tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Nov 20 12:21:59 1994
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Re: Interesting construction
- From: [email protected]
- Subject: Re: Interesting construction
- Date: Sun, 20 Nov 1994 15:20:41 -0500
>> There will be those who criticize {jInIDbogh}, but I would ask you to
>> consider the construction as a whole first.
I wish to reiterate this very point, because I think that thruout this post,
you had been disregarding it.
>The problem here is that you are not trying the freighter.
>{-bogh} belongs to the verb that ties the freighter to the main
>verb. The extra layer there of the {-meH} purpose clause screws
>this up. Note that {-meH} and {-bogh} are both Type 9 suffixes.
>I think you have come up with one of those situations Okrand
>was trying to avoid by requiring that you cannot have two
>suffixes of the same type on the same verb.
>The freighter is the freighter which you attack. It is not the
>freighter which you try. What you REALLY want to do is
>nominalize the {-meH} purpose clause, which Klingon will not
>let you do.
Let's go back to the concept as expressed in English. "The freighter which I
try to attack escapes." You see, the English structure maps directly to the
Klingon. In other words, in the English you are not "trying the freighter"
either. I am not saying that {Haw' tongDuj vIHIvmeH jInIDbogh} is a literal
translation from the English. I did not extrapolate it from the English
structure. It's a functionalism. I look at {HIvmeH nID} as one verbal unit
(maybe you don't, but that's ok). Look at the whole structure again and then
look at how it maps to the English; and again, remember I'm not saying that I
extrapolated this from the English, because I didn't.
>Basically, you are trying to open a bottle with a sledge
>hammer. You need a better tool. (Try your betleH.) Recast it to
>form three sentences:
>Haw' tongDuj. 'oH vIHIvmeH jInIDpu'. HIvqa' veqlargh.
It works this time, but not always. I have at least one example from Hamlet
5.1 where I had to use a similar structure, and it couldn't be recasted in
the way you describe here without oversimplification.
Also remember that this is a functionalism. By that I mean that it is not a
truly logical construction. Pragmatics or context, as ~mark has pointed out,
play a big part of interpretation of such functionalistic constructions. That
is what a functionalism is. Not necessarily logical, but pragmatic. Basically
that can be said of all natural languages.
Also, regarding your comments on relative clauses, restrictive vs,
non-restrictive. I have also noticed a severe lack of non-restrictive {-bogh}
clauses. Plus the incapability of Klingon to grammatically distinguish
restrictive vs. non-restrictive seems to stem from the syntactic nature of
{-bogh} clauses.
As for the extrapolation of ~mark's making {'e'} the head noun of the
relative clause, perhaps I didn't make myself clear enough in my last post on
that. I don't approve of *{'e''e'} or any suffix on {'e'}. I am notorious for
being taken far too seriously when I start getting imaginative and speculate
on grammatical transformations and the like. That was one reason I got
'driven' off the list last time. But I'll try to play it down. Plus I'm still
working on Hamlet, so I won't have too much list posting time, either.
As you were.
>> Guido
>charghwI'
Guido