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On 6/16/05, Rex May <rmay@hidden.email> wrote: > I'm trying to pin down just what the transitive-intransitive thing > really means, and what it implies for how ceqli should work. > > It seems that there are words like `kom' that are intrinsically > transitive. > "Go kom" – We hear this as transitive, whether it has an indicated > object or not. Other such words are "ku," "bua", "xau," "pomo," – > all of these have an implied object. I'm not a real linguist, but I think you might be misusing the word "transitive". If a *verb* doesn't have an *object* in a particular sentence, it's being used intransitively, and is therefore not mandatorily transitive, even if the *action* the verb refers to necessarily has a *patient*. Or maybe there is logical transitivity and grammatical transitivity, and you're talking about one and I'm talking about the other. Anyway, they shouldn't be confused. > Then we have verbs that are, in English, capable of being both. > Cook, burn, etc. > > In ceqli, I think maybe such verbs should be intransitive in the base > form. > to karn tunu. The meat cooks. > go tunufa to karn. I cook the meat. > > But what do you think? Am I being anglocentric here? If "tunu" > remains transitive, then we'd have: > > go tunu to karn. > to tunu bekarn. > > And maybe that's better. Because when something cooks, or burns, > something is almost always acting on it. Yes, I think the latter makes sense. You might have a rule that verbs which refer to actions that necessarily have an actor affecting a patient are always transitive, with the subject being the actor and the object being the patient. My own preference is to mark all verbs explicitly for transitivity (as in Rick Harrison's Vorlin), but that might go against your design goal of concision. > And, while I'm at it, I think we can allow some ceqli verbs to be > transitive in a Mandarinesque way: > > go dorm cuaq. I sleep bed. = I sleep in a bed. > go ja parizo. I go Paris. > go stu cer. I sit chair. Yes, that seems to fit the concise spirit of ceqli pretty well. > > But to say: > This car seats six. > I think we need > ci tomo studon xei. Is this stu+don? I don't think the idiom is terribly clear. I would render that in E-o as "Cxi auxto havas ses sidlokojn" or "Cxi auxto sidigus ses homojn" Maybe the ceqli equivalent of the latter would be something like ci tomo stufa xei [jin]. > All that aside, my next project is to get back to work on the > glossary. Anybody who has any good ideas for vocabulary, bring it up > here. I've just downloaded the glossary from the Yahoo group site. I'll look at it and see if I see any obvious gaps. (It needs to go on your own site, BTW - you shouldn't oblige people to subscribe to the listgroup to get the glossary. And MyHTML.html is a terribly vague filename.) -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/review/log.htm