Seven sentences in Adyghe (a Northwest Caucasian language, North Adygea, Russian Federation) in simplified romanisation, with their English glosses. Crack the verb morphology — the prefix on the verb encodes where the action happens (into / onto / under) — then translate new sentences both ways. The Adyghe verb is famously polysynthetic. Today's task is only its locative slot.
Note.
ć, ǵ, x, ʁ, ʒ, ʔ are specific consonants;
ə and y are vowels of Adyghe. (Romanisation
after Testelets, 2003.) The English glosses are deliberately blunt — the
natural rendering of "where does he X" is often clunky in English.
data · adyghe (rosetta)
click a word · drag-select letters to mark a morpheme · all occurrences light up
assignment 1 · more precise glosses
(a) Give a more precise English translation of sentences (6) and
(7), even if it sounds clunky. What does the verb prefix tell you,
on top of the verb stem?
Self-graded — see the official IOL 2003 solutions
(Derzhanski / Testelets) for the worked discussion.
assignment 2 · translate into english
(b) (8)
pхəṇtə̣kur hakum deʒə.(c) (9)
aхśər tyda zydiʁafərər?
assignment 3 · translate into adyghe
(d) (10) "He puts the plate under the kettle."
Hint: the locative slot for "under" is
ćə- (cf. sentence 5).
Drop the tə/tyrə "onto"-prefix.
(e) (11) "What does he throw under the chest?"
(f) (12) "What does he drop into the cauldron?"
assignment 4 · all possible adyghe forms
(g) (13) "Where does he put the table?" — Translate into Adyghe.
Three valid forms — one per locative prefix (into / onto / under). Type any one of them.
Problem 4 from the 1st International Linguistics Olympiad, Borovetz, Bulgaria, 8–12 September 2003 (individual contest, Ivan Derzhanski ed.; problem by Yakov Testelets; 20 marks). Source: the bundled IOL 2003 individual problems PDF in this repo. Previous: ← Problem 3 · Basque Dates