Re: CHAT: Brainstorming! Relative clauses

* 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"