tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Aug 08 01:57:48 1994
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Re: joke
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: joke
- Date: Mon, 8 Aug 94 13:53:35 EDT
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>; from "Mark E. Shoulson" at Aug 8, 94 11:23 am
According to Mark E. Shoulson:
>
...
> Hmm! I derived that from the same place you quoted; it never occurred to
> me that it could be read to imply that Klingon had no direct quotes. We've
> generally taken it to mean that indirect quotation did not exist in Klingon
> (I know that's how I always used it, and Nick, and I seem to recall Krankor
> also on this side.) I suppose one could find support from Okrand's
> translation of his examples by using direct quotes rather than reported
> speech, to imply that it should be treated as such.
Good point. Since the argument in favor of reported speech has
even LESS going for it, I accept the likelihood that direct
quotation is the way to interpret this.
> Also, it makes more
> sense to consider things as quotes and not objects (i.e. "I told you:
> 'don't interrupt me'" with a sort of colon between the sentences) because
> they can come in either order and are not restricted to quote-first. This
> raises the question of how you say "I said, 'hello'" with no addressee. If
> you don't consider the quote an object, it should be {jIja' "nuqneH"} or
> {"nuqneH" jIja'}, otherwise it should be {vIja' "nuqneH"}/{"nuqneH" vIja'}
> (tho {vIja' "nuqneH"} really looks icky to me). Maybe the second can only
> mean "I said 'hello' to him". This may be another Okrand-question.
Very interesting point. Of course, in the spirit of not having
infinitives and ALWAYS requiring one to think about subject and
object for every verb, perhaps a Klingon would ALWAYS indicate
to whom he was speaking when the original words were spoken.
Still, this appears in the section on Sentence-As-Object, and
if the quotation is not an object of the verb of speaking, then
why didn't he describe this somewhere else? Why put it in
6.2.5? As for the ugliness of placing the quote AFTER the verb
of speaking, I can only guess that it is the same kind of
shorthand that allows us to leave off the pronoun {'e'}. It is
such a common construction that they just don't CARE if it is
complete and correct.
If that's true, then the prefix for the verb of speech would
ALWAYS imply an object, either the sentence itself or the
person to whom the quotation is being given. Then again, TKD
does not give us enough information to rule on this. I think it
is DEFINITELY one of the things Okrand should clarify.
Lawrence? Hello, Lawrence? Do you hear me calling?
Anyway, this is definitely interesting. Does anybody know any
OTHER canon examples of this kind of sentence construction?
> ~mark
charghwI'