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Re: [saweli] verb endings

In a message dated 6/6/2007 8:48:15 AM Central Daylight Time, sts@hidden.email writes:


Questions: "b" means that there are two arguments. I wonder what happens
if you use open nouns: needs the suffix to indicate the quantity of
arguments as well?




The endings of verbs are derived differently from the closed/open endings of the other parts of speech.  

The closed endings are all unvoiced, while the open endings are the voiced counterparts.  Thus a closed noun ends in 's', while an open noun ends in 'z'.  The only exception to this is that voiced 'd' is used for both open case tags and closed adverbs, which follows the Latejami, where both have the same part-of-speech ending.  If desirable, the closed adverb could be marked by unvoiced 't'.  

All basic verbs (ones with no argument restructuring) are inherently open, since they take at least a subject.  
Since there were exactly five combinations of number of arguments vs. dynamicity, I chose the verb endings from the largest subgroup of related consonants that were available, namely, the five labials:  p, b, f, v, m.  
If  it turns out that I need a classifier that requires an argument structure of A/P/F-s, I'll be out of luck, because there's no unvoiced counterpart to 'm', and then I'll have to reconsider the verb endings, or just use 'm' for both the static and dynamic verbs.  This wouldn't be much of a problem, since there is currently exactly one classifier that uses 'm' anyway, so adding another classifier with 'm' won't cause a lot of trouble.  And if the new classifier were going to be used fairly often, it would be a part of the language already.

stevo