Re: Doing without relative, coordinate and subordinate clauses?

Japanese does the Audi sentence by using a connective form of the
first (and any subsequent non-final) adjective, and the regular finite
form for the final one.

There is no direct translation for the train sentence; it would
require either a separate verb for the pulling-out subclause, e.g. "as
she looked at the train pulling out...", or a separate sentence;
speaking of her late father could be "speak of late father time.LOC
voice.GEN tension" or similar.

For the money sentence, the parse might look like "how-much.ACC
find-out.CONN money.ACC give.NOMINAL need".

Eugene

2007/6/30, Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@...>:
> Hi all
>
> I've been trying to get back into conlanging. I was inspired by John
> Crowe's "Deciphering Conlangs" thread into trying to compose a little text in
> my conlang Vn for the members to decipher, when I realized that although I
> wanted to do without relative, coordinate and subordinate clauses, and use
> participles and the like instead, I had no idea how to go about it.
>
> Using pseudo-English as a metalanguage, I got as far as abolishing relative
> clauses, e.g. instead of:
>
> "I saw the man who owns an Audi and lives on our street in the Post Office
> today"
>
> you would say:
>
> "I saw the Audi-owning-CONN living-on-our-street-CONN man in the Post Office
> today"
>
> where -CONN marks a connecting particle attached to each of the phrases which
> in English would be joined by "and";
>
> But I'm having trouble working out what I would need in place of finite verbs
> (and/or conjunctions) in examples such as:
>
> "I'll always remember the tension in her voice //when she spoke of her late
> father/as the train pulled out of the station and receded into the distance//
>
> Or:
>
> "Before I can get it for you, you need to find out how much it is and give me
> the money, please."
>
> Does your conlang do this? How do you do it? Are there natlangs which do this?
> I'd appreciate any pointers.
>
> TIA
>
> Jeff
> --
> "Please understand that there are small
> European principalities devoted to debating
> Tcl vs. Perl as a tourist attraction."
>
>                             -- Cameron Laird
>

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