Most natural way to write sentences of the type "A verbs that B verbs that C verbs that..."


**A)**

I think the typical way to say

> Tanaka said that Yamata knows where the building is

in Japanese is

> 田中さんは山田さんが建物はどこか知っていると言った

Maybe it's more natural to say "the building's location" instead of using a
interrogative clause, but the point is, the overall sentence structure takes
the pattern

...S3(S2(S1OV1)V2)V3...

For small sentences, it's easy to keep track who is doing what. But when the
recursion depth is larger, it gets harder to understand. Is there a way to
reorganize the sentence such that the subject of each relative clause is next
to the verb? I was thinking that it might be possible to make the sentences
OSV order. Thus the pattern could be

...((OS1V1)S2V2)S3V3...

Here is my attempt, please tell me of any particle errors, or if the idea
itself is flawed.

> 建物はどこか山田さんが知っているのは田中さんは言った

**B)**

The inspiration here is the Eddington controversy:

> If A, B, C, D each speaks the truth 1 in 3 times (independently), and **A
> affirms that B denies that C declares that D is a liar** , what’s the
> (conditional) probability that D was speaking the truth?

in particular I'm trying to translate the bolded part

EDIT:

From the answers I realized I swapped 山田さん and 田中さん




> 田中さんは山田さんが建物はどこか知っていると言った

To understand the word order in a complicated sentence like this, it is useful
to break it down into parts called _bunsetsu_ :

![The bunsetsu tree of the sentence
田中さんは山田さんが建物はどこか知っていると言った](https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/18SgzooROTSKk7KTg55s_102yVbnZMVC1QdDiYIr-3hQ/pub?w=800)

Each arrow represents that everything before the arrow modifies the bunsetsu
immediately after the arrow. For example, 建物は modifies どこか, and both 山田さんが and
建物はどこか modify 知っていると.

(Two caveats:

  1. It is probably more correct to say that 山田さんが and 建物はどこか modify 知っている, and that と is attached to the whole 山田さんが建物はどこか知っている, rather than 山田さんが and 建物はどこか modify 知っていると. But I am restricting the scope to the structure among bunsetsu, ignoring the structure inside them.

  2. Not every sentence fits this model cleanly. There are sentences whose structure is explained better if we allow a modified part to consist of more than one bunsetsu. But I stick to the basic case here.)

A modifier must come somewhere before the bunsetsu it modifies (although
[there are exceptions (shameless
plug)](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/5605/varying-word-order-
for-stylistic-effect/5610#5610)). Where a bunsetsu has more than one modifier,
their relative order is flexible. So 山田さんが建物はどこか知っていると…… and
建物はどこか山田さんが知っていると…… are both grammatical. However, 建物は山田さんがどこか知っていると…… is not,
because some part of the modifier 建物はどこか comes before another modifier 山田さんが
and the other part comes after it.

(If you know the terminology in computer science, the diagram like the one
above is a rooted tree where an arrow points from a child to a parent, and I
have just claimed that any post-order traversal gives a grammatical ordering
of words.)

Then there are some desirable properties of the word order:

  * A subject should come first.
  * A modifier and the bunsetsu it modifies should be close to each other, so a longer modifier is better to come earlier.
  * Ambiguity should be avoided.
  * Too many _toten_ (、) should be avoided.
  * …

In this case, I would give up putting the subject first, and write

> 建物はどこか山田さんが知っていると田中さんは言った。

(As you stated, it is simpler to use 建物の場所 in this sentence, but I am focusing
on the order of the words.)

Returning to your attempt:

> 建物はどこか田中さんが知っているのは山田さんは言った

It is incorrect for several reasons. I hope that you can figure out why from
the explanation above.

