Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: CHAT: Brainstorming! Relative clauses

From:taliesin the storyteller <taliesin@...>
Date:Tuesday, October 5, 1999, 17:58
* Padraic Brown (pbrown@polaris.umuc.edu) [991005 18:25]:
> On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, taliesin the storyteller wrote: > > > I'm currently struggling with understanding the rel. cl. of my lang > > correctly, and thought I'd look at how it works in other langs. > > Unfortunately, it seems that relative clauses is part of the grammar > > that is 'not yet online' :) Does it change too often? > > > > Anyways, how -do- you do relative clauses in your conlangs? Here's > > something for y'all to translate... (substitute words when necessary...) > >
/lotsa good snippage/
> > Thanks for the exercise! Lesson learnt: few rel. clauses is good, lots of > nested clauses is bad!
Muhahaha, keep 'em coming! Too bad there are no really polysynthetic or incorporating examples yet though... The way I understand rel. clauses in ta:ruven now is that the relative clause is incorporated into a word, and then acts like your average noun modifier. The problem is that the verb in the relative "word" agrees with the noun the rel.word modifies, and due to phon(etic|ological) processes, the individual parts of the rel.word gets munged a bit. Mock-up example: dog it-saw-cat-CASE was large it-saw-cat(-CASE) dog was large it-saw-cat-dog was large Of course, since short, understated, ambiguous statements are king in ta:ruven, most of the time relative clauses and similar is simply shunned. I'll give y'all a full report when there's more to put in it :) tal. -- "Better living through conlanging"