Re: Clauses, etc

On Mon, 28 Jan 2002 21:19:08 -0500, Joel <supercooljoel@...> wrote:

> Yes, it is that guy that hides in the depths of the list, I had to change
> my email address unfortunately.
>
>I never really understood fully clauses and that sort of grammar, so in my
>unseeing blindness, i attempted to construct a clause system.  Basically,
>you enclose the clause in "nihk...il"  if I am trying to say, "The man that
>john hit yesterday is angry" Using that in English is should turn out to be
>"Nihk The man john his yesterday il is angry". You follow?  I hope I've got
>the right idea with clauses here.
>
>Any help or criticism is helpful, be reminded, I have NO idea what I'm
>talking about!
>
>- Joel Heikkila
Hi Joel

AFMCL, adding to what others have said:

in MNCL, relative clauses start with the relative pronoun {y-} and end with
a pronoun {d-}, as in:

Zo (man)o ya (John)u (hit)e (yesterday)i da (angry)ize.
"The man [whom] John hit yesterday is angry".

(note: I'm using more or less the English word order (and words) for ease
of reading; MNCL changes the word order within a phrase or phrase order
within a clause according to focus/emphasis and other considerations)

This can be broken down as:

  Z-o  (man)-o      y-a (John)-u (hit)-e (yesterday)-i  d-a (angry)-iz-e
DEF-QUAL (V)-QUAL REL-ABS  (V)-ERG (V)-PRED   (V)-OBL SCT-ABS (V)-PRS-PRED

DEF  anaphoric pronoun/determiner (definite article in this case)
REL  relative pronoun
SCT  subordinate clause terminator
(V)  a general vocabulary item
PRS  present tense
QUAL this word qualifies what follows directly
ABS  absolutive case
ERG  ergative case
OBL  oblique case; used for adverbial stuff
PRED predicative or essive "case"; the syntactic verb

Does this help?

Jeff