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Rex May - Baloo wrote: > > 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. Ah. But I see flexibility as a flaw--assuming that your goals include ease of learning and ease of use. One of the problems I had with Japanese is that once you've learned five ways to say the same thing, some native speaker will stump you with a sixth. I would expect that, whenever possible, speakers would pick structures that feel familiar to them, but listeners have to understand every possible way of expressing any given idea. In my personal language-learning experience, regularity and consistency make things easy--no matter how alien the structure appears. I'd hate to be a new student of English, where we can say things like: John, who was just getting over breaking up with Mary, was getting up to get off of the bus, when Bob turned to him and said, "I really got off on the way you got over on the teacher yesterday." "Well," says John, "he wouldn't get off my back. By the way, do you think we'll get off on Friday for Teacher Training Day?" "I hope so. I need to get over to the range and get off a few shots with my new antique AK-47." "You're blocking the door, boys" pipes up the bus driver. "Off you get. Go on...get along with you." Now *that* is flexibility. (For extra credit, translate the preceding paragraph into Ceqli.) > > 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. I can see OSV as a topicalization of O, but what is VOS for? > > 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. I'll try to start doing this as I notice them. > Are they all internal conflicts? Yes. -- 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