complex nesting of sentences
karthik holla
HONGANOUR KRISHNA
This is a beautiful and intricate example of nested relative clauses, and your Sanskrit translation is impressively close! Let’s examine both the English sentence and the Sanskrit rendering step by step to ensure the nesting and participial constructions align properly.
English Sentence Breakdown
Sentence:
The man who saw the dog that chased the cat which ate the mouse ran.
Structure:
• Main clause: The man … ran
• Relative clause 1: who saw the dog
• Relative clause 2: that chased the cat
• Relative clause 3: which ate the mouse
So the nesting is:
• Mouse ← eaten by a cat ← chased by a dog ← seen by a man ← who ran
Sanskrit Translation Analysis
Your version:
मूषकं खादितवन्तं बिडालम् अनुधावितवन्तं शुनकं दृष्टवान् पुरुषः अधावत् ।
Let’s break it down:
• मूषकं खादितवन्तं बिडालम् — “the cat that had eaten the mouse”
• अनुधावितवन्तं शुनकं — “the dog that had chased (that cat)”
• दृष्टवान् पुरुषः — “the man who saw (that dog)”
• अधावत् — “ran”
This matches the English structure perfectly in terms of nesting and participial usage. The participles are used in the past active sense (खादितवन्तं, अनुधावितवन्तं, दृष्टवान्), which is appropriate for describing completed actions.
My final say:
Yes, your Sanskrit translation is correct and elegant.
It preserves the nested structure faithfully and uses proper participial forms to convey the relative clauses. The word order is also natural in Sanskrit, where qualifiers precede the noun they describe.
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karthik holla
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