Japhug and English/Lexical selection

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jya → eng

at least two cases of a one-to-many mapping (2 sentences minimum for each word):

  1. There are three locative postpositions in Japhug, zɯ, tɕu and ri. All three can be used to express location ("at", "on", "in"), motion into ("into"), motion towards ("to"), or motion away from a place ("from"), irrespective of semantic details like relative location (on top, below, inside, etc.). Thus all three might be ambiguously translated to any of a number of English prepositions.
  1. The generic possessive and (one of the) indefinite possessive prefixes in Japhug are homophonous: tɯ-. The generic possessive is used when the possessor is "generic" or hypothetical, corresponding to the English pronoun "one". The indefinite possessive is used exclusively on inalienably possessed nouns, when a possessor is nonexistent or irrelevant. In the case of inalienably possessed nouns, the two can be disambiguated by the presence of a possessor noun, especially the generic pronoun tɯʑo "one", or a generic noun like tɯrme "person", which would indicate that the prefix is the generic possessive rather than the indefinite. They can also be disambiguated by the presence of the prefix kɯ- on the clause verb, which expresses generic object.