(20-03-2019, 02:29 PM)Anton wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Let's suppose that gallows are some modifiers. That they are potential modifiers follows from the fact that gallows coverage is there. Although coverage of p and f can be theoretically written off to embellishment (although certain occurrences speak against that), coverage of t is just plainly there and cannot be written away. But let's go further and suppose that all gallows are some modifiers. If all Gvords are nouns (which, by the way, does not yet preclude other types of vords from being nouns), then there are two possibilities. Either gallows make nouns from nouns, or they make nouns from some other parts of speech.
In my opinion, the evidence discussed by Stolfi, Emma (and certainly others) suggests that Grove words are different from other gVords. In particular, the gallows in (most) Grove words appear to be attached as a prefix to an ordinary word. In this case, the gallows could be modifiers and some candidate meanings could be:
- an analogous to uppercase-markers
- something like the Latin You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which in some texts appears at the beginning of most chapters
- pilcrows (not exactly modifiers, but paragraph markers)
- ....
I think that pilcrows are unlikely, since the gallows appear to be homogeneous with the text: the function of pilcrows (often written in red ink) was to highlight paragraph starts, and in the VMS paragraphs are clearly separated by the indentation of the last line. The gallows do not seem to me to really stand out.
In other gVords (i.e. most gVords), the gallows might very well not be modifiers, but be part of the root of the word (which can take the optional o- / qo- modifiers).
An interesting task could be the definition of a procedure separating Grove words from other gVords: I mean something solely based on word morphology, ignoring the position of a word in a paragraph. I wonder how much accurate such a procedure would be...