Re: Commentary: From Tokana to Denden

On Thu, 18 Nov 1999, Matt Pearson wrote:

> I must not have provided nearly enough info, because you seem to have
> parsed these sentences incorrectly.  The correct structure is:
>
Well, what made me go wrong was the bit in the notes:

 So "itan maha olat" in the above poem can only mean "that which
 one hears". It can't mean "that which hears things".

So I took that for the relative clause, and tried to connect the
dative 'suhoi' and 'sihe' and so on to the verb.

>         [ itan maha olat suhoi ]  uthma tsampatin
>         [ that which (one) hears in-the-wind ]  gives health
>
>         [ itan maha olat sihe ]  uthma pamihati
>         [ that which (one) hears in-the-stream ]  gives nourishment
>
> So SUHOI and SIHE are part of the relative clause.
>
> The ending -AT on OLAT indicates that this verb is part of an embedded
> clause (here, a relative clause headed by MAHA "what").  The ending -A on
> UTHMA, by contrast, indicates that this verb is in the main clause.
>
Well, I'd really like to see a thorough syntactic analysis of this
constructions - it's still not entirely clear to me.

> I guess Tokana is harder than I thought!  :-)
Well, that's what I told you when I mailed you that I'd finished
it!

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://denden.conlang.org