Re: Trans: Shoeflower Nose Man

 From: "Christophe Grandsire"

> >If you can translate a sentence such as: "if I see the man who walked on
my
> >flowers, I'm gonna make him eat his dirty shoes through his nose!" :))
> without
> >grammatical difficulties (I'm not talking about a lack of vocabulary),
I'd
> say
> >your language is pretty complete.
Well yippee, then, 'cause I needed no new vocab and no new grammar.

In Géarthnuns:

Sí lí chö dhaubsöt, chöb lé chak flahansach sítenach chloivez sho, hautel
sho, sí lín söböt höi chaul sförsaum batröthürafalöraum söböraum chöi
öfetsöin ndí heglozh.
_____________

Sí lí chö dhaubsöt, chöb lé chak flahansach sítenach
I-nom fut the man-acc, who-nom past the-pl flower-acc/pl my-acc/pl

chloivez sho, hautel sho, sí lín söböt höi chaul sförsaum
trample SHO, see-speculative SHO, I-nom fut-causative
HÖI the-dual shoe-acc/dual

batröthürafalöraum söböraum chöi öfetsöin ndí heglozh.
dirty-acc/dual his-acc/dual the nose-instr "force" eat-conclusive
___________

There are words for "if" and "then", but the "speculative/conclusive" verb
construct often takes care of that by implication.

I talked about "sho" recently. It marks the end of subordinate clauses (I've
always thought of this as an extended use of "to" in Japanese, as in:
"Kimikosan wa Hiroshisan ga kuru TO itta." (though where I was, we said
'yutta'); "Kimiko said Hiroshi was coming."). (In Géarthnuns: "Kímíkobauths
lé, gü Híroshíbauths la höithauth SHO, ngamath.")

 "Höi" is kind of the reverse of that; it marks the beginning of embedded
participial and gerund phrases. Here, its other function is to separate the
two accusatives in a causative construction. "He" is accusative, because
he's the one being made to eat; "shoes" are accusative, because that's what
he's eating. To disambiguate, the thing/person being made to "verb" is
outside the "höi" construction, while that on the inside is the thing to be
"verbed". Matt, our resident pro linguist gave up on "höi" after talks about
"chomeurs" and such :) Perhaps we'll never know. :)

"Nda" is technically an adverb which agrees in tense with the auxiliary
(hence, it's "ndí" here to agree with the future "lín"). On its own, it
really doesn't translate well, but in conjunction with the causative voice,
it means, "force, compel". The causative elicits many of these kind of
adverbs to tweek the meaning of "make sth/so do". Normally, the causative
alone would suffice here, but since the emotion is so strong (shoes, nose,
etc.), it seemed more appropriate to bang it up a notch. Otherwise it would
have had the effect of an rather effete: "I shall have him eat his shoes..."
(oh no, Reginald, say it isn't so!).

Kou