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(Cross post from Conlang)
Intrusive articles -- while most certainly not an official
linguistic term, it's what I call Jovian's most recent
grammatical feature.
It all started out with the fact that Modern Jovian, having
lost case inflection in nouns and adjectives, relies on
articles to convey case information. Some pronouns, like
"none" or "any", seemed to sound strange after both definite
and indefinite articles, so I decided to place an article
*between* the pronoun and the head noun, reducing the
pronoun into a "radical" form ending on -e (thereby avoiding
all sandhi):
|Nuolu| [nu@l] "no, none"
|Nuole u mare| [nu@l @ ma:r] "none a man" = "no man"
|Aege| [ajg] "any, whatever"
|Aege u mare| [ajg @ ma:r] "any a man" = "any man"
|Oene| [Ajn] "each, every"
|Oene ni obe| [Ajn ni o:b] "each a(OBL) means" = "by every
means"
|Tozu| [to:z] "all, whole"
|Toze en terra| [to:z en dEr] "whole the(ACC) world" =
"the whole world"
The possessive pronouns |miu, tuu, suu, notter, votter| had
long bothered me with their complicated mute endings, so I
applied the same scheme to them:
|mi eos wigi| [mi @s 'vi:gi] "my them(ACC) friends" =
"my friends"
|nor ys ammur| [nAr yz 'amm@r] "our the(GEN) love" = "of our
love"
Finally, since I liked this construction so much, I dedided
to extend it to all adjectives fronted for emphasis:
|Is eogu toldra graeve un onner.|
[iz e@g 'tAld@r grajv @n 'Ann@r]
"The horse bears heavy a load."
|Nau jo nuver mi an fija tan tsuode ni puore.|
[no jA 'nu:v@r mi @m pi: tan dzu@d ni bu@r]
"I am not going to wed one of my daughters to such daft a
boy."
Comments?
-- Christian Thalmann