On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 10:29 PM, Pierre Abbat
<phma@phma.optus.nu> wrote:
On Thursday 13 May 2010 21:11:30 Michael Turniansky wrote:
> I don't know, it always seems to me like JAI BAI and JAI SELBRI don't
> really function in quite the same way, meaningwise. (And what exactly does
> JAI PU do? Does anyone use it? Examples?)
[snip]
lo nu kunzba cu jai pu rokcedra
(This is hard to translate. It's like an antipassive, except it isn't.)
"Smelting was *past-ed by the Stone Age"?
"Smelting was *Stone-Aged before it happened"?
The un-jai-ed version, "pu lo nu kunzba cu rokcedra", is much easier: "Before
smelting was the Stone Age". The difficulty of translating JAI PU, at least
into accusative languages and probably into ergative languages as well,
probably explains why it isn't used much.
Okay, that's what I thought, but then I thought maybe I was thinking about it wrong. ki'e
--gejyspa