From: Christian Thalmann (cinga@gmx.net)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2003 - 07:59:38 EST
--- In romanceconlang@yahoogroups.com, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@f...> wrote:
> >But what about |nuolu| "no, none"? |U nuolu| "a none" and |is
> >nuolu| "the none" don't make sense.
>
> Since when do languages have to make sense? :)))
Right. Stupid me. ;-)
> >This still leaves other problems with uncountable quantities.
> >How do you say "of water", as in "a glass of water"? Neither
> >|ys auga| [yz awg] "of the water" nor |nys auga| [nyz awg]
> >"of a water" seem to work. Of course, one could define an
> >idiomatic use of either article in this situation, but I
> >wonder whether it wouldn't lead to ambiguities.
>
> Or you could just not use any article, like in Dutch "een glas
water". It
> never leads to any ambiguity, and it makes sense for Jovian to be
> influenced by Germanic languages.
That works with a quantifying head noun such as "glass", but
for things like "the taste of wine"? I really wouldn't like
to use |de| here, seeing how Jovian prefers to use inflected
articles for genitives, a concept I'm rather fond of.
I think I'm just going to use the singular indefinite article
for uncountables. Thus "the taste of wine" would become |is
sappur nys uenun| [i 'sapp@r nyz 'y@n@]. The danger of
misunderstanding is very low, methinks. If we were talking
about a specific wine, we could use the definite article and
treat the wine as countable (since specific brands or
generations of wine are countable): |is sappur ys uenun|
"the taste of the wine".
> >Does anyone have alternate ideas for the creation of a
> >partitive article like du/des in French? I can't think of a
> >fitting Latin root...
>
> In Narbonósc, there is a partitive article of the form "ne/na" (which
> exists only in the singular). It is derived from "em+e" and "em+a"
(like
> "du" is "de+le").
Pretty cool.
-- Christian Thalmann
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