Re: Subordinate clauses

Staving Sally Caves:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Jonathan Knibb" <j_knibb@...>
>
> > In T4, the phrase {man - see I} 'the man that I saw' can be put in the
> > place of X in {dog with + X' green}, and the nesting is marked
>prosodically.
> > Similarly, {dog with + man} 'dog with man' can be put for X in {X - see I'
> > green}, again subject to appropriate nesting.  The word order itself
> > remains the same, but the relative nesting of the phrases changes.
> >
> > Sorry I can't summon up the energy to make this into a proper
> > comparative translation exercise -- it would be an interesting one.
>
>I know what you mean; this is an utterly fiendish little sentence.  I've
>been following the various responses; loved the German examples, especially
>the "Der Hund mit dem von mir gesehenen Mann war gruen."  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.  As for
>Aaron's original question, Teonaht dispenses with a subordination particle,
>and merely juxtaposes main and subordinate or relative clauses through
>reversal of word order: "the man saw I" means "the man that I saw."  The
>trailing word "hai" (him/whom) is optional and more and more often left off
>now.  Of course, this is an inaccurate translation: I've dispensed with the
>double nesting: "the dog WITH THE MAN  THAT I SAW was green."  Let's see:
>Vyrm li kohs ilid zef tsobal kerem: "green the dog of the man under-my
>seeing."  No.  Horrible.  Interesting, but horrible.
>
Khangaþyagon has a couple of interesting grammatical features that are
quite useful for this sentence

kemnidahing trab rikart u iðuzhang ya de

kemni-dah-i- ng   trab rik-art  u           iðuzh-a- ng   ya de
green be  3p past dog  man with "such that" see   1p past I  him

The first interesting feature is adjective-verb compounding. An adjective
used as a predicate compounds with the verb, as above Adjectives used as
attributes follow the nouns they qualify and agree with them. "dahing trab
kemni" can only mean "The green dog was...", not "The dog was green."

The second is the pronound de, here translated as "him". It is an alternate
form of the 3rd person pronoun, the normal one being yi. If a situation
arises where it might be ambiguous what a pronoun refers to, yi is used to
refer back to the subject, de otherwise.

"Green was the dog with the man that I saw."

Pete