Re: "In spite of"

On Sun, 3 Aug 2008 18:08:50 -0400, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:

>In trying to come up with a way to render the meaning of English
>"despite" / "in spite of", Esperanto "malgraux", French "malgré",
[...]
>How do y'all express this meaning, whether as as conjunction or
>adposition or case or whatever, in your conlang or in natlangs
>you know?
Wiktionary's translations for "despite" and "in spite of" return a few
traceable cases.  Italian _nonostante_, with parallels in some other Romance
langs, is _non ostante_ 'not obstructing'.  Finnish has _huolimatta_ which
is the abessive of the third active infinitive of _huolia_ 'mind, care
about, accept s.t. offered'.  Czech _pr^es_ is lit. 'across'.

AFMCLs pjaukra is the only one where I've really thought about this matter,
but what I have recorded confuses me.  Nothing for 'despite' as such, but
there is <ampara X sauje Y> 'though X yet Y': the thing is, the first word
here is from <an> gnomic + <para> present of 'be reliable/valid/true' which
I'd expect to have been the 'yet'.  I have no etymology for <sauje> and it
only otherwise appears in <maite X pari Y sauje Z> 'X, otoh Y, ot3h Z' and
variants of that.  So I might be reworking this.

Alex