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

Akathanu's noun-centric grammar is still forming (and there's virtually no
vocabulary yet), but at present it would go something like this:

"Man remover of-mountain become beginner by-act-of-carrying of-stones
small-things."

Note that 'become' is the dynamic form of the copula, the only true verb in
Akathanu. Other than this word, and the particles of- and by-, all the other
words here are nouns. Also, I still haven't decided how to deal with
verb+preposition constructions, such as "carry away", so I'm ignoring them
for now. Translated back into English, it becomes:

"A man, the remover of a mountain, becomes a beginner by carrying small
stones."

As Steg noted, 'by' in this case denotes the method, means, or instrument of
beginning. Prepositions in English are such funny thing to mess around with.
(Hey -- I ended that sentence with two consecutive prepositions! How cool is
that!)

~Caleb

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@J...> wrote:
> On Aug 9, 2004, at 9:31 PM, Trebor Jung 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...
>
>
> Hmm...
> "The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones."
>
> Something like...
>
> kwened-a ooloi-dakihsht sha'gyomihl, uhzoi-jet ya'dahoudht-ad-a
> tza'pyetm sud[[small]]m._
>
> 'the person who takes away a mountain, they begin by means of the
> removal of small stones.'
>
> It's instrumental, "by means of".  The 'carrying away' of small stones
> is the manner in which 'the man' 'begins' removing the mountain.
>
>
> -Stephen (Steg)
>   "i have my guinea pig minions"
>       ~ my friend h