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Re: Subordinate clauses

From:John Quijada <jq_ithkuil@...>
Date:Tuesday, June 15, 2004, 16:17
>Aaron Grahn said: >> Is there a good way to introduce a subordinate clause without a >> particle? For instance in >> >> The dog with the man that I saw was green. >> >> the relative clause is introduced with "that". This is probably a bad >> example, because English doesn't really distinguish (except by word >> order) which one I saw, and which one was with the one that I saw, but >> assume I saw a dog, the dog was with a man, and the dog was green. >>
I believe most of the North Caucasian languages do not use any sort of particle, but rather use a non-finite verb form, roughly equivalent to an English gerundial construction, so that the sentence would be something like "The dog with the my-seeing-him man was green." In Ithkuil, the entire 2nd order sentence "I saw the man" is marked for a noun case as if it were a single noun in apposition to its head, the particular case used being dependent on its semantic role in relation to the head noun. Details are in Section 5.7 of the online Ithkuil grammar (http://home.inreach.com/sl2120/Ithkuil). --John Quijada