Oliver Cromm | Intuition (was: On embedding sentences)

• Autor: Oliver Cromm (“ocromm”)
• Tema: Intuition (was: On embedding sentences)
• Data: 2002-11-29 20:39
• Mesaje: 427 (a supra, presedente, seguente)

George Boeree <cgboeree@...> wrote:
(11/29/2002 14:21)

>Alo, Oliver.
>
>My translations till now have been casual ones (probably with many
>errors and little consistency!), but your points are very well taken.  I
>will do my best to be more precise below....

Yes, that's normal. The sentence structures follow
your intuitions on Romance languages, and everyone
with good command of a Romance language, I guess, will
have little difficulty (I don't know about Romanian,
the always-forgotten RL).

As for me, I don't speak any Romance language well (I
read French trying to ignore the clitics, which is not
always good), and I have grown wary of intuitions
learning Japanese. To understand that, look at the
Japanese equivalents for what are modal verbs in most
European languages:

We want to go - (watashitachi wa) iki-tai "We go-
inclined" kind of a modal adjective
We must go - ikanakereba naranai "If we don't go, it
doesn't become." [go-not-if become-not]
We need to go - iku hitsuyou ga aru "There is the
necessity to go"
We should go - itta hou ga ii "It's better we went"
even more literally: "The side of going is good"
We can go - iku koto ga dekiru "Going is possible"
We may go - itte mo ii "even if we go it is good" [go
also good]
We like to go - iku ki ga aru "There is the spirit to
go"

Short version: they are all very different
constructions, instead of just two in English (with or
without "to").

Oliver