Re: OT: Punctuation

Gustavo Eulalio comunu:

>> Sentio nontio o nino dargvic nonte lavu von!
>> "No, I did not wash *your* car!"
>        So, it's more like "No, dammit, I did not...!" than "No, buddy,
>I did not..."? Or is it something I'm not seeing. The enfasizing of the
>"your" called my attention, but I couldn't see any emotion in it.
Let's strip out the clause modifiers (translated as "No" and "!" in the
English), since they confuse the point we're considering:

O nino dargvic nonte lavu von.
Literally, "Your car not washed by me."

You might be tempted to translate it as "Your car was not washed by me", but
that's not accurate.  The direct object ('O nino dargvic') has been
topicalized and moved to the front of the sentence.  Since this is
emphasized, I intrepreted the sentence as, "I did not wash *your* car,
because its your car, not mine," as a spouse quibbling over car-washing
responsibility based on who drives the car more.  It could also be
interpreted as "I did not wash *your car*", implying that I washed something
else instead -- perhaps I wasn't paying attention and thought you had asked
me to wash your dog.

Did this help?

Those asterisks are pretty handy ways of marking word emphasis, though;  I
might have to incorporate them into the formal syntax, though I would want
to add an emphatic modifier so that it could be clear in spoken Dublex the
word being emphasized.

Best regards,

Jeffrey Henning
http://www.LangMaker.com/ - Invent Your Own Language
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