Detail #225: Along the Lines of Gnomic Aspect

I got my first contribution ever, and I am quite happy about that! Since I am a thorough kind of guy, I discussed the idea a bit with the contributor, and together we came up with a bunch of ideas.

The starting point, really, was articles, or rather degrees of definiteness. Observe how for general statements, languages may differ in their use of articles and even numbers:

the car is a vehicle | a car is a vehicle | cars are vehicles

Analogous sentences to the ones given above are attested in different languages for analogous statements. Some languages even permit more than one of them.

 

However, what other things could we do with this? Well, we could imagine treating definitions (and other universal statements) as dealing with mass nouns instead of with count nouns, regardless if the noun normally is a mass noun or not:

car is (a) vehicle

Or we could break the verbal congruence:

(a|the) car is* (a) vehicle
* without overt third person marking, so 'be' would be better in English here.

cars is vehicle(s)

One could also imagine using some type of partitive case for the complement (or the subject) with regards to statements of this type. Or, finally, let's come up with a new article altogether!

nu car is (a|nu) vehicle

Some languages apparently have a gnomic aspect for statements such as these. I have no idea whether this also can mark truths about an object instead of truths about a subject, such as:

engineering turns nu idea into reality
engineering turn.gnomic idea into reality

This is a truth about engineering as well, but we may want to focus on the idea, and tell us something about how ideas relate to engineering and reality. With just a gnomic aspect, we can't really tell what we're focusing on in this (well, word order readjustments and whatnot could fix that, of course.)

So maybe combine a gnomic article with a gnomic aspect to make it possible for general truths to be about non-subjects – but then again, the gnomic article per se seems sufficient. But then again², redundancy is useful in languages.

Thanks for the contribution, Daniel!