Re: translation exercise

E fésto <jcowan@...>:
> Mark J. Reed scripsit:
>
>>         I know who I want to take me home.
>>
>> Maybe I've just been hypersensitized to complexity, and this is
>> actually perfectly straightforward and transparent to non-natives, but
>> it strikes me as the sort of thing that might present translation
>> difficulties, and may not survive the operation as a single sentence.
>
> This is an example of a so-called "indirect question", and it has vexed
> and perplexed the Lojban community for many a year.  We eventually
> added a patch to handle these things, but it is only a patch: we have
> no properly logical analysis of them.
>
> I asked Linguist List what the approaches of various natlangs are, and
> basically got two kinds of answers: those that use explicit question
> words, as here (and it is a question word, not a relative pronoun, as
> other languages that make a sharp distinction make clear), and those
> that blur the distinction between "I know who" and "I know the one that".
Perhaps "question word" is too strong a name for the whole class of
wh-words, then.  It seems to just be an unassigned variable [in the way
that ordinary pronouns are definitely assigned to objects or persons[1]],
which doesnt necessarily mean a request to assign it [i.e., a question] is
being made.

cf.
       I wonder what I should do.
       I wonder, what should I do?

[and is possibly also why some languages *dont* sharply distinguish
relatives and interrogatives?]

I suspect that if a language can place direct and indirect questions
interchangeably in a sentence, that the direct question [and not the
indirect one] will always bear additional question marking, as English
does with the word order and question intonation.  But that's an intuition
based on a one-language sample, so I could be entirely wrong :x)


        *Muke!
[1] It might be said that in "I know who..." that "who" is assigned, but I
think it really isnt:  it doesnt matter who the "who" is assigned to; as
far as the speech act goes, it's indefinite and undisclosed, even tho the
speaker knows the referent.
--
http://frath.net/                  E jer savne zarjé mas ne
http://kohath.livejournal.com/     Se imné koone'f metha
http://kohath.deviantart.com/      Brissve mé kolé adâ.