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--- In ceqli@yahoogroups.com, "Marcos Cramer" <marcos.cramer@...> wrote: > > I'm new to Ceqli, so my oppinion might not be very competent. OTOH, you bring a fresh perspective. > > I don't feel the necessity for the difference between "young" and "new". In > the few cases where the differences matters, in can be made explicit in some > way. I think you're right. > > I guess the reason why we say "I bought a new dog" is because the dog is new > to me. So if we want to make this explicit in Ceqli (in order to avoid > confusion with "young") we should add something like "to me" to the > modifier. > > My attempt: "go posel pigil ko go sa kanin". > > (Correct me if the grammar is wrong) Not wrong, but owing to the way 'sa' operates, it'd work better to say: go posel ko go pigil sa kanin. Contrariwise, that sentence could almost be taken as "I bought myself a new dog." Is it possible that "new dog" in this sense is a bit of an English idiom? I think of... "I dropped my fork. Bring me a new one." Which seems to mean the same as "another one." Or is it a deep-grammar idiom, one that comes naturally to the human mind? As for merging new/old and young/old into one, does anybody know of any languages that don't make that distinction? Now I'm thinking of the new/used distinction, as in books and cars. Is that fundamentally different from new/old? For "used," Ceqli could have jebezu - already passive use And a new car could be "bubezu tomo." Q: when "new" doesn't mean "young", does it pretty much always mean "unused"? > > That would also allow for disambiguating "I bought a new car": "go posel > pigil gari" vs "go posel pigil ko go sa gari". (Is "gari" the right word? In > the word list it says "gari" means "car (of train etc)", so I'm not sure > whether it also means "car" as in "automobile"). For automobile Ceqli has "tomo" a truncation of the word. > > In the word list you also have "jun" and "pojun" for "young" and "old" > respectively. Are these now obsolete? If yes, why did you choose to base the > words for "young" and "old" on the abstract noun "age", whereas other > adjectives like "bel" and "haw" are basic rather than based on abstract > nouns for "beauty" and "goodness". At any rate, how do you say "beauty" and > "goodness" in Ceqli? You're right. That's indeed an assymetry in the language. Now, logically, "pigil" would mean "young" whether or not there is another word for young in the language, but my sense of elegance says that "pigil" is a bit of a wart. So let's say we need a pair of words for young/old, and then the jebezu/bubezu distinction. You could even get a new wife, because she hasn't been used as a wife by you. That makes it a little idiomatic, but why not? So what remains is to pick the young root. I don't like jun, because it's not easily pronounced when reversed into 'jnu' for 'old.' I currently have baru/bura from Indonesian, but there's something about it I just don't like. How about from Russian, stari - old stira - young > > Sorry for asking so many questions, when I ment to write an answer. As a > novice to Ceqli, it's hard to find answers to many questions, given that the > online grammar and word lists aren't very detailed. Questions are just what I need. They further the language.