tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Aug 25 16:56:22 1993
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Relatives; mu' chu' lIngghach
>From: [email protected]
>Date: 25 Aug 93 09:28:00 GMT
> [email protected] wrote on Tue 24 Aug 1993 18:39:39 -0400 (EDT) (Subject:
>more on relative clauses):-
> > ... Appleyard's message which mentioned his idiosyncratic suffixes, e.g.,
>-'I' and -lu', I was utterly surprised. I couldn't have fathomed that such
>liberalism existed in Klingon ...
> I did explain that my *`'I'` and *`-lu'` were not Okrand standard but my
>invention. I suppose that, if I must stick absolutely to TKD, and if I run
>again into a need for an instrumental, I will have to insert the English in
>marker brackets as is done with anything else that has no Klingon word so far:
> "I again scuba dived here" = `naDev ji[scuba_dive]qa'pu'`
> "I shot him with a phaser" = `pu'[using] vIbachpu'`
> "X is at the ship, Y is in the ship" = `DujDaq X, Duj[in] Y`.
> until Marc Okrand fills the gap. I feel that there is need to find all
>places where additions to known Klingon would be useful, so they can all be
>sent to him all at once for him to authorize or reject.
Come now, is an instrumental suffix really so vital? What do we do in
English? Well, we have instrumental prepositions, yes, and our
prepositions are analogous to Klingon type 5 noun suffixes, for the most
part. But what if we didn't have an instrumental "with"? Would we be dead
in the neutral zone? No! We'd do just fine with phrases like "I shot him
using a phaser", at a cost of one syllable. Why shouldn't Klingons make do
with similar idioms? What's wrong with "pu' vIlo'taHvIS vIbachpu'"? (while
I was using a phaser, I shot him). Granted, there's some ambiguity there,
but there always is, and I can easily see the idiom as becoming accepted to
mean that I used the phaser to shoot him. And the cost in Klingon,
granted, is three extra syllables (vI, taH, vIS), less for third-person,
but is that so high? Zipf isn't such a hard master as all that!
As to "in the ship" as opposed to "at the ship", I'd be *much* more
inclined to believe a solution with an unknown word in an open class than a
new suffix, which is probably a closed class. We have words for "area
above/below/between/etc.", I'd postulate the existence of a noun (I'm not
sure there are more suffixes than we know about, but there *certainly* are
more nouns!) meaning "area inside", say "XXX", and say "Duj XXXDaq ghaH".
It's completely analogous to "Duj bIngDaq ghaH"--"he is below the ship",
and so would be a natural construction.
> > ... Capt Krankor's column in HolQeD Vol.1 No.3 pp 5-6 [says re] relative
>clauses that "if there is a type 5 noun suffix on one of the nouns, that one
>must be the 'head noun.'"
> It isn't the headword in `'ejyo'waw'<Daq> targh bachpu'bogh HoD vIleghpu'` =
>"I saw the captain who shot the targ in the starbase"!
Yes; I'm not sure I buy this about *any* type 5 suffix. There's also the
ambiguity of which clause the "-Daq" is part of. Did the seeing or the
shooting take place there?
BTW, check me on your quoting convention: quoted text starts with a > and
continues until the next indented line? It's sometimes hard to tell where
it ends.
~mark