From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Wed Dec 14 2005 - 05:33:25 CST
souravm wrote:
> Based on my limited Sanskrit knowledge I really don't remember anything
> as 'ca' used in Sanskrit sentences, inserted after each element.
I don't think it's always practical to form dvanda compounds. To begin
with, you'd have to
(a) Convert clauses to noun phrases
(b) Convert noun phrases to tatpurushas, losing any subtlety in the choice
of case for what becomes the first element.
Moreover, the use of long dvandas is high style where elegance matters more
than clarity. For clarity, one would want 'ca' rather than dvandas - we're
chiefly looking at things like '3 errors, 5 warnings and 26 uses of
extensions'. The practical issue was where 'ca' was inserted. I have an
example of clauses joined by 'ca' - in these 'ca' follows the the first word
of each clause. Flicking through a Pali grammar, I see 'ca' cannot follow
an enclitic.
However, even the use of dvandas is an instructive example. The list
elements would have to be processed using some non-trivial grammatical
knowledge - case endings would have to be stripped off non-final elements,
and then adjustments made to the stem, all before you applied the rules of
sandhi.
The point here is that the conjunction has to be included *within* the
elements. There's nothing special about Sanskrit in the example. I would
have stayed with Latin -que but for the facts that (a) you
can always use 'et' instead and (b) you can't add it to words ending in 'c'
or short 'e'.
With the Welsh example, a subtle point I didn't make is that the Welsh
conjunction 'ac' can actually undo a mutation - "my brother" is "fy mrawd",
but "and my brother" is "a'm brawd".
Richard.
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