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Re: [saweli] Saweli Dictionary



The short answer is that the grammar is almost the same as for Latejami. What follows is the long answer. 
I added a lot more classifiers, making distinctions that Rick doesn't. I reorder the morphemes in a word so that the classifier always comes first. I re-added the anti-anti-passive and -middle that Rick dropped sometime between original Katanda and final Latejami. I like the completeness it provides. 
One innovation is an infix to denote the opposite of a classifier, e.g., va- (mental state), va'a (opposite of mental state, with infix "-'a") for Rick's kop- and dum-. 
I also changed his absolute argument-changing system to a relative one. 
And I changed all the modifiers to an ordered set so that opposites are close together alphabetically. 
The part-of-speech morphemes are all consonants, with the unvoiced variant for closed forms, and the voiced equivalent for the corresponding open forms, except for verbs, which have a new eight-consonant system indicating both whether the verb is static, dynamic, or imperative (not related to dynamicity, but paralleling Rick's use of imperative suffix, IIRC), and number of objects (0, 1, or 2). Both the verb endings and the relative argument modifiers are to make it easier to remember the base forms argument structure and make it easier to create new forms. 

stevo

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 2:43 AM, geoff.hacker@hidden.email [saweli] <saweli@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
 

So it's a relexification of Latejami, and it has a slightly larger vocabulary. Are there significant differences in the grammar?