linguistics-questions:

Relative Clauses

Relative clauses, also known as embedded clauses, are clauses that start with a relative conjunction (e.g. that, who, which) to show that the clause is describing something and is not the main clause. In other languages, however, this is a little different.

English

the girl [who is studying]

Turkish

[ders çalışan] kız

Japanese

[勉強している]女の子

German

Das Mädchen, [das lernt].

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What does this mean? 🦄

So, when we use relative clauses in English, we start the clause with a relative pronoun. In this case, “who” is the appropriate pronoun.

And from there, the relative pronoun acts as the subject to the verb that follows and you can add in other elements if necessary.

In other languages, however, this is kind of different.

In Turkish, they don’t use a relative pronoun, they use a relativized verb suffix (~[y]an/~[y]en). So, instead of “the girl who is studying”, they say “studying girl”, and other words have to be added in for extra context since verbs in relative clauses don’t conjugate to show tense or mood.

Interestingly enough, Japanese does something very similar, except they don’t even have a special verb ending. They just use the proper verb conjugation for the subject and stick it before the antecedent - (a word which here means “an expression that a relative clause refers to”).

German is a little more similar to English, because they use relative pronouns. But theirs are slightly different. German relative pronouns are based on the definite articles, so when we say “the girl who is studying”, a German person would say “the girl, that studies” or “the girl, the studies” however you wanna look at it.

Anyways, I thought that was interesting and thought I’d share. Hopefully this inspires you to start thinking of relative clauses in your own conlang.

In Bodvíga, this is how we form relative clauses (for now anyway):

The boy [who lived] -> Bnog, [wahedi hońglet], ídogi

Here, instead of “the boy who lived” we have “the, who lived, boy”. However, bnog (the proper article) is only used here to show that the relative clause is more like a title, otherwise the clause would be “wahedi hońglet, ídogi”, while a boy who lived would be “tí, wahedi hońglet, ídogi”.

I hope that makes sense 🐧

How do you do relative clauses in your conlang?

Interesting question.

Both my conlangs (Moten and Haotyétpi) are basically SOV (i.e. the verb comes last in the sentence), like Turkish and Japanese, and funnily enough they basically handle relative sentences like Turkish and Japanese respectively (well, the comparison with Turkish is slightly off but OK for now). Basically:

• In Moten, as explained in this article, verbs have independent and dependent finite forms. Independent forms are used in main and independent clauses, while dependent forms are used in subordinate clauses, including relative clauses (it’s actually more complicated than that, but that’s not relevant for relative clauses). To form a relative clause, simply take an independent one, replace the independent verb form for the corresponding dependent one, and put it in front of the noun it completes. That’s all there is to it. It’s similar to Turkish in that verbs need a special form to be used in relative clauses, but it’s different in that that form is considered finite, and can conjugate to mark tense, aspect and mood.
• In Haotyétpi, things are much simpler and work pretty much like Japanese: take a sentence, stick it in front of a noun, and you’ve got a relative sentence. You may need to actually remove a bit of stuff after the verb before you can put the clause in front of a noun (because Haotyétpi speakers love to add stuff after verbs, so called sentence final forms, to mark assertiveness, questions, affection, or engage the listener into replying, and that stuff doesn’t belong in a relative clause), but that’s easy to do. In Haotyétpi, relative clauses are extremely common, because that’s basically how they handle adjectives in attributive position: Haotyétpi doesn’t have adjectives as a separate part of speech, but a bunch of stative verbs that correspond roughly to “to be + adjective” in English. Stick those in front of a noun and you’ve got something that formally means “noun that is + adjective”, but that’s basically the same as “adjective + noun”.

Here’s an example of a Moten sentence with a relative clause:

Ga igebezdin eto ka|se jagi etok: The man I was talking to left.

The relative clause is in italics. The verb is igebezdin eto: “was talking” (most Moten verbs only have periphrastic conjugations, like Basque). For comparison, the independent form of this clause would be something like:

Ga |lakatse igebezdin etok: I was talking to the man.

Notice the form of the verb: igebezdin etok is the independent form, igebezdin eto the dependent form.

For an example in Haotyétpi, how about:

Kaam kutáyse kár rú nupár eyró mrese ka: I really like this man’s dog.

From the translation, it may not look like this sentence contains a relative clause, but it actually does: rú is actually a verb meaning “to belong to”, and alienable possession in Haotyétpi is usually done using a relative clause with rú as the verb (nupár means “dog”). I can’t really show how the relative clause would be like as a main clause, as in Haotyétpi rú is basically never used in independent clauses. It’s not that it cannot be used that way, just that Haotyétpi speakers much prefer different constructions to mark predicative possession. Typically, the corresponding independent clause would look like this:

Kaam kutáyse kár ponop nupár ás marese: This man has/owns a dog (literally: “as for this man, there is a dog/a dog exists”).

Notice the element m(a)rese (ka) present at the end of both sentences. It’s one of these sentence final forms I was talking about, added to the last verb of a sentence to mark the attitude of the speaker. This particular form marks assertiveness (hence the “really” in the first sentence’s translation), but when the ka element is omitted it loses most of its strength and becomes more like an “end of utterance” mark, indicating that the speaker is done with what they wanted to say and signalling to the listener that they can react if they want to.

Finally, I can also mention that eyró is one of those stative verbs I was writing about. It means literally “to be pleasant”, and is typically used in expressions better translated as “to like”. So literally, the first Haotyétpi sentence I showed means: “the dog that belongs to this man is pleasant (to me) and I really mean that“. But eyró can also be used in a relative clause on its own, making something like eyró nupár, which can mean both “a pleasant dog” or “a dog I like“.

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