Sally writes:

>Here are some verbs that are always non-volitional:
>
>be, exist, be ignorant of, be absent, be present, be happy, sad, blue,
>fiery, stupid and a bunch of other stative verbs in T; get, sleep, fall
>asleep, wake up, sicken, vomit, bleed, die, dream, have (inalienable),
>beware, trip, fall down, etc.

Interesting. Géarthnuns doesn't have these kinds of grammatically
hardwired volitional distinctions of course, but the word for
"sleepy" is "héfürafalöb", "wanting to sleep". There is a set of
adjectives like this: glozhürafalöb - hungry (wanting to eat),
frozhürafalöb - thirsty (wanting to drink), batröthürafalöb - dirty
(wanting to be washed), and perhaps others. One could argue, I
suppose, that this usage of "üraf", "want", is akin to English or
Chinese, where want bleeds into need. Still, I think to the
Géarthçins mindset, sleep would run alongside your defecate and
urinate disitnctions. I mean, there's sleep (It's your late afternoon
art history class, the professor's turned off the lights to show
slides, it's eighty degrees in the classroom, and you pulled an
all-nighter the night before -- you don't stand a prayer.) and
there's sleep (It's a lazy Saturday, you're racked out on the couch
reading a book and you're so comfortable that you lay your open book
on your chest and decide to head off to the Land of Nod for a few
hours.).

>The ambivolitional verbs cover the senses:
>
>hear/listen to; see/watch or look at; smell/sniff; feel/touch or caress;
>taste/lick

Géarthnuns marks these pairs with a prefix, "dim-", which I've never
bothered to translate ("keenly, attentively doing X"?). It's only
used with these basic sensory verbs:

tel/dimtel - see/look at
shal/dimshal - hear/listen to
don't remember the others sans dictionary but:
feel/touch
smell/smell
taste/taste

For the Géarthçins, the "smell/dimsmell" and "taste/dimtaste" pairs
translate into English as "smell" and "taste" respectively, since
English doesn't seem make this distinction:

"Do you smell smoke?" (smell)
"Smell this milk. Has it gone bad?" (dimsmell)
"You can't taste things very well with a bad cold." (taste)
"Taste this. Does it need more dill?" (dimtaste) (and *every*thing
needs more dill -- Cheerios need more dill -- that, and cream sherry).

"Sniff" and "lick" would be translated differently as they're
considered different phenomena.

Kou