From lojbab Thu Dec 15 16:47:17 1994 Received: from access2.digex.net by nfs1.digex.net with SMTP id AA12899 (5.67b8/IDA-1.5 for ); Thu, 15 Dec 1994 16:47:13 -0500 Received: by access2.digex.net id AA29794 (5.67b8/IDA-1.5 for lojbab@access2.digex.net); Thu, 15 Dec 1994 16:47:11 -0500 From: Logical Language Group Message-Id: <199412152147.AA29794@access2.digex.net> Subject: Re: Q-kau To: lojbab@access.digex.net (Logical Language Group) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 1994 16:47:11 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <199412150634.AA17950@access1.digex.net> from "Logical Language Group" at Dec 15, 94 01:34:34 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24beta] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1150 Status: RO la lojbab. cusku di'e > I believe that it is malglico, or at leats malropno, to label such things > as "questions", indirect or otherwise. Let's let Veijo and Ken Shan (or Cowan > with his Chinese linguist hat on) tell us about indirection in Finnish, > Japanese, and Chinese. Chinese specifically uses the same words for WH-questions and WH-indirect questions, just like English. Yes/no questions are asked in one of two ways, corresponding to "xu" or to "broda gi'i na broda", where the word for "gi'i" (hai2shi) is usually omitted. Only the latter form may be used for an indirect yes/no ("whether") question. Chinese relative pronouns are quite distinct from interrogatives. Some time ago, I polled Linguist List for how it's done in other languages. The great majority of responses said "WH-indirect questions are the same as WH-direct." A minority of languages use relative clauses, and simply make no distinction between "I know who went to the store" (indirect question) and "I know the person that went to the store" (relative clause). -- John Cowan sharing account for now e'osai ko sarji la lojban.