George Boeree | Re: [LFN] Disambiguating Indo-European Usages

• Autor: George Boeree (“cgboeree”)
• Tema: Re: [LFN] Disambiguating Indo-European Usages
• Data: 2005-07-05 12:15
• Mesaje: 1436 (a supra, presedente, seguente)

Hi, Paul.

As you know, all languages have ambiguities.  Since we rarely ask such
questions out of the blue, most of the time the ambiguities are
resolved by context.  Languages like Chinese rely on context a great
deal more than Indo-European languages, and yet serve their speakers
very well indeed!

As for the sentence, it would be translated "Tu demanda de la om ci fa
esa?" and "Tu demanda ci fa esa de la om?"  It is a quirk of LFN that
demanda has as its direct object the question and word order takes care
of the ambiguity.  In ordinary speech, I am sure people will use the
first example for both, but, like I said, context will likely take care
of the ambiguity.

George

On Jul 4, 2005, at 10:40 PM, Paul Bartlett wrote:

>      Lingua Franca Nova follows its Indo-European parentage in
>  conflating interrogative and relative pronouns/adjectives, a feature
>  that may be confusing and even baffling to speakers of languages which
>  clearly distinguish them.  How do you translate into LFN the two
>  meanings of the English sentence "Did you ask the man who did it?"?
>  (This is a serious question.)
>
>  --
>  Paul Bartlett