Re: The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

Hallo!

On Mon, 9 Aug 2004 21:31:21 -0400,
Trebor Jung <treborjung@...> wrote:

> How would your conlang(s) translate this? The primary obstacle, to me, for
> translating of this sentence into Kosi is that I can't seem to figure out
> what 'by' means here...
It says that the `carrying away' is he means by which the removing
of the mountain is carried out.

Old Albic uses the instrumental case of the verbal noun here:

O         ndero   a       dahajára                bol
the:M-AGT man-AGT REL-AGT remove-PRES-3SG:P-3SG:A mountain-OBJ

hanara           dahajesi       øntimesi          pichimesi.
begin-PRES-3SG:A remove-VN-INST stone-PL-LOC-INST small-PL-LOC-INST

(Note the suffixaufnahme at the end of the sentence.  The object
of the VN agrees in case with the VN in addition to its own
plural locative.)

Greetings,

Jörg.