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Re: Small translation challenge

From:Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Date:Friday, June 2, 2006, 14:11
On 6/2/06, Larry Sulky <larrysulky@...> wrote:
> In your conlangs/auxlangs, how would you translate this: > > "The boy whose mother my daughter was later to befriend became ill."
In Klingon - I wouldn't. As far as I know, you can only relativise subjects or objects there. As for natlangs: Greek allows you to embed an explicit pronoun referring to the head, which lets you construct more complex sentences. So while I think this couldn't be done with the genitive of the "real" relative pronoun (since the result is object, not subject, of "befriend"), you could probably do it with the "easy" all-purpose relative pronoun που, giving something like Το αγόρι που η κόρη μου ύστερα έγινε φίλος της μητέρας του, έγινε άρρωστος. Which does something like "The boy REL the daughter mine later became friend of-the mother his [<-- this explicit pronoun referring back to the boy] became ill". Cheers, -- Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

Replies

Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>