@djr33,
first of all, did you not see that i said "
some of the others"?
personally i find it a little unbecoming when a person makes defending themselves the top priority of a response, but whatever. even if i
had been talking about you specifically, you should be open to the possibility that i have a point. and maybe i'm totally wrong, but the response to that then should be an actual argument as to
why i'm wrong (not simply pointing out that you've dealt with lots of languages and grammars).
...we're not taking the English translations as examples of English grammar.
i never said you were.
If the goal of the conlang is to simulate a natural language, something that would actually be used for communication between humans, then our comments apply.
no, you're wrong. forget about conlangs altogether. even when dealing
only with natural languages, many of the comments on this thread do not apply at all.
for example, if you were dealing with the english translation of a basque sentence, then it would be incorrect to conclude that because a certain noun in the english translation is in the nominative case, that it must be nominative in the basque sample as well. similarly, an english sentence like "the cat saw the mouse" has "the cat" in the nominative, but in the chechen equivalent of this sentence "cat" would actually be in the dative. (and this is not simply an arbitrary label. the chechen dative is very similar to the english dative in that it would be the case used for "him" in a sentence like "i gave it to him".) --- to take this to an even further extreme though, parts of speech themselves are not stably consistent from one language to the next. in lakota, the part of a sentence corresponding to "tall" would not be an adjective, but rather a verb. in navajo, a word like "under" is not a preposition, but rather a noun. in cherokee, a word like "sister" is not a noun, but something more similar to a verb or preposition. and in salish, a word like "building" can just as easily be used as a verb as it can a noun. --- lastly, the way in which translations can differ at the sentence level can be quite drastic (and i would expect that everyone on these boards is already well aware of that). concepts encoded by english phrases like "in spite of" or "even though" can sometimes manifest themselves in radically different forms, involving completely different constructions/processes and latching on to totally different parts of a given sentence (and in many cases, the very notion of translation stops making much sense at this level).
very simply then, anything you can say about an english sentence regarding its*grammar* is irrelevant regarding the grammar of the sentence's translation into another language. --- do you agree with this?? --- and so, if you can say about a certain english sentence that the word for "john" is the subject, and that the word for "mary" is in the vocative, and that the word for "building" is being used as a noun, then that still tells you nothing about the behavior of the words in a translation of the same sentence into a different language. this is because terms like "subject", "vocative", and "noun" are all strictly grammatical and in no way semantic (regardless of the fact that they are usually used to represent processes which seem largely semantically similar from one language to the next). (*admittedly, the term "subject" could maybe be a slight exception here since it entails topicness. for the most part though, subjects have no semantic information. it's really quite in accurate to say that subjects are always agents.)
If your goal is to create an unnatural sounding conlang, then you can do whatever you want, but (not in any way to be excluding) the comments probably don't belong on a linguistics forum where we're interested in linguistic analysis (of natural languages).
no one here has expressed any such goal. person-marking on nouns might very well be something that exists in natural languages (you might have missed the part where i said i remember coming across one), but even if it doesn't (or hasn't ever), that doesn't mean it couldn't potentially, or that there wouldn't be a usefulness to it.
just consider the example i gave. people already say stuff like "as your friend, i'm begging you not to do this". so why is it so unreasonable to think that a language might have use for a feature that enable the words "i" and "friend" here to somehow be combined into a single word (either by marking the noun "friend" as 1st person to show that it's not being used in the typical 3rd person way, or by declining the word for "i" to the "friendly form", or whatever)?
and vir docilis provided a really good natural-language example too, but you seem to have totally missed his point. (yes, in this case i am directly accusing you personally of having misunderstood something. but you should consider the possibility that maybe you did.) he gave the japanese example:
"Shizuka-san ha dou omoimasu ka?"
provided i understood correctly, this sentence has two meanings:
1. "What does Shizuka think?"
(in which, shizuka is being talked about.)
2. "what do you think, shizuka?"
(in which shizuka is the one being addressed.)
your response to this was "I don't think that's a vocative in the narrow sense. It's sort of like English "Mr."", but that doesn't have anything to do with vir docilis' post, and i can only assume that you must not have read his post very carefully. (you should reread it.) --- he wasn't talking about the "san" suffix, nor was he claiming that this sentence even uses the vocative in anyway. (in fact, he was expressly stating that it
doesn't use the vocative. specifically he said "Japanese does not always use vocative when referring to a listener", and he then went on to give an example of this.)
in any case,,, just consider how useful person-marking on nouns would be for an example like this. it would totally resolve the issue of ambiguity. you might not see ambiguity as a problem here (maybe because it should always be clear to the person being addressed as to whether they're mr shizuka or not, or maybe because japanese has managed to survive despite whatever ambiguity arises), but i think that in general we should avoid logic like "well, that would never be a problem" or "why would a language ever need that?" if we wish to understand how languages (natural or otherwise) operate.
i'm sure you're familiar with all sorts of examples of natural languages making complex nuanced distinctions that other languages manage to do without. perhaps such quirks arise simply because that's just what makes good semantic sense (for example, like how in english a phrase like "five books" is convey plurality on the noun in combination with the fiveness implied by "five", which is redundant, but still makes sense on an agreement level). or maybe such quirks are only due to languages tending to become needlessly complex over time as a result of humans generally having innate tendencies for creating very idiosyncratic rituals for the purposes of weeding out those who do not possess a group mentality (or maybe it stems from innate xenophobia and serves as a means for weeding out foreigners). or maybe such quirks really do improve a language, thereby ever-so-slightly increasing the odds of survival for anyone who happens to speak it, but are easily lost if the language is regularly being learned as second language by foreigners. --- whatever the case, i can certainly see why person-marking on nouns would not be widespread (since nouns are typically just 3rd person anyway), but at the same time i can certainly see how having such a feature could be advantageous.
