Re: Weekly Vocab 8

Camilla Drefvenborg wrote:

>I've migrated all my material from Word to Mozilla, so that it is 1)
>not under proprietary control and 2) instantly publishable.
Good move. I'm not very computer literate, so I'm using (Yad help me)
frontpage to make the website. But I pare it down to barest essentials and
remove any microsoft tags from it.

>> I will push myself to at least get a short grammar sketch up if
>> someone's interested.
>
>I am certainly interested, for one!
I'll get going on that then.

>by the way, how do you handle relative clauses? for some reason, I just
>can't seem to get it 'right', i.e. get it into a pleasing state. a
>rather broad question, I know, but any details would be very welcome
>indeed.
Relative clauses in Rhean can work two ways. There are "relativised" forms
of all the question words: |kudom| "where" |nudom| "(the place) where..."
|kui| "what" |nui| "(the one) that..." |c'orod| "when" |dorod| "(the time)
when..." etc. This creates a relative clause AFTER the noun:

Lumo nuin miriom g'uf as'e.
light that-ACC see-1SG:PAST fire be:3SG:PAST
The light that I saw was a fire.**

Or can be used on its own:

Nuin miriom g'uf as'e.
What I saw was a fire.

Nudom sis, edom g'uf.
where smoke , there fire

The second way is a suffix -na which can attach to any conjugated verb to
make it a relative clause BEFORE the noun:

Miriomna lumo g'uf as'e.
see-1SG:PAST-REL light fire be:3SG:PAST

>oh, and just in case someone fluent in Nihongo is listening, how does
>it do it? I know it involves rather interesting knot-tying, due to the
>lack of relative pronouns, but... well...
I'm not fluent but I know a bit of bad highschool Japanese. You just put
the plain form of the verb right in front of the noun that you modify.

... hon o yomu
(one) reads a book

... yomu hon
the book that (one) reads

nete iru inu
a sleeping dog

(watashi ga) mita akari wa kasai deshita.
The light that I saw was a fire.
(But I think I remember that the |ga| becomes |no| in that kind of case)

Hope that helps.

M

** With Rhean being most often head-final, with both genitives and
adjectives coming *before* the modified noun, Rhean grammarians like to
justify this first structure as some kind of apposition: "The light, the
one that I saw, was fire" This theory is, however, nonsense.