A few quickies from Frommer

Started by omängum fra'uti, May 12, 2010, 05:14:23 PM

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omängum fra'uti

Don't expect too much this week as he's busy with CSU related stuff (You know, his day job?) but I did get a few tidbits from this weekend.

First was about word order.  In the lessons I made recently I had been giving translations of OSV order as passive sentences in English.  He wasn't entirely happy about that, not because it can't be the case, but because it wouldn't always be.  As an example, he could not think of a case where "You are seen by me" would be used in English conversations, although syntactically and grammatically there is nothing wrong with it.  On the other hand, "Ngati oel tse'a" would be perfectly natural in Na'vi.

However, he still doesn't really have any sort of clear guidance as to when you would use the different word orders.

Second is something that I have played devils advocate against for awhile, merely pointing out that we don't know.  However, I can stop that now as we know.  In "si" constructs (Excepting cases where the assisting noun is contextual) it is always "noun si".  (From examples like "tsakem rä'ä si", I'd imagine adverbs like rä'ä and possibly also ke could be slipped in between, but no comment on that as I hadn't asked.)  So the "si irayo" form is the exception to the rule, rather than a counter-example.  Then again, irayo isn't a true noun anyway.
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Plumps

Thanks for keeping us up-to-date, ma omängum

Swoka Swizaw

Assuming that this week is Finals Week at CSU, of course he'd be busy as hell. But this summer...oooo! Should be packed (in our favor). Hopefully.

Kì'eyawn

Cool, thanks for the update.  Summer will be exciting!
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Queso6p4

Many thanks. It's good to see Na'vi coming together more and more. I'm also curious as to why you tended to render OSV sentences in the passive voice in English.

Prrton

Quote from: Queso6p4 on May 20, 2010, 10:30:40 PM
Many thanks. It's good to see Na'vi coming together more and more. I'm also curious as to why you tended to render OSV sentences in the passive voice in English.

That's the closest thing that Na'vi has for the passive voice. It's the "official" way to do it. There is a "passive participle" that works as an adjectival modifier of nouns for direct modification, but it cannot be used predicative. It is pre-first position -awn-. «T-awn-aron» for "hunted" »»» yerik atawnaron ("a hunted yerik"), but yerikit tolaron (fkol) ("a yerik was hunted (by one (someone)").

kewnya txamew'itan

Quote from: omängum fra'uti on May 12, 2010, 05:14:23 PM
it is always "noun si"

Yay! I wasn't as wrong as I thought! a-nounsusi/nounsusi-a becomes a possibility again!  :D
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