Posted by Philip Newton on 9:37 12/6/01
In reply to: Questions posted by Mark Rosenfelder on 1:30 12/5/01
Mark wrote:
(quotations from Philip are in italics... sorry, too much work to use blockquote. :)
I can understand :) But I'll do it anyway here with your text, and I'll blockquote my original questions as well where I quote you quoting me.
First off, thanks for taking the time to go through, think about, and answer all those questions!
Bolyáshe is really a typo; it's due to the fact that the word for 'street' was once stolen directly from Russian-- prospekt.
Ah -- that would explain why the Durm story goes "...along the Scafi Prospekt". I was wondering how to translate that :)
I'd write fayre dy matune, since both verbs refer to the same past time. (Verdurian, unlike Greek or Esperanto, doesn't use 'relative' tenses in indirect speech or subordinate clauses: Mizhe dy läzne Deshtain, he said he was going to Deshtai.
That makes sense.
Think of it as an optional transformation: Faye dy (X-nom V-finite O) --> Faye X-dat V-infinitive O.
Cool!
I'm going to say we should use a preposition, as in French. The best preposition would be and; thus: Ci-cista e tro seshuë and sevan.
So without an extra pronoun ("This box is too heavy to lift it"). OK, makes sense; English and German do it that way, too. And it'd be obvious what we want to lift since we just talked about the box.
Is it correct to translate they were useless to him as ilun fueu agbütî -- that is, with the dative?
Yes. (Hmm, does it help you or confuse you to natively speak a language that also has a dative case?)
I think that on the whole it helps. Can't really say, though. Perhaps slightly confusing that German uses the construction "help + dat." whereas other languages use the accusative with "help" (certainly Greek does, and since 'colapren' is marked 'vt', I suppose Verdurian does, too). And it's what makes me think of sentences such as this -- it seems "right" somehow to use the dative there.
Hmm, how do you do this in French? Just Non?
Not sure, to tell you the truth. I'd guess either Non! or Pas! but I don't know which, if either, is correct. Or maybe they use Arrête!, as you did in Verdurian -- and as is commonly heard in English, as well.
Cheers,
Philip.