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Piata complement clauses and dem.prons (was: Re: OT More pens)

From:daniel andreasson <danielandreasson@...>
Date:Thursday, June 12, 2003, 17:30
Stone Gordonssen wrote:

> My lower case "i" has a dot, my upper case "J" was similar to the > "F" but with no cross bar in the middle, and my upper case "X" was > like a "9" and a "6" butted together.
All I have to say is that "le-kituu e-iloo luachishi ite". In a desperate attempt to bring this thread into on-topicness, I went ahead and made up how to form complement clauses in Piata. It turns out that they are introduced by a prefix {e-}. I also had to come up with the demonstrative pronouns. They distinguish number, distance and animacy. Fixed-width font, please. :) SINGULAR PLURAL ANIM. INANIM. ANIM. INANIM. PROXIMATE (NEAR) ite ite itte ite MEDIAL (NOT NEAR) ate aite atte aitte DISTAL (FAR) upe upte uppe upte And, at last, an interlinear of the sentence at the beginning of this mail: le -kitu -u e- ilo -o luachi -shi ite 1>3-think-PAST COMPL-be:dead-PAST thread/yarn-PEJ DEM.SG.INANIM. 'I thought that this darned thread was dead.' Literally: 'I thought it, that dead was this thread.' _Kitu_ 'to think' is a transitive verb, and it always takes a complement clause. Hence the {le-} prefix, which means that a first person is acting upon a third person. PEJ means "Pejorative", which is kind of mild and usually translated 'old' or 'darned'. Also, the word order changes in complement clauses from SVO to VSO. The verb always comes first in such clauses. Daniel Andreasson