"To have" in Wena/Hibuese/Ngehu

[Imralu]

Aha, very interesting! You're right that the comparative sentence was confusing me.

What distinguishes ya and ye? Are there other particles that describe noun relationships?

Ya is genitive, basically "of".
Ye is attributive, basically "with".

mba ya da
house GEN big^E
big one's house / house of a big person

mba ye da
house ATTR big^E
big house / house which is big

Na i vwe ya hye.
1S COP see^A GEN bird
I see a bird.

Na i vwe ye hye.
1S COP see^A ATTR bird
I see and I'm a bird. / I'm a seer who is a bird. (!?)

Na i hye ye vwe.
1S COP bird ATTR see^A
I'm a bird who sees. / I'm a seeing bird. (!?)

I don't think there are others that are just for setting relationships within noun phrases. Gwe "and (at the same time)", do "and then" etc. can be, but they can also work between clauses.

[bradrn]

Do you think should^A wait^A would be a less confusing gloss?

Possibly, but then I’d just wonder what ^A means. (I’m still not entirely clear on that, actually.)

Yeah, I'll explain that in anything I write. I guess I'll change my signature slightly to reflect it. It's my way of indicating the agent nount of the glossed word, so I can gloss mwe as "can^A" rather than "entity.that.can" or making awkward things like "canner" and "shoulder" for "entity.that.can" or "entity.that.should". I think .AG is the normal way to gloss this, except I think that glosing he as should.AG may imply that he is an agent noun derived from some other word in Wena, when it is in fact an underived root, and what I want to do is merely indicate that the translation in the gloss should be understood as whatever agent noun we can imagine for the word "should". A superscript ^A needs an explanation anyway as it's not part of the Leipzig rules, but I like that it's much more compact and makes for much more readable glosses, I think.

I forgot that you had all those abbreviations in your signature! And now that you remind me of that, I do think now that ^A is a really good compromise between explicity (is that a word?) and length — my only concern was that it’s hard to understand.

I think that in general I prefer to be as explicit as possible with my glosses, even at the expense of compactness.

Interesting that you say that but then you still glossed both ga and nyoga as "future". Ga is basically "entity which will be", whereas nyoga is just the word for the future. I could also gloss ga as "will^A".
[/quote]

That’s because I wasn’t quite sure what the difference between those two words was. But now that you explain it, I would gloss ga future.entity and nyoga future.

True, all the .things do get repetitive, but they also give a much better idea of what the language is really like.

Yeah, but that's why I'd rather use ^E. It requires an explanation of course, but once it's there, the glosses are, I think, easier to read.

So that’s what ^E means! But what exactly is the difference between an agent and an entity?

[Imralu]

So that’s what ^E means! But what exactly is the difference between an agent and an entity?

Not much. An agent is an entity that does. It's when you can often use "-er" in English, or "one that ____s". I use ^A when the gloss word is a verb and ^E when it's an adjective etc, when you would replace it with just "one" or "person or thing" in English. I could of course express the same word as "runner" (using English's agent noun), "run^A" (using English's verb and indicating it as an agent) or "running^E" (using English's adjectival verb form (participle) and the indicating that it's an entity). The end result is the same, but I'd prefer run^A just for compactness. This way, you can also easily tell the difference between like^E (≈ similar^E) and like^A (≈ love^A).

[bradrn]

So that’s what ^E means! But what exactly is the difference between an agent and an entity?

Not much. An agent is an entity that does. It's when you can often use "-er" in English, or "one that ____s". I use ^A when the gloss word is a verb and ^E when it's an adjective etc, when you would replace it with just "one" or "person or thing" in English. I could of course express the same word as "runner" (using English's agent noun), "run^A" (using English's verb and indicating it as an agent) or "running^E" (using English's adjectival verb form (participle) and the indicating that it's an entity). The end result is the same, but I'd prefer run^A just for compactness. This way, you can also easily tell the difference between like^E (≈ similar^E) and like^A (≈ love^A).

Thanks for explaining!