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Re: [romanceconlang] Interrogative question?



 --- Adam Walker skrzypszy: 

> And Carrajena will have a triple valency in its
> demonstratives (here, there and yon) but I only have
> the here (fistu) and there (isu) worked out so far. 

I was thinking about that possibility too. 
Wenedyk is modelled after Polish, and Polish also has the third one (o'w),
although it is old-fashioned and rarely used. What happened in Polish, is that
the meaning of "there" (ten/ta/to) shifted towards a general demonstrative,
used for both "here" and "there"; only when you want to say explicitly that
something is *there* and not *here* (for example in oppositions) you use a form
that can be analysed as "there-that" (tamten/tamta/tamto).
That's exactly what I did in Wenedyk: "il\" and "il\a" for "this/that", and
"iwial\"/"iwial\a" for "that one over there". The latter is of course derived
from Latin "ibi+illum", "ibi+illam" etc.

> All these little function words -- conjunctions,
> demonstratives, pronouns, articles, prepositions --
> eat an inordinate amount of time.

Yes, but it is a nice thing to do, and besides very rewarding. I've been
redoing the pronouns and the prepositions in Wenedyk lately, and after
modifying all my translations accordingly, the language became suddenly much
more alive!
Besides, Wenedyk has 41 prepositions now! Yay!

> > "Which" seems to have disappeared from the list,
> > BTW.
> 
> Oops!  Now how did that happen?  which is either fi or
> pali.  I think it will likely be identical with what. 
> But I *might* differentiate.

Personally, I prefer "pali", for the reasons I already mentioned.
BTW "kwal" in Wenedyk is also used as the normal relative pronoun. Hence: 
"Pacz nos'c', kwal jesz je~ cial\o'r ..."

In dialects and slang, "kwal" is often replaced by "czy" or "kód", the former
only for people, the latter for both people and things.

Jan

=====
"Originality is the art of concealing your source." - Franklin P. Jones

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