Kaltxì, ma frapo—
As you may know, I’m giving a talk this Saturday at the Southern California Undergraduate Linguistics Conference at UCLA. Since the audience will largely be linguistics students, I thought I’d take the opportunity to expand my standard presentation to include a bit more about Na’vi grammar. One of the example sentences I’m planning to discuss is this simple one:
Sempulìl ngeyä wutsot yolom.
So my question to you is, why did I choose this sentence, and what is its significance? 🙂
Because you can’t know if it’s “your father” or “your meal”, I would say.
And this is a good example for the free word order, which is really free, but sometimes not clear in it’s translation.
Seysonìltsan! 🙂
Exactly! As Prrton said, Seysonìltsan!
Srane, txantsan! Nìngay oe ke tslalmam nì’awve krr a tsole’a fì’iut…
Actually first I read it as [Sempulìl ngeyä] wutsot yolom., but second time I forgot about it and read as Sempulìl [ngeyä wutsot] yolom. 🙂 Nìngay fìtìkenong eltur tìtxen si.
Kanu nìngay! 🙂
And with some imagination you could even think it’s your father who is served as your meal. Oops…
No that won’t work I think. Because of the -ìl it is clear that it’s the subject of the sentence, isn’t it?
Not really. A noun phrase in any Na’vi case can in principle be topicalized. The only constraint on the topical is that is should (usually) already be part of the conversation, either directly or implied by context.
I imagine it’s as tsmuk Talis pointed out, to show the problems associated with a true “free” word order system and that we don’t know whither “ngeyä” is attached to “sempulìl” or “wutsot”.
However, I’m going to guess that rather than show shortcomings you’re going to demonstrate that it’s not hard to make the meaning clear, either by context or a small reordering of the words so that “ngeyä” has only one noun beside it.
Also, I would imagine that you could figure out the most “probable” meaning of the sentence as I believe we’ve usually had possessive pronouns come before the noun rather than after. Thus, I would hazard a guess that, without any other sources of information, you could probably translate this as “father ate your meal” with some confidence.
Finally, I’m glad you’ll get to do a talk with mostly linguistic students. I’m really curious how the talk will differ from your previous talks and how they will respond to it as a language and less as a neat insight into a favorite film (not that there’s anything wrong with either).
Right, ma Ftiafpi. Very good. For maximally free word order, which I think Na’vi has (at least I tried to design it that way), you pay a price: sometimes you come up with ambiguous structures. When I first discovered these conundrums, I was a bit chagrined, until I realized that plenty of natural languages run into exactly the same problems. For example, I constructed a comparable sentence in Latin, where the genitive could go with either the preceding or the following noun, and ran it by a friend of mine who’s a retired classics professor. He confirmed the ambiguity.
As I’ve discussed previously, context will often determine which reading makes sense. Or better, you can rearrange the sentence so it’s no longer ambiguous. To my knowledge that’s always a possibility in Na’vi.
In this case, though, I’m not sure that “Father ate your meal” is the more likely reading! I guess it would be OK if you had prepared a nice meal for your father, and so he ate “your meal.” But if in fact it was “your meal” in the sense that you were going to eat it yourself but he ate it instead, that’s less likely, I think. “Your father ate dinner” seems the most probably reading to me, out of context.
I’ll let you know how the talk to the linguistics students goes. It should be fun, although I bet I’ll get some questions that will keep me on my toes.
Ooh, but Na’vi word order isn’t actually maximally free. It still has the notion of constituency (i.e., noun phrases) which has rather tight requirements. In a really free word order language (like Ancient Greek, or quite a few languages of Australia), even the idea of the noun phrase is undermined, with attributive adjectives, demonstratives and possessives regularly occurring some distance from the nouns they would be attached to in Na’vi:
This sort of distraction is common very pedestrian (ancient) Greek, not just as a special effect, though Greek poets did delight in exploring the outer ranges of human short-term memory.
I’m happy enough for Na’vi to have a robust sense of constituency. 🙂
“…though Greek poets did delight in exploring the outer ranges of human short-term memory.”
I love you a little.
Sorry, just had to chime in for that XD
My first reading here was “My father ate dinner”.
The lack of context is, in itself, still a context. And lacking context, it makes the most sense. “Father ate my diner” still makes sense, but it leaves open whose father, why was it your dinner, and why is it notable that he ate it?
On the other hand, if it was “Oe sti, sempul oeyä wutsot yolom”, the opposite would be true. Now it makes more sense to read it as “I’m angry – father ate my diner”. It still leaves open the question of whose father (Though both here and above it is could be inferred it is my father) but without further context, it doesn’t make sense that I would be angry that my father ate dinner.
Unless of course, I was preparing a big feast for him as I said it…
I’d imagine there would potentially be different intonation in the sentence when it was said as well, helping to further disambiguate it. I’ve noticed I seem to vary intonation and/or cadence subtly when I am speaking a word along with a genitive or adjective associated with it.
That reminds me: it would be wonderful to find out what role(s) intonation can play in Na’vi, let alone how it works (N.K. pitch stress accent?, dynamic stress accent? and how?). Right now we have been relying on a system all too nì’Ìnglìsì for obvious reason 😛
Speaking as a completely non-scholar kind of guy, I think this level of order uncertainty is actually quite desirable. If Na’vi gets too perfect, it will start to sound “constructed” (as it were). A little entropy here and there could be a good thing! 🙂
My first reading was: ” Your father ate dinner”. And the fact that you can also read “Father ate your dinner” I did not notice. A perfect example! Here, as in the Russian direct translation: “Отец мой съел обед ” you can properly understood only by accent.
Eywa ngahu ma Karyu!
Kehe, ngaru tìngay. “Отец мой обед съел” livu kangay 🙂 The same word order.
*tìkxey.. oe skxawng lu…
All the other points considered, it is also a nice, compact, easy-to-remember sentence that illustrates a lot of different Na`vi concepts. I will have to remember this one for a good illustrative sentence.
I also read it as ‘My Father ate dinner’. In general, despite free word order, a person writing a sentence would (normally!) try do write it in such a way that the most obvious interpretation is probably the correct one.
Stuff like this happens in English as well, and when writing (especially technical or legal writing, both of which I do), one tries to avoid this sort of things. But those who then use my instructions, etc. always seem to find [i]something[/i] that is ambiguous. And what they find often surprises me big time!
The meaning of the sentence “Sempulìl ngeyä wutsot yolom” is if i’m not wrong :
Sempul = Father
-ìl = accusative
Ngeyä = Yours
Wutso = Diner
-t/-ti = accustive
Yolom = Small
Maybe the meaning is : Your father has a small diner(?)
Tell me if i’ve wrong or not!
Irayo ma Pawl Eywa ngahu!
Keep it up this beutiful language!
you probably mean:
Sempul = Father
-ìl = agentive(subject)
Ngeyä = Your
Wutso = Dinner
-t/-ti = patientive(direct object)
Yolom = ate (yom means to eat)
meaning here is either “your father ate dinner” or “father ate your dinner”
we don’t know without more information, because the word “ngeyä” is located between “sempul” and “wutso” in the sentence, therefore we don’t know which is yours, the father or the dinner.
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Like the rest, I first read this as ‘your father ate dinner’ since it might be more likely a situation. but again, either situation is possible, and without more context, it’s not immediately obvious what the actual meaning here is. (basically, what everyone before me said.)
afterthought:
having the ngeyä in between the nouns couldn’t possibly mean that it could possibly attribute to both adjacent nouns, could it?
sempulìl ngeyä wutsot yolom: could it mean your father ate your dinner? or would you have to explicitly put two “ngeyä”s in there:
sempulìl ngeyä ngeyä wutsot yolom
Yes i was wrong! Thank u!
Irayo ma tsmukan!
I just thought of an easy way to avoid the confusion. I’m not sure if anyone has said it already but I’m gonna post it in case.
we can just put infixes or and the meaning will be clear.
infixes or . don’t know why it couldn’t post them in the first one.
ok for some reason the infixes I wrote disappeared when I posted.
I meant the “mood infixes” (happy ei and unhappy äng).
probably you typed <äng> and this is a html blog.
your browser iterprets anything inside <&rt; as tag and doesn’t display it.
you have to write < and >
it was meant to be anything inside <>