Conversation unit 03- Where do you work?

Texts

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08

• 03.1
  
  to work

  []
  This is my mother

  
  She is in France

  {}
  She doesn't work, she retired

  []
  This is my brother

  
  He is in France, too

  []
  He is a teacher, too

  
  He works in Paris

• 03.2
  []
  Who is she?

  [] ==   liliθ   []
  She is Lilith Moon; she is a student

  
  Does she have sisters?

  {} {}
  Yes she has. She has an elder sister; she doesn't have younger sisters or brothers

  [] {}
  Where does her sister work?

  []
  She works in London, she is a dancer

• 03.3
  
  Who is this?

    liliθ  
  This is Lilith's mother

  []
  Where does she work?

  []
  She works in Beijing

• NOTES
  
  Indirect complements are almost always placed before the verb, not after. In this unit examples of this are given by the location complements, e.g. "work in Paris" that has inverted order in MG.

  
  Unlike English which moves such interrogative words as "what", "when", "who" etc to the beginning of the sentence to form a question, MediaGlyphs - like Chinese - leaves the word order unchanged when forming questions. Hence "Who is this?" is written like "This is who?", since the answer has a structure "This is X."

    liliθ  
  The possessive marker, close to the English genitive "'s", works in that order: "X's Y", and not "Y of X". In MG the structure "Lilith's mother" is the correct one, instead of writing "the mother of Lilith".

• DIFFERENCES WITH CHINESE
  
  MediaGlyphs almost never drops the verb or the subject. Also prepositions are only prepositions, they don't work as verb as well. Hence the Chinese "ta1 zai4 fa3 guo2", where zai4 works as preposition and verb ("to stay, to be at") becomes in Mediaglyphs "she AT france STAY", with explicit verb and preposition.

  
  The question marker is used even with question words
   
   
  

  First appearance: Sun Aug 11 15:44:50 CEST 2002 - | - Last modified: Fri Dec 11 17:10:45 CET 2009