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on 4/3/02 6:29 PM, Mike Wright at darwin@hidden.email wrote: > I'm beginning to get the feeling that Ceqli is a sort of mixture of > English (and other Indo-European) approaches and Mandarin approaches. Sure, sort of. > > Since English has so many foreign influences, especially from French, > it already sort of lacks unity of structure. Notice how many things > can be said in very different ways, like "the mountain's top" vs. "the > top of the mountain". I don't see this as a flaw, but as flexibility. > > Mandarin, too, has some oddities that appear to come from foreign influences. > > This really struck me when I noticed that Ceqli has the word "gi" for > "during", which works as a progressive aspect particle before a verb. > I assume that this is intended to mean "during" when used before a > noun. If so, this is very much English word order, and very different > from Mandarin, but in other cases, we are using Mandarin word order. > Sometimes we seem to be using structures that don't match either > English or Mandarin. I'm generally placing modifiers in front of verbs, be they adverbs or whatever. Indeed, tense and aspect markers can be considered adverbs. > > My real preference would be to first define all word order in the > abstract, without any reference to translations into any language. > This should permit the development of a consistent internal logic, > with minimal influence from any natural language. Of course, we can > look at a language like Mandarin and decide on SOV and modifier-head > as basics, along with some others. But then the details should arise > from the basics, ignoring irregularities in any of the natural > languages that we know. I'll buy that. But I don't really see any real inconsistencies at this point. We're now SVO, VOS, OSV, and head-last. > > Failing that, I'd prefer to start from a single natural language > model, and then modify it to make it more regular and internally consistent. > > At the moment, it's too close to 50-50, and there are all sorts of odd > conflicts. It makes me crazy. (No, really. I wasn't already crazy > before this.) Do list the conflicts. Are they all internal conflicts? -- >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/