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

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

In gjax-zym-byn:

mrunq    hxy-i     taxnq-zox     max    loq   miq-i,
mountain [patient] remove-V.ACT. person which [topic],

max    poq  tu-i    gix'bu-zox   taxnq-zox
person this [agent] begin-V.ACT. remove-V.ACT.

mrunq-txy      sroq    hxy-i.
mountain-piece several [patient]

Phonetic: (X-SAMPA)

mr\u~  xU?i  t{~z2~  m{ lO  mI?i
m{  pO  tu?i  gybuz2  t{~z2~
mr\u~TU~  sr\O  xU?i

"The person who removes a mountain, this person begins
to remove some stones."

I'm not really happy with the relative clauses in gzb;
after six years you would think I would have settled
on some consistent way to use them, but no.  Anyway,
this is how it sounds today.  Next month it might be
different.  I thought about collapsing the topic and agent
phrases above into one agent phrase, thus:

....taxnq-zox max loq tu-i gix'bu-zox.....

but it didn't sound quite right.

{taxnq} means to take, to pick up, to remove, to delete.

{mrunq-txy} is the normal word for stone.

There is no infinitive in gzb; the verbs just inflect for active vs. state
(plus reflexive and reciprocal versions of the active, not relevant here),
and both "begin" and "remove" are active.  An early version
of gzb had verb inflection for valence or transitivity, but I changed it
to active/state/reflexive in late 1998, and added reciprocal a year
or two later.  The presence or absence of patient, result, or attention
noun phrases shows whether a verb is transitive in a given sentence.

In a postpositional language, the auxiliary verb probably ought to
follow the "infinitive" verb (or the verb that would be infinitive if gzb
had infinitives).  I may change this.

gzb nouns have no number inflection.  I figured {sroq}
"several" would suit better than {coq} "a few" or {renx} "many"
in this case.  Or I might leave out the quantifier entirely.


- Jim Henry
http://www.mindspring.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm