Re: Subordinate clauses

I tried in spoken French:

Le type que j'ai vu, son chien était vert.
or:
J'ai vu un type, son chien était vert.
or even:
Le type que j'ai vu, là, vert qu'il était, son chien.


(Can't understand why that dog has to be green. IMO,
it makes the sentence unnatural).

--- Jonathan Knibb <j_knibb@...> wrote:
> Sally wrote:
> >In Teonaht you'd
> >probably say: "the man that I saw his dog was
> green."  Not too much
> >nesting:
> >Li zef kelry hai, vyrm lo kohs.  "the man see-past
> I (rel.)him, green his
> >dog."  This strikes me as being a very common
> natlang solution.
>
> I agree, absolutely.  There are (at least) two ways
> to approach a
> translation
> exercise -- you can approximate the grammar of the
> sentence as closely as
> possible, or you can try to come up with what a
> putative native speaker
> would
> have said with the same communicative intention.
> The problem with the
> latter approach is that it often subverts the point
> of the exercise!  In
> this case,
> Teonaht's use of two clauses strikes me as very
> natural.
>
> Just one question -- is this two sentences connected
> by a comma, or is the
> first clause syntactically relative?  Would a
> reverse translation be 'I saw
> the man,
> green his dog.' or 'The man I saw, green his dog.'?
>
> Jonathan.

=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail