Conlangery #72: Relative Clauses

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1. 

   Pá mamūnám ontā́ bán

   David sounded a bit surprised that “mgeni” (pl: “wageni”) can mean both “guest” and “stranger” in Swahili, interestingly the Russian “гость” (“guest”), English “guest”, “host”, “hostile” and Latin “hostis” (“enemy” or “stranger”) all come from the PIE “*gʰóstis” (“stranger”).

   October 22nd, 2012
   • 

     wm.annis

     Ancient Greek has the same, ξένος (and [2]) ksénos.

     October 22nd, 2012
     • 

       Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets

       Modern Greek too. Actually, the word hasn’t changed shape or meaning at all in more than 2000 years!

       March 15th, 2013
   • 

     David J. Peterson

     I don’t think it’s surprising that you could have both derive from the same source. But having the exact same word for both in the same language? That’s what I found odd. But this may be because “stranger” in English is a neutral-bad word. It may not be in Swahili, even though “stranger” is the best English translation.

     October 23rd, 2012
2. 

   Sören E. Worbs

   No greeting today? Did you run out of greetings? 🙁

   October 22nd, 2012
   • 

     admin

     Yes, it seems that I’ve run out.

     October 22nd, 2012
     • 

       MBR

       Oh no! Sounds like a weekend project.

       October 25th, 2012
     • 

       Roman Rausch

       I’ve recorded 3 greetings already and still could do one in Russian if you’re interested, but then I’m completely dry.
       Another idea would be to use some dead languages.

       October 27th, 2012
     • 

       Gleki

       You have not. You have at least two more. Just search your mailbox.

       November 3rd, 2012
       • 

         admin

         Could you tell me which languages of yours I haven’t done, so I can search my inbox. It is entirely possible I have missed a greeting or so if you sent multiple greetings in the same email.

         November 3rd, 2012
3. 

   Aaron

   Nooooooooooooooooooo!!!!6

   Guys, sort your German grammar out!

   The grammatically standard version of what David was trying to say is “der Mann, DEM ich das Buch gegeben habe.” The relative pronoun in all cases except Genitive is identical to the definite article. So you “die Frau, DIE mit dem Kind spielt, heißt Jane.”

   Case of the relative pronoun follows its role in the subordinate clause, similar to the Russian example Mike gave. “Der Mann, den du siehst, heißt Günter.”

   For genitive, there are two special relative pronouns corresponding to the English word “whose”, “dessen” (for masculine or neuter possessors) and “deren” (for feminine or plural possessors). Interestingly (I think), Spanish has a similar thing (cuy@(s)) but the gender matches the possessed, not the possessor.

   Regards word order, in a relative clause the finite verb is always last.

   Love the show, keep it up (and learn some more German) 😉

   October 24th, 2012
   • 

     admin

     I sould note that Spanish cuyo follows the same general pattern of the other genitive pronouns, where the pronoun agrees in gender and number with the possessed noun. (True, mi, tu and su do not gain gender agreement, but postnominal forms mio, tuyo, and suyo do.) Of course, as we noted in the podcast, relativization of the possessor is not terribly common outside of Indo-European.

     October 24th, 2012
     • 

       Esploranto

       Exactly. And that’s because it is ultimately “de quién” and so acts as the other possessive adjectives, tuyo (de ti), suyo (de él/ella), etc.

       A funny thing happens in Croatian and many other languages where you have a 3rd person feminine and masculine and their possessives also mark the gender of what’s possessed. So you have poss-MASC-MASC or poss-FEM-FEM. It’d be like having in Spanish “suoyo/suoya” and “suayo/suaya” hehe.

       Love the show!

       October 24th, 2012
       • 

         Chickenduck

         A lot of regional varieties of spoken German also ditch the genitive relative pronoun entirely, and just use the dative version instead (this matches a tendency in German for the genitive case to only really be used in formal contexts – in daily speech it’s usually replaced by dative constructions).

         So the English phrase “I know a guy whose girlfriend speaks French” could be translated in these two manners:

         Formal (what most Germans would consider correct): “Ich kenne einen Mann, dessen Freundin Französisch kann.”

         Informal (most Germans would peg this as sounding either uneducated or dialectal, but you do sometimes hear it): Ich kenne einen Mann, DEM die Freundin Französisch kann.”

         Note that in the second example, they’d add the definite article to the subject in the relative clause.

         October 25th, 2012
4. 

   Esploranto

   I would have loved for you to mention the relative clause in Hebrew which uses the prefix she- to my understanding and how you can use a prefix for that. Also I think Japanese has great ideas for different odd ways of formulating a relative clause. Cool.

   To David: It’d have been a treat to see how Castithan or Irathient mark the relative clause. Also about that, I couldn’t help but wondering… did you think of the word “rejo” for “sport” first or did you actually think of all the roots and proto-language words and came up with *raidi which you then transformed into “rejo”? How does your process work in this regard? Or is it a mixture?

   Best wishes! Great show!

   October 24th, 2012
5. 

   MBR

   Aw, nuts, I already used word order changes to mark voice in Hra’anh.

   And my favorite SOV clause in German is from a stanza of Waldesgespräch (Eichendorff):
   “Groß ist der Männer Trug und List,
   Vor Schmerz mein Herz gebrochen ist,
   Wohl irrt das Waldhorn her und hin,
   O flieh! Du weißt nicht, wer ich bin.”

   Just beautiful!

   October 25th, 2012
   • 

     Chickenduck

     Beautiful poetry, but not a single SOV clause to be seen!!

     The lines are:

     adj-V-genitive-S
     adv-S-V
     adv-V-S
     imp! S-V, int-S-V

     In fact, there isn’t a single O to be seen in the stanza, unless you’re counting the genitive plural “der Männer”, which isn’t a direct object.

     October 26th, 2012
     • 

       MBR

       Whatever. I was eyeing “mein Herz gebrochen ist” as a verb-final clause; I didn’t take the time to analyze it.

       October 27th, 2012
6. 

   Roman Rausch

   1. Here is an interesting paper by Bernard Comrie who argues that relative clauses in East Asian languages work in a different way compared to European:
   http://elies.rediris.es/Language_Design/LD1/comrie.pdf
   In my own words I would say that they form loose compounds with the head noun and their relationship is deduced with the help of pragmatics. Comrie gives an example of a Japanese sentence which is ungrammatical by itself, but becomes grammatical when tied to the commonly known story of the dog Hachiko.

   2. As far as Indo-European goes, I find the Gothic relative pronouns very interesting: They are formed by agglutinating the complementizer ei (pronounced [i:]) to a demonstrative pronoun: sa manna ‘this man’, manna saei… ‘the man who…’. What’s interesting is that ei can be combined with 1st and 2nd person pronouns to relativize them just as easily: ikei ‘I who’, þuei ‘you who’.

   October 27th, 2012
   • 

     Esploranto

     That bit about Gothic is indeed very very interesting! Thanks for sharing! As is also the paper on Japanese.

     October 28th, 2012
7. 

   Kraamlep

   My Conlangery-inspired language Frixàð uses a pair of markers, like bookends (or brackets), to mark relative clauses. They are “ek” and “et” (the latter also serves as a conjunction and as an ending marker to certain other subordinate clauses, but that’s not important here). Example, from the greeting in show 60-something:

   Alifa ruið! He iðu Konlaneri, h-podbirlax ek ju-mia xenteðl uz ju-h-kizul ek xef xentiros hen et ii et.

   
Ali-fa ruið!
face.ALL mutual

   He iðu-0 Konlaneri,
be.3SG this-[ABS] [name]

   h-podbirlax-0 ek ju-mia xent-eð-l
DEF-podcast-[ABS] REL» ABL-language(G2) create-PASTADJ-PL

   uz ju-h-kizu-l
and ABL-DEF-person-PL

   ek xef xent-ir-os hen et ii et.
REL» 4PL.G2.ABS create-PRSPTCP-3PL.G2.OBJ be.3PL «REL talk.3SG «REL


   As you can see, relative clauses can be nested.

   Does any natlang do this, i.e. mark the start and end of relative clauses?

   November 4th, 2012
8. 

   Vítor De Araújo

   Stray comment from the future: Spoken Brazilian Portuguese pretty much killed “cujo/cuja(s)” (whose). Instead, a sentence like “The man whose sister speaks Volapük came here today” is expressed as “o homem que a irmã fala Volapük veio aqui hoje” (“the man which/that the sister speaks Volapük came here today”).

   Note that Portuguese (standard or otherwise) often uses an article where English would use a possessive pronoun (e.g., “machuquei a mão” (“[I] hurt the hand”)).

   February 14th, 2013
9. 

   Melvar

   Lojban certainly does have relative clauses. You make them by following the meat of your noun phrase (such as nominalizer+verb) with the particle poi or noi (for a restrictive or nonrestrictive relative clause, respectively) followed by an ordinary clause in which the pronoun ke'a refers to the head of the relative clause. At the end one places ku'o if necessary (it seldom is). ke'a is usually elided, in which case it is assumed to be in the first unspecified slot in the clause. So one might give “The man I saw yesterday” as “le prenu poi mi viska ca lo prulamdei”, but “The man whose sister I saw yesterday” as “le prenu poi mi viska le mensi be ke’a ca lo prulamdei”, i.e. “the person that I see the sister of them=head during a yesterday”.

   As a side note, you can’t say the equivalent of “this book” in Lojban, because demonstratives are exclusively pronouns (in proximal, medial, and distal flavors). So you have to say “ti poi cukta” i.e. “this that is-a-book”, using a small relative clause.

   May 25th, 2014

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