Re: A new translation exercise (was: lexicons)

On Wed, 31 Mar 1999, FFlores wrote:

> Boudewijn Rempt <bsarempt@...> wrote:
>
> > It might seem curious, but I've nver attempted this before in Denden.
>
> You'd never shown us any Denden before! It looks a bit
> like Japanese. Especially the honorifics, the SOV structure,
> and _ga_ joining parts of sentences! (What is its real purpose?)
>
Well, I meant, there's this text which has been around in my
household for a few years, and what more, which is very suited
to a translation excercise, and I've never done it before...
I have posted a list of words before - that has arrived, hasn't it?

Denden as a language is quite old - I conceived it about 15 years ago,
when in secondary school. The honorifics, for what I remember where
taken from French - in the last published version of my grammar
(in the 1992 Yearbook of the Dutch Society for Linguafiction, Rempt
1992) the honorific forms were labeled 'polite', 'equal', 'despising',
'amatorious' and 'respectful'. In 1993-4 I studied Nepali, whence I took
the labels of Low Grade Honorific, Middle Grade Honorific, High Grade
Honorific, Very High Grade Honorific and Affective. I've recently
finished a chapter on pronouns, which will shortly appear on
http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/andal.

The usage of NOM _g/ka_ (and GEN _tan_) is more related to Classical
Chinese _ye_ and _zhi_, than to Japanes _ga_ or _wa_ and _no_ , although
it works a bit different [1]. How exactly these particles function is still
a subject for research, so I'm currently sticking to the labels that
were introducted in Rempt (1992), although they cannot be correct, as
you point out. Both are 'glue' particles, but there is a marked
difference in usage, which is apparent even from an analysis of the
corpus available from my homepage.

[1] If only because I _have_ studied Classical Chinese, but all
my knowledge of Japanese is from Shibatani (1990), which I acquired
only in 1997.

References

Rempt, Boudewijn. 1992. De Syntaxis van het Denden. Shwa, Jaarschrift
van het Nederlands Genootschap voor Linguafictie, vol I, Haarlem.

Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1990 (1996). The Languages of Japan. Cambridge
Language Surveus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

>
> > DUP     reduplication (forms the plural of mono- or bi-syllabic words)
>
> Is the name _Denden_ itself a reDUPlicated form?
>
Yes, indeed. Almost everything can be reduplicated, even particles.
In this case, since _den_ means language, _denden_ means the most
normal language, the language-language, so to say. The Charyan people
is not very philosophical, despite their dedication to the Divine
Philosopher Pantumator, or they would have used _denden_ for
meta-language...

>
> >
> > PT3     third preterite (before the speaker was born)
>
> A very interesting tense.

Denden has the following tense system:

Preterite 3 - before the lifetime of the speaker
Preterite 2 - during the lifetime of the speaker
Preterite 1 - recently happened, this week
Preterite - relative past
Present - now, near future
Future - relative future
Future 1 - absolute future

>
> And a very nice sounding language. I hope to hear more of
> it. Does it come with a culture? :)
>
Yes - small bits are available from my website, with more to come.
Currently there are a story, bits about clothing, food and especially
drink, a small corpus and a few maps and other bits All comments are
welcome!

Boudewijn Rempt
boud@rempt.xs4all.nl
http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt