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

Hello!

Trebor Jung:

> "The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away
> small stones."
(Classical) Ayeri:

Sorry, I haven't made up enough words for that yet. The
sentence is also very hard to translate regarding
morphology. I must think about it.

The relative clause "the man who removes a mountain" is
simple: "Ayonang siang me{mountain}in le {remove}iyà".
But what about "begins by/with carrying away small stones"?
I'd understand this phrase as some kind of an instrumental
maybe, but then the whole phrase would have to be marked
for that. The two verbs in this sentence are somehow
disturbing. Wait, isn't this construction called a "raising
verb"? Or was it an "equi verb"? Something evil in every
case. I wish I had Comrie's "Major Languages of the World"
to get some inspiration ...

While reading other people's answers, John Leland gave me
the idea to really use "go" in the other sense that I
recently defined for Ayeri: "adposition for indicating
movements away from s.o. or s.th.", 'manga sara' ("manga"
is for indicating movement).
OTOH, this still does not help me very much with sensibly
translating the structure of the sentence :-(

Sorry, I must give up here at the moment. I must think about
those confusing verbs that need a verb in the gerund as
argument, however they're called.

German btw does this with a so-called "erweiterter Infinitiv
mit 'zu'":

     Der Mann, der einen Berg versetzt, fängt damit an,
     kleine Steine abzutragen.

     ART(m) man, REL(m, NOM) indef_art(ACC) mountain
     remove.3sg, begin.3sg some_demonstrative_pronoun
     CIRC(begin), small(n) stone.pl
     remove-extended_infinitive-INF.

     Wordly: The man, who a mountain replaces, gins
     therewith be, small stones re-to-move.


Carsten