Open problems in translation

The following is a list of English sentences for which there is no widely accepted Toaq translation. The list is broken into three sections: sentences for which no translation is known at all, sentences for which translations are known but are impractically long or unacceptable for some other reason, and sentences for which acceptable translations have since been found.

The existence or nonexistence of a solution is determined relative to official grammatical features of Toaq (unofficial predicates are allowed).

Sentences that have not been translated

• "If I owned a unicorn, I would feed it."
  • She hâqdoa jí tu shıtuaq bö jí hó, keo bo jí sıa hao da. has to be phrased much differently than the original (enough so that it might not even mean the right thing (?)), and is long.
  • Baq guo sü kîaı jí sa shıtuaq bı, mu paq gúo hâqdoa jí shítuaq päqtao gúo da. demonstrates the seed of different kind of phrasing, but is very long and awkward as-is. The idea is to have a single mechanism that covers both "if a unicorn existed, it would have a horn" and "if an event of me having a unicorn existed, it would include me feeding it" with some mechanism for saying "X's have property Y" even when X's don't really exist, and then to make X "events of me having a unicorn" and Y the property "the haver of X gives food to the havee of X".

• "Foxes are small to medium-sized creatures."
  • Nuı rVV saotuao nıaı baq hupı da. requires a new conjunction rVV which produces the appropriate meaning when used in serials. It's unclear (to me, Hoaqgıo, as I write this) how the conjunction would work, because it doesn't seem like there's a meaning for it to have when joining two noun phrases, unless they both happen to be kinds.
  • Rıe nuı roı saotuao nıaı baq hupı da. requires roı to be allowed in serials and for some mechanism to be put in place that gives it reasonable behavior, including correct behavior in this case.

Sentences that have not been translated well

• "I know the names of many things."
  • There are several attempts at this
    • Sa puı tu shı mëa púı bı, dua jí chûa hı shí da. works, but is quite long.
    • Sa puı bı, dua jí mû chua tu shı mea púı hı da. works if you allow tu to scope over hı, but it's also long.
    • Hıdua chua jí sa puı da. almost works if you make chua nondistributive, except that even the modified version of the predicate can't say which names go to which things.
    • Puy shı bı, dua chua sa shí da. works if you allow puy to be puı in SA.
    • Chuadua jí sa puı da. works but it isn't clear how this would generalize to other cases.
    • Shıjeo sa puı dûa chua jí sa ja da. works with shıjeo meaning "every individual among X satisfies Y".