[Tlhingan-hol] Objects, direct and indirect

[Anthony Appleyard]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quenya

Tolkien ran into this problem when writing a poem in his invented Quenya language :: he wanted to say "the throat of the ship cut the sea-waves", NOT vice-versa, and he had to quickly invent a subject/object disambiguater :: he used an added '-n'  as a ergative-type subject marker.

----Original message----
>From : lojmitti7wi7nuv at gmail.com
Date : 22/11/2015 - 04:43 (GMTST)
To : tlhingan-hol at kli.org
Subject : Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Objects, direct and indirect

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It’s an element similar to the famous indigenous language that can’t say, “The man bit the dog”, because it just gives you “man” and “dog” and “bite” in random order and you have to figure out from context who is biting whom. Since dogs are expected to bite men and not the other way around, there simply aren’t any grammatical tools to use in order to express the less common statement.
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