Subject: Species and relative clauses

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2001 16:42:47 -0700

>In _The Amazing Body Human_, there is this sentence:

>One of the tapeworms, which lives in human beings, has a life-span of
>thirty-five years.

>I take this to mean not a single individual, but the typical member of a
>particular species. So how's this?:

>lo'e sricurnu be da ku noi xabju lo remna cu jmive nanca li cimu

Out of context, I would have thought it was the other interpretation, but
sure, the rendering's fine.

The omission of ke'a leaves things somewhat vague, which is actually a good
thing. For example, from my preceding email:

le'i valsi poi [lu'a ke'a] slabu mi cu cmalu

If it *was* one of the tapeworms, and not the typical tapeworm, then we
might actually take the "lo broda ku noi brode" Gotcha (see Wiki) to our
advantage:

pa sricurnu noi xabju lo remna cu jmive nanca li cimu
one of {the tapeworms, which dwell in a human,} has a life span in years of 35.

>As to the tapeworm: sricurnu, curnrta'eni, or what?

You'll be surprised to hear me say this in light of my recent tantrum :-) ,
but both. curnrta'enia (I'm guessing there's an extra vowel at the end from
Greek tainia 'tape; movie') would be the formal term, sricurnu the informal.

And I now wonder whether it might not be more pronouncable (and slightly
more Hellenocentric, but that never crossed my mind ;-) ) to transliterate
'ae' and 'oe' as ai and oi...

Nick Nicholas, TLG, UCI, USA. [email-masked] www.opoudjis.net
"Most Byzantine historians felt they knew enough to use the optatives
correctly; some of them were right." --- Harry Turtledove.