Relative clauses are phrases such as “the man who sold you this is a cheat”, “the horse that died collapsed here”, or “show me the house where you live” – subordinate clauses being used to describe or more closely specify a noun (the man, horse, or house). They are introduced by special words: in English, words like “who” and “where”, precisely resembling the question words “who?” and “where?”, but in this language by entirely distinct words such as e, nui which literally mean “something”, “somewhere”.
To form a relative clause, take the basic sentence containing the noun in question:
and the sentence to be converted into a subclause:
first reorganising the sentence so that the repeated noun is replaced by a dummy word like e and moved to the start:
and put the two sentences together like this:
The relative clause e·da … fáru·ap is inserted immediately after the noun it describes. Note that relative clauses can be hard to detect in English – the above might have been disguised as “the king I gave the horse is strong”.
One last complication: if the subject of the subclause and the subject of the main clause are both the same thing, and if the clause is only an incidental description (“I ate some fish, which I had caught”) not a defining criterion (“I only ate the fish that I had caught”) then a slightly different form is often used – the participial phrase (see following).
If you're wondering “Where are the participles? Where are the descriptive relative clauses?” – well, actually both of these conventional syntactic categories (and more) translate into one rather tricky idiom I'm labelling the “participial phrase”, easily recognised since it always starts with the word en.
Participial relative constructions are seen even by native speakers as somewhat formal and convoluted, so they can probably be safely ignored by students at this introductory level.