Who loves whom

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kiwikami
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Re: Who loves whom

Post by kiwikami »

:con: Alál

Lıú Alzxálılıá kahatṣ kahadẓ Ṣıílıẓal aṣùṣ ẓaıẓ.
lıú la<zxa-ŕ>l-ıl-ı-á ka<a>h=ṣṣ ka<a>h=ẓẓ ṣı<ıí>l-ı-ẓı<a>l ṣa<ù>ṣ ẓa<ı>ẓ
manner talk<1.1PL-PL>-PST-DUR-VOL2.ACT person<OBL>=FOC1 person<OBL>=FOC2 desire<3.3>-DUR-flock<VOL.ACT> FOC1<ACC> FOC2<NOM>
We were talking (with each other) about who loves whom.

Lıú Alrálılıá/Laḳrlılıá kahatṣ kahadẓ Ṣıílıẓal aṣùṣ ẓaıẓ.
lıú la<ra/aḳ-ŕ>l-ıl-ı-á ka<a>h-ṣṣ ka<a>h-ẓẓ ṣı<ıí>l-ı-ẓı<a>l ṣa<ù>ṣ ẓa<ı>ẓ
manner talk<1.4/4PL-PL>-PST-DUR-VOL2.ACT person<OBL>=FOC1 person<OBL>=FOC2, desire<3.3>-DUR-flock<VOL.ACT> FOC1<ACC> FOC1<NOM>
We were talking (to an unspecified third party/to multiple unspecified third parties) about who loves whom.
Last edited by kiwikami on 22 Jul 2016 20:03, edited 1 time in total.
Edit: Substituted a string instrument for a French interjection.

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Re: Who loves whom

Post by k1234567890y »

Lonmai Luna(romanization):
sefa nat lusi hir maken dalta maken
1.PL.EXCL PROG discuss COMP who like who
We were discussing who loves who.
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Re: Who loves whom

Post by Imralu »

:tan: Swahili:

Tulikuwa tukizungumzia nani anampenda nani.
tu-li-ku-w(a) tu-ki-zungumz(a)-(l)i/e(a) nani a-na-m-pend(a) nani
1P-PST-EXT-be 1P-SITU-converse-APPL who 3S.ANIM.SBJ-PRES-3S.ANIM.OBJ-love/like who

We were discussing who loves who(m)?
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific, AG = agent, E = entity (person, animal, thing)
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Re: Who loves whom

Post by Dormouse559 »

Image Silvish

On prejhéva de ki ky ama ki.
[ɔ̃m.pʁəˈʒe.va de.kiˈkja.ma ˈki]
1P talk-IPF-3S of who REL-NOM love-3S who

We were talking about who loves whom.


Notes
I could almost go through this sentence word by word. The last time I translated this, I used the reflex of Lt. nos (modern nou) for "we"; this time I used on, the reflex of Lt. homo, like you see in informal French. Silvish still uses nou, but on is more common, even in neutral and some formal settings. Since on is exclusively nominative, nou sees a lot of use for nonsubjects.

The imperfect tense-aspect on "talk" has gone full-circle; in 2016, I was using a form that had /v/ in it, but since I've tried out other forms that deleted that consonant. In the past few months, I restored the /v/. Additionally, this is an older change, but I changed the etymon for "talk" from parabolo to praedico.

Looking at "who" vs. "whom", 2016 Silvish had a case distinction in interrogative pronouns, but I have dropped this, making the situation similar to French. However, when a Silvish clause begins with an interrogative pronoun (as a result of either default syntax or wh-fronting), the pronoun must be followed by a relative pronoun, which does mark case.
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Re: Who loves whom

Post by Creyeditor »

Not really a translation, but I just wanted to mention that in some languages you can only have one wh-word at a time. In such a language, I guess you would talk about who loves someone and whom somebody loves.
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Re: Who loves whom

Post by Reyzadren »

:con: griuskant (without script here)

aeskes kigsa thaforvisen.
/'eskəs 'kigsa 'θafɔrvisən/
1PL talk-PL-V love-EB-IMP-who-PL-N-PASS
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Re: Who loves whom

Post by Salmoneus »

Creyeditor wrote: 28 Oct 2020 15:20 Not really a translation, but I just wanted to mention that in some languages you can only have one wh-word at a time. In such a language, I guess you would talk about who loves someone and whom somebody loves.
I wouldn't be so sure. First, you have to be careful about blanketly replacing interrogatives with indefinites, since the two are often merged to begin with - you can't always assume there'll be a distinct, independent indefinite standing by to replace 'who' as there is in English.

Second, the semantics there would be quite different. Talking about who loves someone is NOT the same as talking about who loves whom - because 'someone', while indefinite, refers to some one.

A better alternative would be to use 'each (one)': we were talking about whom each (one) loves. Or we were talking about who loves each (one).

[of course, some languages may merge 'someone' and 'each one']

[there can be various paraphrases where there is no single word for 'each'. For instance, "one by one, who they love" or the like]



I must say, I'm surprised by the way people seem to have had no difficulty translating this syntactically peculiar idiom! And I'm disappointed by how many people have chickened out in glossing and just written 'who'!

Interesting that Silvish, unlike English, has a relative clause here. Presumably a more literal translation then would be "We were talking about who it is that loves whom"? - although, of course, that doesn't actually mean the same thing!



The English uses an interrogative clause instead. But many languages do not have indirect interrogative clauses. [this is why it would be better if people didn't gloss their word for 'who' as just 'who' - in modern SAE, the interrogative and relative pronouns are same, but this was not true in Germanic languages even a thousand years ago (not sure when Romance made the switch), and will not be true in most non-SAE languages*]. And Interrogative clauses have to be licensed by specific verbs in (most?) languages that have them, and "talking about" is not the sort of verb most likely to license such a clause. (Indeed, even in English, this sentence feels rather uncomfortably close to ungrammaticality to me!) So even in many languages with embedded interrogatives, a direct translation of this sentence probably would not be possible.





*fun fact: the wh- words were at first only interrogatives; they became relative pronouns across Europe, replacing earlier constructions, by analogy with these interrogative clauses. The shift is not yet complete, but varies with the language - originally a feature only of informal speech, they remain so in some dialects, and often have limitations in how they can be manipulated syntactically, as a reflection of their originally analogical nature.
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Re: Who loves whom

Post by Dormouse559 »

Salmoneus wrote: 28 Oct 2020 23:18Interesting that Silvish, unlike English, has a relative clause here. Presumably a more literal translation then would be "We were talking about who it is that loves whom"? - although, of course, that doesn't actually mean the same thing!
You're correct on the literal translation. Regarding any differences of meaning one might detect, it's important to think of the Silvish in the context of basic French interrogatives like Qu'est-ce que tu fais ?, literally "What is it that you do?"
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Re: Who loves whom

Post by Khemehekis »

Salmoneus wrote: 28 Oct 2020 23:18 I must say, I'm surprised by the way people seem to have had no difficulty translating this syntactically peculiar idiom! And I'm disappointed by how many people have chickened out in glossing and just written 'who'!

The English uses an interrogative clause instead. But many languages do not have indirect interrogative clauses. [this is why it would be better if people didn't gloss their word for 'who' as just 'who' - in modern SAE, the interrogative and relative pronouns are same, but this was not true in Germanic languages even a thousand years ago (not sure when Romance made the switch), and will not be true in most non-SAE languages*]. And Interrogative clauses have to be licensed by specific verbs in (most?) languages that have them, and "talking about" is not the sort of verb most likely to license such a clause. (Indeed, even in English, this sentence feels rather uncomfortably close to ungrammaticality to me!) So even in many languages with embedded interrogatives, a direct translation of this sentence probably would not be possible.
Yep. English speakers use these question words as relatives all the time. "Tell me why you're wearing that T-shirt." "I know what you did last summer". "Let me guess how many chocolates are in the jar!" "I wonder when my girlfriend is coming back." But far from every natlang does this.

In Kankonian, there are the simple WH-question words: hiel is what, ku is when, ans is how, anti is how many, il is who(m), etc. And then there are a class of words called question-relatives. A question relative comes from a WH-word with the prefix houm- before it. (Houm- is a contraction of hous, the preposition "about", and ham, meaning "this" or "that"). These are the question-relatives in Kankonian:
  • hiel -> houmiel (what)
  • ku -> houmku (when)
  • iri -> houmiri (where)
  • il -> houmil (who)
  • er -> houmer (why)
  • ans -> houmans (how -- manner or method)
  • anti -> houmanti (how much or how many)
  • to -> houmto (how -- degree)
  • eur -> houmeur (like what)
  • hing -> houming (or -- alternative questions)
  • ku ad ku -> houmku ad houmku (how long)
Is steanas houmiel Verma abamen shil luzkat inam.
1s wonder-PRS QR-what Verma eat-PST as meal one-ORD
I wonder what Verma ate for breakfast.

BTW, if you want to read more about Kankonian's question-relatives, including some crazy ones that aren't listed above like "how much more", you may search for the term in my Kankonian grammar at http://khemehekis.angelfire.com/basic.htm

There are a lot of interesting things going on in the OP:

Wir nophatwelen safga houmil id houmil betzithas.
1pl discuss-PST in_the_process_of QR-who done_to QR-whom love-PRS
We were talking about who loves whom.

OK, you already know that Kankonian distinguishes WH-words from question-relatives lexically. But there's more.

Note that normally Kankonian doesn't have WH-fronting:

Ar betzithas il?
2s love-PRS whom
Whom do you love?

Sambri abamen anti vitzakhes?
Sambri eat-PST how_many vitzakh-PL
How many vitzakhs did Sambri eat?

When it comes to the question-relatives, though, it's a big exception, and the question-relative has to come at the beginning of its clause:

Is steanas houmanti vitzakhes Sambri abamen.
1s wonder-PRS QR-how_many vitzakh-PL Sambri eat-PST
I wonder how many vitzakhs Sambri ate.

And there's a counterexception: the situations when "where" is the object of a preposition:

Is hauess ad houmiri Cliff daitroken.
1s know-PRS to QR-where Cliff walk-PST
I know where Cliff walked.

So since "whom" here also becomes a question-relative in Kankonian, it's fronted before the verb "loves":

houmil betzithas houmil -> houmil id houmil betzithas

See that two-letter word, id, that's now become jambed between the two houmil's? To make matters short, that's a preposition that usually marks the object of a gerund -- roughly equivalent to the "of" in The Taming of the Shrew:

Adhashar id goshaniya en hethet stoern.
clean done_to toilet PST task difficult
Cleaning the toilet was a difficult task.

When it combines with the relative az (that, who, which), it can also form azid. Compare:

piva az betzithas is
girl REL love-PRS 1s
the girl who loves me

piva azid is betzithas
girl REL-ACC 1s love-PRS
the girl (whom) I love

Most Kankonian sentences are just SV or SVO, entailing the placement of a direct object directly after the verb without a preposition. You wouldn't say Is betzithas id piva for "I love the girl", in other words.

When you need to link two nominals, however, be it a gerund and a noun or a pronoun and another pronoun, and the "subject/agent" would otherwise abut its "object/patient", id comes to the rescue.



Does anyone else want to explain interesting things that are going on in her/his translation? I see Dormouse has explained hers well.
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Re: Who loves whom

Post by Creyeditor »

@Sal: Thanks for your interesting post. Especially the one-by-one paraphrase. Maybe one could also use some distributive-like marker? As for interrogative clauses, I think some languages just have a less indirect way of embedding them. I have a feeling in Indonesian the sentence might be something like this:

(Papua) Indonesian:

Kita bicara siapa baku suka~suka.
we talk who RECIP like~DISTR
"We talked: who loves whom."

But I might be wrong. If I am correct, the reciprocal marker would get a different interpretation because of the reduplicated verb.
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Re: Who loves whom

Post by Salmoneus »

Khemehekis wrote: 29 Oct 2020 05:12
Salmoneus wrote: 28 Oct 2020 23:18 I must say, I'm surprised by the way people seem to have had no difficulty translating this syntactically peculiar idiom! And I'm disappointed by how many people have chickened out in glossing and just written 'who'!

The English uses an interrogative clause instead. But many languages do not have indirect interrogative clauses. [this is why it would be better if people didn't gloss their word for 'who' as just 'who' - in modern SAE, the interrogative and relative pronouns are same, but this was not true in Germanic languages even a thousand years ago (not sure when Romance made the switch), and will not be true in most non-SAE languages*]. And Interrogative clauses have to be licensed by specific verbs in (most?) languages that have them, and "talking about" is not the sort of verb most likely to license such a clause. (Indeed, even in English, this sentence feels rather uncomfortably close to ungrammaticality to me!) So even in many languages with embedded interrogatives, a direct translation of this sentence probably would not be possible.
Yep. English speakers use these question words as relatives all the time. "Tell me why you're wearing that T-shirt." "I know what you did last summer". "Let me guess how many chocolates are in the jar!" "I wonder when my girlfriend is coming back." But far from every natlang does this.
To be clear: these are not examples of using question words as relatives. These are embedded questions ("why are you wearing that T-shirt?", "what did you do last summer?", "how many chocolates are in the jar?", "when is my girlfriend coming back?"). Some of them are semantically similar to parallel constructions that use relative clauses ("tell me the reason that you're wearing that T-shirt"), and this is why wh-words have ended up as relatives in English (so, "tell me the reason that you're wearing that" (relative) and "tell me why you're wearing that" (embedded question) sort of combined to produce "tell me the reason why you're wearing that" (relative using question word), and then the wh-word relatives expanded from there into other contexts). However, they're syntactically distinct, and don't always have easy parallel relatives ("I wonder about the identity of the time that my girlfriend will come back at", etc...)

Embedded questions generally are only possible with certain verbs (whereas relatives aren't).

However, that doesn't invalidate what you say about 'question-relatives' in Kankonian (i.e., you use different question words in embedded questions). I don't know whether any languages do this, but I do know that some languages use additional particles to introduce embedded question clauses, and it seems entirely plausible to me that such a particle might indeed cliticise onto a following question word. Indeed, I've done the same thing myself in one of my languages (though I'm not sure if it'll stay that way).

By an alternative route, English has developed a conjunction, "whether", which serves primarily to introduce embedded questions, and no longer serves as an interrogative in its own right (it originally meant 'which (of two)?')

Unfortunately, I can't easily find a simple crosslinguistic overview - everything I turn up seems to be highly abstract-theoretical...
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Re: Who loves whom

Post by Khemehekis »

Salmoneus wrote: 29 Oct 2020 16:28
Khemehekis wrote: 29 Oct 2020 05:12 Yep. English speakers use these question words as relatives all the time. "Tell me why you're wearing that T-shirt." "I know what you did last summer". "Let me guess how many chocolates are in the jar!" "I wonder when my girlfriend is coming back." But far from every natlang does this.
To be clear: these are not examples of using question words as relatives. These are embedded questions ("why are you wearing that T-shirt?", "what did you do last summer?", "how many chocolates are in the jar?", "when is my girlfriend coming back?"). Some of them are semantically similar to parallel constructions that use relative clauses ("tell me the reason that you're wearing that T-shirt"), and this is why wh-words have ended up as relatives in English (so, "tell me the reason that you're wearing that" (relative) and "tell me why you're wearing that" (embedded question) sort of combined to produce "tell me the reason why you're wearing that" (relative using question word), and then the wh-word relatives expanded from there into other contexts). However, they're syntactically distinct, and don't always have easy parallel relatives ("I wonder about the identity of the time that my girlfriend will come back at", etc...)

Embedded questions generally are only possible with certain verbs (whereas relatives aren't).
I recall above you said: And Interrogative clauses have to be licensed by specific verbs in (most?) languages that have them, and "talking about" is not the sort of verb most likely to license such a clause. I would say the prepositions "about" and its synonym "over" are prone to leading to embedded questions: "We argued about who should apologize", or "Dan and Mary argued over where to go on vacation". Of course, the majority of embedded questions are licensed by verbs such as "say", "think", "know", "guess", and "wonder". The (English) sentence "We were talking about who loves whom" seems to be using "who" in its interrogative, embedded-question sense here, rather than its "the person that" sense as a relative; which (non-English) natlangs would use a simple relative here?
However, that doesn't invalidate what you say about 'question-relatives' in Kankonian (i.e., you use different question words in embedded questions).
Hmmmm . . . if they're not really relatives, I've got to change the name "question-relative". How about calling them "embedded question conjunctions", or EQC's for short, and glossing the proclitic as EQC (e.g. EQC-who)?
I don't know whether any languages do this, but I do know that some languages use additional particles to introduce embedded question clauses, and it seems entirely plausible to me that such a particle might indeed cliticise onto a following question word. Indeed, I've done the same thing myself in one of my languages (though I'm not sure if it'll stay that way).
Oh, cool! Would this be your Germlang (I believe it's called Wenthish), by any chance?
By an alternative route, English has developed a conjunction, "whether", which serves primarily to introduce embedded questions, and no longer serves as an interrogative in its own right (it originally meant 'which (of two)?')
Fascinating! I never knew the etymology of "whether"!
Unfortunately, I can't easily find a simple crosslinguistic overview - everything I turn up seems to be highly abstract-theoretical...
That's a shame -- you'd think that for a kind of construction that we use so often, there would be a good cross-linguistic survey of the real-world manifestation of this feature.
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Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 86,336 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
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Re: Who loves whom

Post by Khemehekis »

Well, I did it. I changed "question-relative" to "EQC". "EQC" is now what you should be searching for on https://khemehekis.angelfire.com/basic.htm.
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Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 86,336 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
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Re: Who loves whom

Post by prettydragoon »

:con: Rireinutire
me sakina puukiva hii yoku yokuna repikayo:
1P.NOM that-PTV talk-PST-SENS that.CONJ who.Q.NOM who.Q-PTV love-PRS-Q
We were talking about who loves whom.
Image
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What is this, how you say, Rireinutire?
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