From cowan@xxxxx.xxxx.xxxx Thu Mar 4 14:15:44 1999 X-Digest-Num: 81 Message-ID: <44114.81.493.959273824@eGroups.com> Date: Thu, 04 Mar 1999 17:15:44 -0500 From: John Cowan >I suppose that {mi ba'oku klama le zarci} is the same as > >{mi ba'o klama le zarci} and not {mi ba'o zo'e klama le zarci}, right? > > I hesitate to say, because John and I have answered the question before, > and it might even be in the Book. My interpretation barring John saying > otherwise, however, would be that the ku form presumes the ellipsized > sumti. No, actually the Codex Woldemar does say otherwise: tense+KU is equivalent to tense+selbri, no matter whether it is before the selbri or not: they are explicitly declared so at the beginning of Section 10.12. > The paradigm that had us add puku for example was originally that > of ellipsized sumti, and not as a semantics-free transformational grammar > maneuver. It just was convenient and logical to make puku adjacent to the > selbri be equivalent to pu in the selbri. But I think that > transformability need not be so for ba'o. Perhaps it should not have been so, but it is so as of today. > I know that in support of the compounding interpretation, there were some > things that could not be said with a single tenseconstruct because > ungrammatical, which John said would be expressed using two consecutive > tenses. For example, > > mi baki ne'iki klama This whole example is rather pointless, I think, unless the ki's are subscripted, because the second ki will override the first, so this is the same as bane'iki. There are other examples that make somewhat more sense, though. > It was a late modification that John made that allowed both orders to be > possible without a ku. Basically requiring fe'e to flag *every* TAhE, ROI, or ZAhO that was about space eliminated the ambiguity. (Previously a fe'e was needed to *separate* time and space interval qualifiers, which meant they had to be in a fixed order.) > Remember that it is not necessarily the case that logical connectives > expand into separate bridi. I am not sure what has been said about tense > logical connection. Tense logical connection is expandable: only tanru logical connection is not. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org You tollerday donsk? N. You tolkatiff scowegian? Nn. You spigotty anglease? Nnn. You phonio saxo? Nnnn. Clear all so! 'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)