🚀 go-pugleaf

David Librik (librik@cory.Berkeley.EDU) writes:
>Jacques Guy (jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU) writes:
>>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'

Well, again we can add several languages to the list. Swedish and
German are two. In German you only get an ambiguity when none of
the words are masculine with articles, so the example above does
not translate well to German, since "Hund" is masculine, but take
a cat instead:

       "Eine Katze sah Tom"

I leave to Leo Connolly to sort out the fine details for German, but
in Swedish:

       "En katt s}g Tom"      ("}" = a-ring)

You don't really know what this is without context. Normally you put the
subject first, but then again you are more often talking of what Tom sees
than what the cat sees.

A somewhat similar problem occurred to me when reading a headline
in an Italian newspaper. I have forgotten the words, but I had

     verb noun adjective noun adjective

First noun was the subject, the second the object, so far so good but
what confused me was my initial analysis of the adjectives which I
assumed both were postpositioned which made the head line look very
strange. (My Italian is not fanastastic.) It took me quite a while,
until I realized that both adjectives belonged to the object. Italian
is a good example on that you need case systems and that to have a
free word order.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se