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Re: Creative ways to form relative clauses?

From:Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>
Date:Sunday, December 21, 2008, 1:06
--- On Sat, 12/20/08, Daniel Bowman <danny.c.bowman@...> wrote:

> From: Daniel Bowman <danny.c.bowman@...>
> Hello fellow conlangers, >
...
> > Currently, my conlang follows the English model, and thus > the relative > clause structure of the sentence "I hate the man who > hit me yesterday" > would be quite similar in my conlang. I'd rather do it > some other way since > the rest of my grammar is decidedly non-English.
My peculiar conlang Soaloa has a very strict limit on the complexity of a sentence. Thoughts are broken down into a string of clauses bound together with certain special pronoun-type linking words that relate back to subjects or objects of previous clauses. <http://fiziwig.com/soaloa/soaloa.html> Most often the clauses are treated as complete sentences. Your example would definitely need to broken into two separate sentences: Yesterday man hit me; (previous object = me) hate (previous subject = man). Even such simple concepts as "My red crayon is broken." needs to be subdivided into "I have crayon; It that-is red; same is broken." So the whole issue of relative clauses evaporates in the simplicity of Soaloa syntax. --gary