11/10 meeting with Harsha

This week, we met to examine nested clauses.  We elicited a few sentences.

1)
d͡ʒei lok-ʈa toma-ke ʃuri-te pet͡ʃe ʈa-ke ami dekʰte pat͡ʃt͡ʃʰe
That person-the you-of listen-able to received of-that (person) I is able to see receiving
"That person you heard I saw"
or, as prompted,
"I see the man who heard you"

It is also possible to flip the clauses.
2a)
ami ʃei lok-ʈa-ke dekʈe pat͡ʃt͡ʃʰi d͡ʒe toma-ke ʃunte pet͡ʃe
I that person-the-of see-able to received that you-of hear-able to received
"The person that I saw was the one who hurt you"

2b) *ami ʃei lokʈake dekʈe pat͡ʃt͡ʃʰi d͡ʒe lokʈake tomake ʃunte pet͡ʃe
    *"I see the man who is the man who hurt you" - redundant AND ungrammatical
For more information on 2b, listen to about 0:12:00 to 0:15:00 on part 1 of the recording.

Also valid:
3)
ami d͡ʒei lok-ʈa-ke dekʈe pat͡ʃt͡ʃʰi ʃe toma-ke ʃunte pet͡ʃe
I that person-the-of see-able to received that you-of hear-able to received
(d͡ʒe(i) and ʃe(i) are switched)

4)
d͡ʒei lok-ʈa-ke ami dek-te pat͡ʃt͡ʃʰi ʃei mohila-ke t͡ʃene d͡ʒe toma-ke ʃunte pet͡ʃe
that man-of-the I able to see receiving that woman-of knows who you-of was able to hear
"I see the man who knows the woman who heard you"

Harsha translated both "ʃe" and "d͡ʒe" as "that."
ʃe - dependent clauses
d͡ʒe - independent clauses

He also explained that d͡ʒe/ʃe appeared clause-medially, whereas d͡ʒei/ʃei appeared at the heads of clauses.

Sentences 2 and 3 are our best examples of this occurence, but Harsha's description does not seem wholly accurate.
For one, we are used to seeing -i as a descriptive suffix.  It appears more that d͡ʒe-i and ʃe-i are modifying the nouns following them, like demonstrative adjectives in English.  For example, in sentence 4, d͡ʒe appears to be the subject of ʃunte pet͡ʃe, although we would need to run tests to confirm.  If so, "mohila" would be the object of "t͡ʃene" rather than "ʃei", which makes sense intuitively but would still need back-up confirmation.  The translations at least suggest these interpretations are so.

Next, we did some work on conjunctions with differing levels of formality.  Rather than translate from English, we had Harsha translate from C++ symbols for logical functions.  This also allowed us to test constructions that might not have been as obvious thinking in English.  Let "D" stand for "kukuɽ" and "C" stand for "beɽal" and "G" stand for "tiktiki."  Here, the symbolic representation has been translated to logic.  At this point, also, our recorder ran out of space and so we had to record in two parts.

Read from textbook Speaking with professor Speaking with classmates English
D ^ C kukuɽ o/ebõŋ beɽal kukuɽ ebõŋ beɽal kukuɽ ar beɽal "dog and cat"
D ∨ C kukuɽ ɔtoba beɽal kukuɽ kiŋba/kimba beɽal kukuɽ bã beɽal "dog or cat"
~(D∨C) kukuɽ ba beɽal kon-er ta-i na - - "not any of cat or dog"
~(D^C) kukuɽ ar beɽal na - - "not dog or cat"
~D ^ C beɽal kinʈu kukuɽ na - - "cat but not dog"
D∨C∨G kukuɽ ɔtoba beɽal ɔtoba tiktiki kukuɽ kinba beɽal kinba tiktiki kukuɽ bã beɽal bã tiktiki "cat or dog or lizard"

Note: In the final example, the first ɔtoba could be removed and replaced with a comma, as in English.  Also, you could add d͡ʒekono akta at the end to mean "any one"-- that is, "any one of the dog, the cat, or the lizard."

For less common examples, like ~D^C, there was no intrinsic formality that should be used.

Finally, we checked for ambiguous phrasing.

Særæ Mæri-ke bollo d͡ʒe ʈar bʰai eʃt͡ʃ̩
Sarah mary-obj said that their brother was there (?)
"Sarah told Mary her brother was there"
We have the same ambiguity that we have in English, it is unclear whether the brother belongs to Sarah or to Mary.  Harsha also told us that "ʈar" was not gendered.