Re: Marked Word Order [Was: Test sentences]

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 1:53 PM, Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@...> wrote:
> On http://www.fiziwig.com/gsfa_1.txt, sentence #20 says:
>> Up jumped the smallest boy.
>
> The unmarked word order for English would be, of course, "The smallest
> boy jumped up." What is your take on preserving a marked word order
> when translating into another language?
It would depend on what the default and alternate
available word orders are in the target language,
and what emphasis or topicalization or whatever
seems to be implied by the marked word order
in the source language, I reckon.  Here, I'm thinking
the English sentence is topicalizing or otherwise
emphasizing the verb: *jumping up* is what the
smallest boy did.  And maybe there's an implication
of suddenness that isn't present in "The smallest
boy jumped up"?  It might depend on the context.

In gzb I would probably translate that by using
the normal word order (VS) but postposing an emphasis
particle after the verb or verb + adverb phrase:

bly-ca ķǒ-so vǒm mâ-ĵĭn-vĭ ny-sra.
ballistic-V.REFL DIR-up indeed person-young-male small-COMP

or maybe with {θǒ} in place of {vǒm} to
indicate a suddenness of the action.

In Esperanto, which has flexible word order
and the same default order as English, I would
translate pretty straightforwardly:

Suprensaltis la plej eta knabo.

That seems to imply suddenness at least
as much as the English version.

In Toki Pona, where there's very little word-order
flexiblity, I would again use an emphasis particle:

jan pi lili mute li tawa sewi kin.
person of smallness much SEP go up EMPH

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/