Koa verbs and thematic roles

Worth mentioning before I forget to mention it again: in designing Koa I do not want to make Indo-European-style decisions about verb valence and thematic roles. The subject position, therefore, will always be used for agent and experiencer, and the object position for patient and recipient.

This removes all the guesswork that usually happens when learning a language around things like "I think," "I dreamt," "I like," "it seemed," etc. -- all of these have an experiencer subject, including "seem" which would then need to be glossed as something like "perceive."

Naturally, we don't know yet how we're going to do predicate nominatives in sentences like "the house looks big," which is apparently yet another thing to think about. Ka talo i pa nae FOO iso, or something.

And no more of this "is 'boil' transitive or intransitive?" business for us like in Esperanto -- the agent is subject and patient is object, always, so if we're trying to translate "the water boiled," and there's only a patient, we know we'll need a passive structure. Same with "the door opened," etc.

I'm sure that trying to be this firm is going to get me into trouble sooner or later, but it is at least a good principle to go by, I think.

Aha, here's problem #1: if mua means "die," wouldn't the subject be the patient, the participant undergoing change of state? But the only possible agent of that verb would make it mean "kill," and "be killed" has, obviously, extremely different semantics from "die." Okay, Einstein, figure that one out.