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how to find the class of a verb
translating relative clauses with
about
(howtofindtheclassofave) (howf)
^ 
To find the verb class of a root, look up the root in a dictionary.
For instance, when you type
Do NOT type
If you don't know the root but only a verb that has it, type the full verb into inria reader.
If you typed a laT, laG, loT, hard liG that means the doer (for instance
If you type some other tense, for instance
You may also type the full verb into auroville, but that is less likely to work.
And, if you can read devanAgarI, you may also type the verb into hyderabad's morphological analyzer tool.
(translatingrelativecla) (transla)
^
If you can speak Hindi or Bengali or any other Indian language descended from Sanskrit, you don't need to read the following explanation. It's for speakers of European languages that are learning Indian languages.
In some Indian languages, such as Sanskrit, we sometimes say things like these using two sentences --
The one that carries the telescope, he's my cousin.
The woman that wears a blue hat, she's my friend
The one that wears a blue hat, that woman is my friend
He robbed my store yesterday, that one that has purple hair.
The guy that robbed my store, we should run away from him.
We should run away from him, the guy that robbed my store.
These lines are PAIRS of sentences, separated by a comma (even though in Sanskrit we never write commas, they are still real things). One of the sentences in the pair (often the first one) has some words that mean "the one that", "the guy that", "the woman that". That part is called the HEAD, and we will call that sentence the RELATIVE sentence, or
Those pairs of sentences are not hard to understand, but they are sort of hard to translate, because uusally we have to shuffle the word order completely in order to get correct English. And because the HEAD always appears before its verb in English, while in Sanskrit, particularly in verse, it will appear wherever we least expect it.
The main difficulty is that in English, we use only one sentence, that sometimes has the RELATIVE sentence embedded in the very middle of the MAIN sentence --
I now know that the man * that gave us the hint * is a spy.
...while in Sanskrit we always use two sentences, usually with the relative sentence in front --
The man that gave us the hint, I now know that he's a spy.
I hope that one of these days Duolinguo releases a Sanskrit teaching app with lots of drills on this.
^
(See also translating relative clauses with yad- .)
The pronoun yad- means "the one that, the one which, the one who, who, he who". As in --
When yad- agrees with
When the horse is given second ending by the verb, the yad- gets second too --
even where there is no horse word in the sentence --
in that example yad- got to be masculine because the speaker is thinking of a horse. If the speaker is thinking of a mare the yad- gets feminine gender --
and same thing if the mare is mentioned --
When the yad- has other endings, we have to be careful to translate the ending in front of the "which", never in front of "the one". As in --
For English speakers, the yad- pronouns are hard to get used to. The important thing about learning them is that you should never try to translate them until after you are comfortable with the several forms of the tad- idam- kim- pronouns. To help with that, I made this drilling gadget --
masculine singular pronouns drill
Hope it works.
chunk 99: lessons and advice on dictionaries etc