Re: Two pairs of technical terms

Joachim Pense wrote:
John Atkinson wrote:

"Joachim Pense" <snob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
Am 20 Nov 2006 03:19:16 -0800 schrieb Stefano MAC:GREGOR:

Joachim Pense wrote:

What's the defining condition of something to conjugate? Being a
verb? or
"something like tense, mood, etc"?
"Having the same kind of inflections that verbs have."

but what "something" exactly?
It depends on the language. In most of the languages I've studied,
verbs do not inflect for gender, but they do that in Hebrew, and thus
I
expect that they do in Arabic.

Pronouns have person and cases. Do they
decline or conjugate, or both?
They decline, just as nouns do. They do not inflect for person,
which
is part of conjugating.

What about the Japanese adverbial/pronomial nouns, which inflect for
person

1.st 2nd 3rd
kore 'this' sore 'that' (near listener) are 'that' (remote)
koko 'here' soko 'there (") asuko 'there' (")
koo 'so' soo 'so' aa 'so'
and many more having the ko- so- a- pattern.
Aren't ko-, so-, a- the _roots_ here, not the inflections?

Or are you actually saying that -re, -ko, -: are the roots of these
words, and that, unlike the usual situation in Japanese, they decline by
means of _pre_fixes?

Well, I don't know what the history is here. But if you look at it
synchronically, it looks very much like 'yes'.

Do you think the phenomenon itself doesn't fit into the usual situation in
Japanese, or just my interpretation of it?

Without daring to answer the question, it seems that we can do some substitution.

First morphemes and equivalents:

<ko> -> <kono>
<so> -> <sono>
<a>/<asu> -> <ano>
<do> -> <dono>

Second morphemes and equivalents:

<ko> -> <tokoro>
<re> -> <mono>
<u>/<a> -> <you ni>

Substitutions:

<koko> -> <kono tokoro> = "here; this place"
<soko> -> <sono tokoro> = "there; that place"
<asuko> -> <ano tokoro> = "yonder; yon place"
<doko> -> <dono tokoro> = "where; which place"

<kore> -> <kono mono> = "this; this thing"
<sore> -> <sono mono> = "that; that thing"
<are> -> <ano mono> = "yon; yon thing"
<dore> -> <dono mono> = "which; which thing"

<kou> -> <kono you ni> = "this way; in this way"
<sou> -> <sono you ni> = "that way; in that way"
<aa> -> <ano you ni> = "yon way; in yon way"
<dou> -> <dono you ni> = "how; in which way"

The order of elements remains the same throughout.

I'm not sure how valid the term "root" is for morphemes in either position.

Hokkien has a pair of contrasting sets that remind me of the Japanese, though they're more limited.

Words referring to something close to the speaker start with <ch->:

<chit + counter> = "this ..."
<che> = "this"
<chiah> = "in this way"
<chia> = "here"

The distant equivalents start with <h->:

<hit + counter> = "that ..."
<he> = "that"
<hiah> = "in that way"
<hia> = "there"

Perhaps these are two-morpheme compounds that have been contracted? Modern Hokkien has a fair number of contractions compared with Mandarin.

I've always wanted to see consistent patterns like those in English:

hither thither yonder whither
here there *yere where
hence thence *yence whence
*hat that *yat what
*hen then *yen when

Stretching things even farther:

*hou thou you who
*he thee ye *whe

("Thou" and "thee" being "closer"; "you" and "ye" being more "distant".)

--
Mike Wright
http://www.raccoonbend.com
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Progamming language for hackers?
    ... >But I think I understand this programming language! ... I like to "aaa the (datatype) bbb and I'd like to have ... How to do (the main verb) - part ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: OT: Verbal Pet Peeves
    ... The verb loan is one of the words English settlers brought to ... We live in a culture that is dominated by an overly-synthetic language ... and mistakenly believe that the vernacular may ... very strict on sentence fragments and run-on sentences. ...
    (alt.smokers.pipes)
  • Re: Attribution, at last
    ... desperate need for vocabulary because it doesn't inflect enough. ... I'd rather have my language made out of Legos and Lincoln Logs than ... But, of course, that's because we grew up with English as our ... you might as well just have burped as far as communication goes. ...
    (rec.arts.sf.written)
  • Re: Re: both sponsoring now, Geoff and Said visited the domestic races beneath frequent offence
    ... grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the ... Any word in the language (in principle this applied even to ... very abstract words such as if or when) could be used either as verb, ... noun, adjective, or adverb. ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • German subject (was: Do Children Learn Languages at ...)
    ... >> agreeing with the syntactical subject, remains in the singular. ... All the following is meant to hold for the German language; ... The inflected verb of the main clause goes into the second place, ... we learn grammar (at least I ...
    (sci.lang)