Agronesia

I just did some reading about subordinate clause because I need to write about it for my Indonesian Japanese language learning blog Yumeko. It seems that in English and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) we need relative pronouns such as who, which, and yang:

Nick gave a handful of potato chips to the dog who was sniffing around the picnic tables.

Nick memberi sejumlah keripik kentak ke anjing yang sedang mengendus-endus di sekitar meja-meja piknik.

On the other hand, the subordinate clause in Japanese has the same form as its independent clause:

It means that in Indonesian and English the underlined clause cannot stand on its own as a complete sentence while the one in Japanese can.

On the consistency in the grammatical structure of describing nouns, English isn’t consistent. Look at these three examples of how a simple adjective modifies a noun:

blue book (MODIFIER HEAD)

buku biru (H M)

青い本
aoi hon (M H)

We can see that when subordinate clause is used, the English language switches to use the H M structure.

The last interesting point is that the Indonesian subordinate clause above can directly function as a noun phrase without any modification:

Did I misanalyze?

This shirt contains the Thailand alphabet. I lived in Thailand for around 4 years, but couldn’t read anything at all. What’s interesting is that the Wikipedia articled states that space is generally not used in writing because most words are monosyllabic. Never realized that also.

I sadly couldn’t speak Thai. Well, I probably can speak the two most important expressions for a man: “khong nam ti nai?” (where is the toilet?) and “pom rak kun” (I (male) love you). I’m of course using the never-before-heard Agronesian romanization.

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