En réponse à Roger Mills :
>I think you have Malay/Indonesian in mind, but not quite...The role of the
>antecedent doesn't matter, but the relative pronoun 'yang' _must_ be the
>subject of the relative clause.
That's exactly what I said! 'yang' does *represent* the antecedent in the
relative clause doesn't it? So the function of 'yang' in the relative
clause is the function of the antecedent in the *relative* clause (I
haven't emphasised *relative* for nothing :) ). I just didn't talk about
relative pronoun because we were talking about relative clauses without
relative pronouns.
> This leads to the so-called active/passive
>distinction---
Yep.
>It gets more complicated when non-3d pers. agents are involved (orang yang
>kulihat 'the man who(m) I saw'); and it gets very complicated if not
>impossible to relativize a gentive, dative or some other case--- 'the man
>whose book I read', 'the man to whom I gave the book' or 'the man from whom
>we bought the car'
Indeed. As far as I have seen it, languages that cannot relativise those
functions juxtapose sentences.
>That would be a solution, if Estel is willing to drop the pronoun in that
>case...
She seems not to be :))) .
Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.