the glossaries, it should be a noun. It would make a
nice verb, though. And how about Malay "bau" as "baw" for "odor"? Then
"smel" could be "to smell", and "traismel" could be "to sniff". Then
"basmel" would become "babaw". (I'm assuming that "basmel" is intended
to be a noun.)
Ceqli seems to be steadily moving from the Mandarin model toward
something more agglutinative. Perhaps you should be studying Turkish?
--
Mike Wright
http://www.CoastalFog.net
____________________________________________________________
"The difference between theory and practice is that, in
theory, there is no difference between theory and practice;
in practice, however, there is." -- Anonymous