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--- In romanceconlang@yahoogroups.com, Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@f...> wrote: > >But what about |nuolu| "no, none"? |U nuolu| "a none" and |is > >nuolu| "the none" don't make sense. > > Since when do languages have to make sense? :))) Right. Stupid me. ;-) > >This still leaves other problems with uncountable quantities. > >How do you say "of water", as in "a glass of water"? Neither > >|ys auga| [yz awg] "of the water" nor |nys auga| [nyz awg] > >"of a water" seem to work. Of course, one could define an > >idiomatic use of either article in this situation, but I > >wonder whether it wouldn't lead to ambiguities. > > Or you could just not use any article, like in Dutch "een glas water". It > never leads to any ambiguity, and it makes sense for Jovian to be > influenced by Germanic languages. That works with a quantifying head noun such as "glass", but for things like "the taste of wine"? I really wouldn't like to use |de| here, seeing how Jovian prefers to use inflected articles for genitives, a concept I'm rather fond of. I think I'm just going to use the singular indefinite article for uncountables. Thus "the taste of wine" would become |is sappur nys uenun| [i 'sapp@r nyz 'y@n@]. The danger of misunderstanding is very low, methinks. If we were talking about a specific wine, we could use the definite article and treat the wine as countable (since specific brands or generations of wine are countable): |is sappur ys uenun| "the taste of the wine". > >Does anyone have alternate ideas for the creation of a > >partitive article like du/des in French? I can't think of a > >fitting Latin root... > > In Narbonósc, there is a partitive article of the form "ne/na" (which > exists only in the singular). It is derived from "em+e" and "em+a" (like > "du" is "de+le"). Pretty cool. -- Christian Thalmann