Xing wrote:Some random thoughts, as I was reading through the grammar.
Sentence structure
Are there any rules concerning the order of adjectives, or of adverbial complements?
Nouns
Where do you draw the line between animate and inanimate nouns? (Or between "animals" and "vegetables"?)
What about amoebae, bacteria, viruses, body parts, cell nuclei, forces of nature? Does a word change noun class if it's used in an extended or non-literal sense. (As in "roots" of a tree vs "roots" in the more abstract sense of "source" or "origin"?)
What's the point of having different noun classes anyway?
As for the plural, how do you handle fractions? (Half a litre, three quarter of a litre, one and a half litre, two and half litre...)
Why not make the plural marker optional, like the gender/sex marker? (Might be a good thing if the number of the referent(s) is unknown...)
Adjectives
How do you form adjectives with different meanings from a single root, when that's possible? Say, if a single root "X" could form adjectives with meanings like "X-ful", "X-ish", "in the manner of X", "pertaining to X", "intended for X", "made of X", "able to do/be-X", etc.?
Personal pronouns
When are the gender/sex indicators used? Are they used only when they're needed to disambiguate an utterance? Or could I choose to habitually use a gendered pronouns when referring to myself (and perhaps also when talking about others), even if the gender/sex is known?
How are reflexive pronouns used? Which constituents can they refer back to? Must they refer back to a subject, or can they refer back also to objects or oblique constituents? Must they refer back to constituents in the same clause or sentences?
Can reflexive pronouns be used in an emphatic sense? (As in English "I wrote the letter myself.")
Prepositions
Having so many prepositions – as people have already pointed out – screams eurocentrism. Apart from having prepositions with quite specialised meanings, you go even further when you insist on having a separate set of prepositions for temporal expression? Why, when it's perfectly fine to treat time as analogous to space? Sure, a temporal locations are not literally the same thing as a spatial location (or temporal beginnings and endpoints as a spatial ones, etc.), but the point is that words are used in an analogous sense. That words can be used in analogous senses is an extremely powerful tool in languages. If you insist that you can't re-use the same prepositions in expressions like "in the afternoon" and "in the living room", you should also have different words for "good" in expressions like "a good deed", "a good knife", "a good purpose" – because "good" quite literally means different things in those.
In any case, if you don't allow words to be used in analogous or extended senses, you must very likely have way more than 500 or so roots.
Another thing: Why do you have a separate preposition to indicate recipients, but not givers or sources?
And as for the instrumental preposition(s), having "s" and "z" indicating opposite meanings might not be optimal.
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I'm about half-way through the grammar now. I might continue when I've got time. But I hope one main point is clear: 20 pages does not make a "complete grammar" of any workable language.
Sentence structure - adjectives to appear behind the noun. Adverbial complements tend to appear between the Subject and the Verb, although this is not 100% strict.
Nouns - everything alive is animate. So for instance a "cell" is believe to be animate. Everything you can touch is "concrete". There can be some interpretion here sometimes. For instance, is "rain" something you can touch, or is it a process? can you touch the rain or you touch the water? Here Atlas allows some freedom. It becomes a bit phylosophical so both would be accepted. For the rest it is very simple. A force of nature would of course be abstract, and roots in an abstract way would be abstract too.
They are very useful to indentify words or to create words. If you take for instance the root "ger" (heal) you have:
geru (drug, medicine)
gere (medicine, set of treatments)
gera (healer)
even you could do "gero", a medicinal plant.
Adjectives
Initially no other words to be added. However, you can always form a compound word to specify the meaning. If you want to to a -ish adjective for instance, you can add the preposition "iex" (similar):
iexbesi - bigish.
Personal pronouns - gender can be used by choice. If you want to specify it, or if you want to use it.
Prepositions - There are a few prepositions, but way far from the ones used in natural languages. See English prepositions for instance and you will find the number is around 80 prepositions easily. I admit seeing them all together is a bit of a shock, would not many languages use less prepositions (without using declensions/postpositions/other formulae apart from them). The reason for every preposition having its own use is:
- easy to decipher the message without ambiguity.
- very handy to form new words with a specific meaning.
as prepositions take a key part in word formation in Atlas.
Of course some could have doble meanings, but the benefits you get from having this system far outweights the difficulties in learning only a few more prepositions. I have had this in the past when teaching English and prepositions with different meanings tend to be difficult for students.
Thanks for your comments! Looking forward to your next analysis