SCONJ:
Definition
A subordinating conjunction is a word that links a subordinate clause to its head.
Middle Persian subordinators usually derive from relative or interrogative pronouns or a phrases including them (e.g. *či-gauna- “what colour” developed to čiyōn “as, like, how”). The interrogative pronoun kū “where” can also be used as a relative pronoun and has become the subordinator of complement clauses. In the genre of religious commentators, we also find hād (or had ?, originally probably “being”) and ay (origin is uncertain).
Complex expressions like ēd rāy čē / this for because, cf. German deswegen, weil are decomposed and analysed separately as pronoun + postposition + subordinator.
Relative clauses were originally introduced by relative pronouns but those turned to relative particles and are annotated as subordinators.
Examples
- kū “that”
- ka or agar “if”
- čē “because, since”
- kē and ī (relativizer)
Border cases
The junctor čē is annotated as either the cojunctor “for” or the subjunctor “because”.
A complicated case is čiyōn “as, like, how”.
It does appear as a subordinator (marking the subordinate relation as modal) and as an adverb (answered by “so, in that way”). There are many instances, where čiyōn is only followed by a nominal phrase. Since Middle Persian basically lost case marking for nouns, it is not possible to test whether the relation is one of a preposition or of a subordinator with the subclausal verb being omitted. To keep the annotation simple, such phrases have been analysed as prepositional phrases.
SCONJ in other languages: [axm] [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [da] [el] [en] [es] [et] [fi] [fr] [fro] [ga] [grc] [hbo] [hy] [hyw] [it] [ja] [ka] [kpv] [ky] [myv] [naq] [nmf] [no] [oge] [pal] [pcm] [ps] [pt] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tr] [tt] [u] [uk] [urj] [vi] [xcl] [xmf] [yue] [zh]