A mystery for us as we were working on the Copala Triqui text Words of counsel for the Triqui people was a very frequent vaa ne at the end of many lines.
Vaa means 'exist, be, seem' and ne means 'and'. Tonight I found a passage in B. Hollenbach's sketch of the language where she writes 'The verbs vaa32 'to exist' and uun1 'to become' often take a sentence of any type as a subject complement with no complementizer. These verbs serve to affirm the truth of the complement sentence, and they can follow the complement as well as precede it' (p. 216).
So this seems to be the right analysis for examples like the following:
This confirms my belief that the answer to (almost) everything is somewhere in one of Barbara H's publications -- the trick is finding it!
Vaa means 'exist, be, seem' and ne means 'and'. Tonight I found a passage in B. Hollenbach's sketch of the language where she writes 'The verbs vaa32 'to exist' and uun1 'to become' often take a sentence of any type as a subject complement with no complementizer. These verbs serve to affirm the truth of the complement sentence, and they can follow the complement as well as precede it' (p. 216).
So this seems to be the right analysis for examples like the following:
This confirms my belief that the answer to (almost) everything is somewhere in one of Barbara H's publications -- the trick is finding it!
No comments:
Post a Comment