Re: Subordinate clauses

Sally wrote:
>In Teonaht you'd
>probably say: "the man that I saw his dog was green."  Not too much
>nesting:
>Li zef kelry hai, vyrm lo kohs.  "the man see-past I (rel.)him, green his
>dog."  This strikes me as being a very common natlang solution.
I agree, absolutely.  There are (at least) two ways to approach a
translation
exercise -- you can approximate the grammar of the sentence as closely as
possible, or you can try to come up with what a putative native speaker
would
have said with the same communicative intention.  The problem with the
latter approach is that it often subverts the point of the exercise!  In
this case,
Teonaht's use of two clauses strikes me as very natural.

Just one question -- is this two sentences connected by a comma, or is the
first clause syntactically relative?  Would a reverse translation be 'I saw
the man,
green his dog.' or 'The man I saw, green his dog.'?

Jonathan.

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