Standardizing relativization in Dinka

[Martin Haspelmath]

> Or do you know of any languages which are
> used for all written functions which DON'T have relative clauses? I don't.
Japanese is an example of a language that renders English Relative 
Clauses by a clause type that does not correspond very closely to them. 
As Matsumoto (1997) and Comrie (1998) have argued convincingly, Japanese 
clauses that are translated by English Relative Clauses in fact have 
broader functions and do not have gaps the way English Relative Clauses do.

Since different languages generally have different categories (Croft 
2001, Haspelmath 2007), it is not surprising to find languages with 
categories that don't match English categories closely.

However, if one wants to translate large amounts of texts from a source 
language to a target language, it is inconvenient if one doesn't have a 
reasonably close match between categories. Bible translators have often 
more or less arbitrarily chosen certain patterns in the target language 
to make their lives easier, and if they have enough authority, speakers 
may accept the disortions of their language, and after a while even 
regard the missionaries' language as prestigious.

I think this is an interesting phenomenon, but I wonder whether Funknet 
is the right place to give advice to applied linguists who are engaged 
in this kind of (perhaps in some ways useful, but also rather 
questionable) enterprise.

Martin


References

Comrie, Bernard. 1998. Rethinking the typology of relative clauses. 
_Language Design _1.59–86.
Croft, William. 2001. _Radical Construction Grammar._ Oxford: Oxford 
University Press.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2007. Pre-established categories don't 
exist—consequences for language description and typology. _Linguistic 
Typology_ 11.119-132.

Matsumoto, Yoshiko. 1997. _Noun-modifying constructions in Japanese: A 
frame-semantic approach._ Amsterdam: Benjamins.