TRANS: flutes in PIE

On Mon, 31 Jan 2000, yl-ruil wrote:

> On Monday, January 31, 2000 2:24 AM raccoon wrote:
>
> Here's another example of Aredos (I'm sure Padraic will provide us with
> another example of Tallarian if we ask nicely. What does Tallarian mean,
> BTW?). This is one of many Aredos proverbs:
> ne ommis cuí caenans habent, caenatores senti "Not all who have flutes are
> flautists".
Here it is translated into Shemspreg (another PIE conlang):

        ne plino ad kwim es cholimos es cholimoteres.

        ne  plino ad kwi -m   es      cholimo -s
        NEG all   to who -OBL be.PRES flute   -PL

        es      cholimo -ter -es
        be.PRES flute   -AGT -PL

Not very remarkable grammatically speaking; typical IE stuff.
Shemspreg doesn't have a word for 'have', so the construction 'X
is to Y' is used to indicate 'Y has X'.

Now in Tepa:

        muamutuhui utuhuikipaa
        mu=  0- <am>  utu  + hui  utu  + hui  <ki>     -paa
        NEG= 3- <AGT> sing + pipe sing + pipe <COLL:B> -have:B
        (literally: not sing-pipers all.sing-pipe.havers)

The derived verb _utuhui-pa_ 'have (a) sing-pipe' is inflected
for number (collective plural), thus "coercing" a derived noun
'sing-pipe haver'. The collective plural and bound phase ( =
definite reference; marked by a final iamb) together give the
universal quantification implied by 'all' in English.

What's interesting to me is that while I've been living with
Tepa much longer, it was by far the harder translation to do.
Shemspreg took me about two minutes (as soon as I remembered the
word 'cholimo'), but the Tepa sentence took about fifteen
minutes. This in spite of the fact that the Tepa sentence is
structurally much simpler than the Shemspreg one.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu