Re: HELP: Relative Clauses with Postpositions

E fésto David Peterson <ThatBlueCat@...>:
> -SOV word order
> -Postpositional
> -Cases: Nom., Acc., Gen., Dat., Loc., Inst., Adverbial.
> -A noun in the genitive follows the noun it possesses.
> -A noun modified by a preposition (generally) gets the locative case.
>
> Now here's the problem.   The above sentence would, basically, look
> something
> like this:
>
> plain land [of Shinar] in [they found it]
>
[cut]
> plain-ACC. land-NOM. Shinar-GEN. in [they found it]
>
> or
>
> plain-ACC. land-LOC. Shinar-GEN. in [they found it]
>
> or
>
> plain-ACC. land-LOC. in Shinar-GEN. [they found it]
>
> For some reason, the last one seems like the one that "should" be
> correct, to me, but then it ends up looking like the wacky language
> we've been discussion, where you have an adposition coming between two
> NP's.

The middle one is probably the most natural one (and similar to what
Kirumb would have).

The seeming awkwardness of the construction is possibly due to
contamination of the English version, because English has a preposition
for *both* "Shinar" and "land", in effect:

    ... plain.ACC land.LOC in Shinar.GEN of

(supposing that you change the word order to match yours) which is
probably why your final alternative feels more natural:  from thinking of
"Shinar.GEN" as a whole prepositional phrase to itself (as it is in
English), even though it isn't in this language.


Incidentally, depending on how literal you need your translation to be,
couldn't you just get by with this? :

    ... plain.ACC Shinar.LOC in

kind of like English would do it in ordinary speech (e.g. "a river in
Russia" and not "a river in the land of Russia").



	*Muke!
--
http://frath.net/                  E jer savne zarjé mas ne
http://kohath.livejournal.com/     Se imné koone'f metha
http://kohath.deviantart.com/      Brissve mé kolé adâ.