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## Background, problem statement

Very often, I find myself in situations where I have to build structurally
complex sentences in Japanese, and find myself struggling, trying to put all I
want to say in a single sentence. As far as the other languages I know well
enough go, it's not an issue since

  1. they have relative pronouns that resolve many ambiguities (that, which, who, whose, qui, que, dont, auquel…),
  2. their grammar allow incremental stacking of relatives, starting with the base of the sentence (see example).

I guess there are two viable solutions to my problem, but I never really paid
attention to which was usually chosen in spoken (nor, in fact, written)
Japanese.

## Solution 1, the most likely

Break your sentence in many small chunks, make a sentence of each chunk, and
convince yourself that unlike French or English, it's not awkward to have a
train of sentences like "Aです。Bです。AとBの関係はCです。Dです。CとDの関係はEです…"

## Solution 2, the "wished" one

It is possible to express unambiguously sentences like

> On Monday, the dog that ate the pudding that I cooked and whose owner's
> sister I met yesterday will be castrated.

My attempt at this sentence would be like:

> 月曜日には昨日妹さんにあった飼い主がいる私が作っていたケーキを食った犬が去勢手術を受ける。

But even though I feel quite satisfied with this simple, quite linear one, I
don't think it's likely to be heard… (FWIW, the sentences I build are often
describing inter-related complex mathematical relations, which makes thing
even harder…)

The recent remark on
["invertion"](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/2943/or) makes me
wonder even more if this common to have such sentences, because inversion may
cause ambiguities to arise:

> 日本人の相手がいる人

The person with a Japanese interlocutor? The Japanese with an interlocutor?

> 相手の日本人がいる人

The partner with a Japanese person? The person with a Japanese partner?

## Questions

  * Do you have issues expressing complex relations in Japanese?
  * How do you get round this issues?
  * Are there relation patterns in English that you will definitely break into several Japanese sentences?
  * Do you have trouble understanding the aforementioned kind of Japanese sentences?

And subsidiary question, if ambiguity is definitely a major issue to all: how
could the language not evolve to avoid ambiguities?
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grammar comprehension relative-clauses ambiguity
How to unambiguously express sentences with lots of relative propositions?
I don't see anything wrong with solution 1, but not because it makes it easier
for the speaker. Breaking up complex ideas also makes things easier for the
listener to digest, piece by piece. Of course it's ridiculous to take it to
the level of "Here's this. Here's that. That relates to this in a certain way.
. . _ad nauseam_ ". But you can and probably should limit how much information
you put into one sentence, then logically work in more complex relationships
in separate sentences. Even in English, I don't think I would ever think to
put all the information contained in your example into a single sentence. I'd
be more likely to say something like "Yesterday I met the sister of the guy
whose dog ate that pudding I made. She said the dog will be fixed on Monday."
Or even more simply "You know that dog that ate the pudding I made? I met his
owner's sister yesterday. Apparently, the dog's getting fixed Monday." In
Japanese, maybe 「昨日、私が作ったプリンを[Edit-see comments
(X食われたX)]食った犬の飼い主さんのお姉さんに出会った。犬は月曜日に去勢されるよ。（へへへへ）」
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This happens a lot in patent translations, so you might get some hints by
searching for these terms: 特許 請求項 翻訳

This site has this example:

>   1. A dynamic random access memory including at least two banks, each of
> said banks including memory cells arranged in rows and columns, said memory
> cells storing data provided by at least one bit line and by at least one
> data line, the dynamic random access memory comprising: first switching
> means for selecting one of said at least two banks; and second switching
> means connected to said first switching means for selecting one of said
> columns, wherein said first and second switching means couple one of said
> bit lines to one of said data lines, enabling data to be written into or
> read out of memory cells common to said selected bank and to said selected
> column.
>

>
> [請求項１]
> 少なくとも２個のバンクを含み、前記各バンクが行と列に配列されたメモリ・セルを含み、前記メモリ・セルが少なくとも１本のビット線と少なくとも１本のデータ線から供給されるデータを記憶するダイナミック・ランダム・アクセス・メモリであって、  
>  前記少なくとも２個のバンクのうちの１個を選択する第１のスイッチング手段と、  
>  前記第１のスイッチング手段に接続され、前記列の１つを選択する第２のスイッチング手段とを備え、  
>
> 前記第１および第２のスイッチング手段が、前記ビット線のうちの１本を前記データ線のうちの１本に結合して、前記選択されたバンクと前記選択された列に共通のメモリ・セルにデータを書き込み、またはそこからデータを読み取ることができるようにする（ことを特徴とする）、ランダム・アクセス・メモリ。

[source](http://www.honyakunoizumi.info/column/Column_PatentTrx.htm)

[This site](http://xenakis.cocolog-tcom.com/) has many more translation
examples.  
The wording in patent translation is obviously very formal and it's probably
not what you want, but I guess if you want to investigate whether one language
is somehow better at unambiguously expressing sentences with lots of relative
propositions, this could be an interesting corpus.
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You’ve probably noticed this but English is a right-branching language,
meaning subordinate clauses generally get deeper as you go to the right.
Japanese in contrast is a left-branching language. Language is always spoken
from left to right (forgive the conflation of speaking and writing), so
naturally a right-branching language lets you deeply nest subordinate clauses
with little confusion about how the clause relates to the utterance as a
whole. If you were to deeply nest subordinate clauses in Japanese, the
listener would hear the deepest subordinate clause first.

When speaking Japanese, you already have to keep a sort of stack (in the
programming sense) of components in your head as you hear the sentence, and
delay interpretation until hearing the predicate (or until you’re confident of
what the predicate will be, given the flow of the dialogue). Deeply nesting to
the left, hence, greatly elongates this stack; so unless the speaker can keep
more than 7 components in mind at once, they are forced to make an
interpretation without full information, which can in the worst case lead to
them having to re-hear the sentence if their interpretation turned out to be
irreparably wrong.

Those sorts of garden path sentences can be used for comedic effect by utterly
changing the meaning of an entire long utterance with a のではない, らしい, or some
other ending. In those cases, one can simply negate or slightly alter there
existing interpretation, so there isn’t a great mental burden or a need to
rehear the sentence. This also applies to relatively semantically-light
function words like こと、よう, etc. that don’t give the listener much mental
burden when transitioning from a long relative clause.

At the same time, this is what makes deeply nested sentences like those found
in English unnatural in many cases. Moderately long sentences with one, rarely
two, layers of nesting can be fine. The subordinate clauses should be kept
brief in most cases if they modify something that is crucial to their
interpretation, but you’ll find some flowery novels that push them to the
limit.

When translating an English sentence with deep nesting or lengthy subordinate
clauses, though, you’ll just have to break up the sentence a bit. “I met a guy
who knows a guy x 100 who knows Ariana Grande.” would not translate well to
Japanese without breaking it up. A good test may be to reread what you wrote
in Japanese two days later and see if you can easily interpret it without
recalling the English.

Another tactic is to translate relative clauses by putting them in parentheses
after the word they describe. For example, “which is located in Shimbashi,
Minato-ku Tokyo-to” could be rendered as “(東京都港区新橋にある)” immediately following
the noun it describes (preceding any particles). This induces some mental
burden to interpretation but not as much, and since they are parenthetical the
reader may choose to ignore them on first pass.
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