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SOV in Indo-European Langs- | ||
Tags: Syntax | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6140 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 1 of 2 25 January 2009 at 4:12pm | IP Logged |
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- and the associated problems.
A persistent problem during my Urdu studies has been the issue of how to form relative clauses. There appears to be 4 common ways of creating such clauses: 1) as in English, just insert the clause into the sentence. Most often seen on BBC/VOA so it seems a bit of an Anglicism, but I've also seen it occasionally in older texts. The problem arises mainly from the use of postpositions, which just are left hanging at the end of the clause isolated from any (pro)noun. 2) similar to the above but the relative pronoun comes before the noun, and a pronoun is used at the end of the clause; roughly - who man came he (jo admi aye vo) = the man who came. Tends to be used only with the subject of a sentence, but one of my tutors doesn't like it and often says you cannot start a sentence with "who". 3) append the relative clause to the end of the sentence - accident this time at happened when (hadsa is waqt ko hua jab). It works ok in short, simple sentences but not when the is more then one element which it could refer to e.g. man woman to gift gave which/who (admi ne aurat ko taufa diya jo). 4) add wala to the infinitive to create a verbal adjective. This seems to most logical as it enable you to construct the sentence in a similar way to other SOV languages like Turkish and Japanese so - gaza from being fired-wala rockets (ghaza se daghe jane wale rockets) - but it seems to indicate a closer relationhip than just "who/which" and can seem a little colloquial. Anyway, I just wanted to know how other SOV Indo-European languages such as Farsi, Pashto, Armenian, Bengali etc, deal with this issue. And also for further clarification of my assessment of Urdu, it's based on my own observations over an 18-month course and I would be interested in a native speaker's opinion. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6272 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 2 of 2 05 February 2009 at 6:47am | IP Logged |
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German subordinate clauses place the verb at the end, like this: Der Mann, den ich im Hauptbahnhof gesehen hatte... ("The man I saw in the main railway station..." Literally, it is "the man that I in the main railway station seen had". In fact here the auxiliary verb goes right at the end, after the past participle.
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