tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Feb 18 05:08:08 1994

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Re: Use of question words

Kevinvo':

>The problem arises when want to make one clause dependent on another.  Our
>tendency is to do this with the 'e' pronoun.  This is fine for most
>sentences, such as:
>
>	qama'pu' DIHoH 'e' luSov
>
>Here the "qama'pu' DIHoH" is a dependent clause which basically functions
>as the object of the verb (please excuse my use of English grammatical
>terms).  In English this works for "When he needs to stop speaking . . ."
>because this type of temporal clause can be used as the object of the
>verb, as in "A warrior knows when he needs to stop speaking."  It does not
>work in tlhIngan Hol, however, because according to TKD 6.2.5 an object
>clause which uses 'e' must be a complete sentence.  In other words, to use
>the 'e' pronoun you need to have two complete sentences.  "When he
>needs to stop speaking . . ." would be expressed in tlhIngan Hol as:
>
>	jatlh 'e' mevnISDI'
>
>Since this is not a complete sentence it cannot be used as the object of a
>verb.
>
>	Since I am not a list grammarian I do not want to overstep my
>bounds, but I still do not think that question words can be used except
>when asking a question.  I am open to being proved wrong.

But you just stated it yourself.  Things that use 'e' are in fact
two complete sentences.  A question *is* a sentence.  If I say:

nuqDaq yuch pol 'e' vISovbe'    "I don't know where he keeps the chocolate"

That's two sentences.  The first one is indeed a question, as
evident by the presence of the question word nuqDaq.  The two
sentences are:

nuqDaq yuch pol                 "Where does he keep the chocolate?"

'e' vISovbe'                    "I don't know that."

Because 'e' sentence pairs tend to be closely coupled and are
generally expressed as one English sentence, our convention is to
not use punctuation between them.  But we could.  Suppose I had
written it instead as:

nuqDaq yuch pol?  'e' vISovbe'  "I don't know where he keeps the chocolate"

Would you still have a problem with it?

                    --Krankor

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