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Re: Simple sentences and how difficult they can be.

From:Sylvia Sotomayor <terjemar@...>
Date:Tuesday, December 5, 2006, 17:16
On 12/5/06, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
> This is hard to say anything about without glosses, so I read up. > > Sylvia wrote: > << > tamma jahārme > 'She swam'. > >> > > So what's missing here is that this is the past tense, third person > singular source/null goal conjugation of SE, so it's something like, > "from her, a swim". The latter would be something like... > > anX > N > "Xing (the activity)" > > ~ > > jaX > N > "a(n) X (an instance of the activity)" > > Right? > > If so, only two questions remain: > > (1) Is the an~ja thing productive with other verbish/actiony > type nouns? So you could have anY "running" and jaY "a run"; > anZ "skiing", jaZ "a ski (as in, "Let's all go out for a nice ski!")? I > ask because I know these guys are supposed to do other things > (marking collectives and inanimate non-collectives).
Yes, more or less. Given that I am revising the dictionary and I am not sure that anX would be an activity anymore. On the other hand, nothing else could be, so anX it is.
> (2) So if this is what it means with a null goal, what would it > mean with a goal? For example... > > temme jaharme ke malacin mo macuma > > (macron on the second a of "jaharme"; second a and i of "malacin"; > u of "macuma"; tilde over the n in "malacin") > > So, "From the girl to the man, a swim" = ? If saying "The girl > swam to the man" would require a different particle (NI), would > this have to mean something like, "The girl gave the man a > swim"?
More like the girl swam for the man. Goal often denotes a beneficiary.
> (3) A word for "girl", but no word for "boy"? Alas, my poor > gender! ;) Maybe makamin? (macron on the "a")
mamoin, macrons on o and i, tilde on the n. Like I said, the dictionary is being revised.
> -David > ******************************************************************* > "A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a." > "No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn." > > -Jim Morrison > > http://dedalvs.free.fr/ >
-- Sylvia Sotomayor terjemar@gmail.com www.terjemar.net