Re: Simple translation exercise?

At 23:52 21/06/03, Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...> wrote:
>I decided to give the new, improved Okaikiar a whirl, and
>immediately ran into trouble. :)
>
>On Sat, Jun 21, 2003 at 08:15:12PM +0100, Ian Spackman wrote:
> >The cow jumped over the moon.
> >The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
>
>These sentences are a surprisingly interesting test of the
>language's relational expressivity.  I can easily say that a cow
>did some jumping that took place above the moon, or that it jumped
>and thereby wound up over the moon.  And, not that it's relevent to this
>sentence, I can also say that the cow started out over the moon
>and jumped such that it was no longer there.  But to express that
>the cow jumped THROUGH the space over the moon, both starting and
>ending up elsewhere, that's harder.
It was relatively easy in Holic: I have a through-over postposition because
the proto-language had four cases for spacial relationships (locative,
allative, ablative, translative) which it used in combination with nouns of
location.  Now it *happens* that in the case of "over" these four cases,
which have disappeared for most nouns, survive, and so the noun has become
4 postpositions.  For spacial relationships it will be messier (this neat
system should only work when the spacial nouns have a very short root
(C(C)V), although I think it will have arisen by analogy in some cases
where it shouldn't occur).

Sorting out the postpositions was something I intended to do this week, but
I shied away from the task (and several others) in the end.  I'm trying to
approach things from a translation angle now; I'm not sure that this is the
best approach, but it at least provides some sense of progress, if at times
painfully slow.

Ian

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