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on 2/1/04 8:52 AM, Garrett Jones at alkaline@hidden.email wrote: > I'll tell how I have the articles organized in Minyeva, maybe it might be > helpful. I have five articles: te, da, ki, sao, and cai. > > - te: the X previously mentioned. The word has to be introduced by one of > the other three articles (da, ki, sao). [TA, TB] > - da: a particular X that I have in mind. [AA, AC] > - ki: a generic instance of X. [TJ, TK, AB, NA, NB] > - sao: the one and only X, the X defined by Y. [TC, TD, TE, TI] > - cai: the one with the name X. [TG, NC] > > not covered by these: TF, TH > > In the sentence "I'm going to marry a swede", using da vs. ki for "a" gives > different meanings. The sentence "I'm going to marry da swede" means "There > is a particular swede I'm going to marry", while "I'm going to marry ki > swede" means "I'm going to find some swede someday and marry that person". > > The meaning of "ki" is translated very idiomatically in English: sometimes > with "the", other times with "a", and other times with nothing at all. For > example: > > "Today we are going to study the tiger." > "You could get eaten by a tiger." > "Tigers are very dangerous." For me, ki (or tuya) fits in those three examples, but for 'a swede' I see a different meaning. You don't mean a typical, or representative Swede here, do you? You could mean, say, that you're going to marry a Swede to get Swedish citizenship, say, and you don't need a typical one, you need -any- one. Here I'd use the 'any' indefinite. Maybe I need 'ta' for that. I agree, however, that the 'da' meaning is a useful one. Krawn? > > So far, from your discussion of articles in ceqli so far, it looks like your > articles match up like this: > > to = te > tuya = ki > (null)/# = da > ?? = sao > ti = cai > > I've done some preliminary frequency studies on my adjectives by looking at > texts from novels and counting up how many words in the texts would match up > to each article. Here is the count I came up with, sampling from Lord of the > Rings, Dune, and The Outsiders: > > sao: 71 > ki: 31 > da: 23 > te: 18 > > The distribution is mostly reducable (meaning, in smaller samples it usually > has about the same ratios). > -- -- Rex F. May (Baloo) Daily cartoon at: http://www.cnsnews.com/cartoon/baloo.asp Buy my book at: http://www.kiva.net/~jonabook/book-GesundheitDummy.htm