🚀 go-pugleaf

jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) writes:
>connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
>>This shortcoming is hardly peculiar.  *Many* languages lose the ability
>>to distinguish subject and object in certain situations.  Here's a
>>German example:
>>	Das ist die Frau, die meine Grossmutter ermordet hat.
>>	'That is the woman who killed my grandmother.'
>>	'That is the woman whom my grandmother killed.'
>Yes, so in Latin (e.g. Catullus: dic mi te me amare), but in the
>Breton case, if memory serves me (I can't find my Breton grammar, 
>koc'h!) that confusion could arise in the simplest sentence, i.e.
>a single, main clause. 

This appears in Welsh (which is related to Breton).  You can emphasize a
certain word in a sentence by putting it first.  So while the normal order
of a sentence is unambiguous:
	Gwelodd Tom ci		`Tom saw a dog'
if you make `dog' emphatic you end up with:
	Ci welodd Tom		`Tom saw a DOG' or `A DOG saw Tom'

This isn't as terrible as it looks, because you wouldn't use such a
construction if there was real confusion about who did what.

- David Librik
librik@cory.Berkeley.edu