Re: "Tagalog, it's got a Trigger System," She Said (was; QUESTION-New project)

On Mon, 15 Feb 1999 17:57:42 +0100 Kristian Jensen <kljensen@...>
writes:
>Steg Belsky wrote:
>>I speak like that in English normally, and people around me do
>>too.....is it known whether this kind of construction, like "my
>>mother, she told me to go to the store" is regional (NYC?) or
>>ethnic (Jewish?), because as far as i know, it's grammatically
>>incorrect, even though i hear it around here all the time, and my
>>brother said that he doesn't think people in other areas use this
>>construction.
>>The type of construction, specifically, is where a pronoun
>>representing the subject of the sentence is placed into a sentence
>>where the subject is already specified, e.g.:
>>My brother, he told me people in other places don't talk like this.
>>His friend Ari, she lives in Jersey.
>>Those stupid tourists, they clog up the subways.
>>The computer, it broke.
>>(as opposed to "My brother told me...", "His friend Ari lives in
>>Jersey", etc.)
>>For some reason it looks so much weirder in writing than it sounds
>>spoken...
>The phenomenon is not as wierd as you think. If I'm not mistaken,
>Hebrew itself is one of those languages that use a pronoun as a
>copular in predicate nominal clauses. So the use of this method is
>probably ethnic Jewish, eh?
Yup, although Hebrew is sorta weird with it....in Biblical Hebrew, the
copular pronoun comes after the predicate, as in _habayit gadol hu_, "the
house is big", literally "the-house big it/him".  But in Modern-Israeli
Hebrew it seems that the pronoun has become stuck in the middle, _habayit
hu gadol_.


-Stephen (Steg)


>BTW, when I translated the Tagalog examples into English, I believe
>that the best literal translations would be a clause that is
>essentially a predicate nominal clause (ie., clauses with only one
>core argument) and not a clause with two core arguments. But since
>its more _not_ normal for English sentences with with more than two
>arguments to be structured as a predicate nominal clause, the best
>translations would have to be one where a pronoun representing the
>subject of the sentence is placed into a sentence where the subject
>is already specified. You might have noticed in fact that I made two
>translations for each Tagalog example, eg.:
>
>lit.: "The man is the cutter of wood in the forest"
>transl.: "The man, he cut wood in the forest"
>
>-Kristian- 8-)
>
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