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on 3/19/02 1:11 PM, Mike Wright at darwin@hidden.email wrote:
> 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?
Not in the way I mean. Go dormX. I sleep-stop. I wake up. But
Go dormY zi. I sleep-stop(transs.) you. I wake you up.
>
>> 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.
That's certainly correct.
>
> 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"?
Yes, and that is now trayxaw, and shd probably be xawtray anyway, with head
last.
>
> 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.)
Good. Only I'd rather derive the noun from the verb. Probably 'smelka'
would make sense.
>
> Ceqli seems to be steadily moving from the Mandarin model toward
> something more agglutinative. Perhaps you should be studying Turkish?
Yikes! No, I hope not. I'm hoping to follow the mandarin/german model of
word-compounding semantically, not grammmatically.
--
>PLEASE NOTE MY NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS: rmay@hidden.email
> Rex F. May (Baloo)
> Daily cartoon at: http://www.cnsnews.com/cartoon/baloo.asp
> Buy my book at: http://www.kiva.net/~jonabook/gdummy.htm
> Language site at: http://www.geocities.com/ceqli/Uploadexp.htm
>Discuss my auxiliary language at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/txeqli/