tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Apr 07 07:19:50 1995
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Re: Relative clauses; veqlargh & ghe''or
>Date: Thu, 6 Apr 1995 04:21:39 -0400
>Originator: [email protected]
>From: "A.Appleyard" <[email protected]>
>(1) [email protected] (Nick Legend Nicholas) qwrote:-
>> human languages follow an acessibility hierarchy for the heads of relative
>> clauses. Any language that has relative clauses will allow their heads to be
>> the subjects of the clauses (eg. "the child who saw me") ...
>Hebrew and Arabic shoot a phaser through this tangle of ad-hoc word
>rearrangements. Their relative clauses start with a marker ({'ashEr} in
>Hebrew, {'allAdhii} in Classical Arabic, {'illi} or similar in most modern
>Arabic, rendered here as `wh-'), and the antecedent (if it isn't the subject)
>is referred to in the relative clause by a pronoun (word or suffix) which is
>in its usual place. (Arabs call that pronoun the `returner'.) Thus: the child
>wh- saw me; the child wh- I saw him; the child wh- I gave him the phaser; the
>child wh- I took his phaser; the child wh- I am bigger than him.
Yes; I always liked this arrangement. It's *very* flexible (Lojban
borrowed it from the Semitic languages). In explaining it to people, I
sometimes translate the "wh-" particle as "which-is-such-that:" so we get
"I read the book which-is-such-that my aunt gave it to you yesterday."
This presumably puts the Semitic languages near the end of the hierarchy
allowing them to have pretty much *any* noun as the head-noun of their
relative clauses ("the man which-is-such-that: you know his sister..."
etc).
>(3) I read once that the Fek'hlr / veqlargh and ghe''or appear in a Star Trek
>episode called `Devil's Due', which I haven't seen. What happens in that
>episode? In it, are ghe''or and the veqlargh mythical only? Or does anyone
>actually see or meet either of them?
I think I saw that one. I believe it was the one where there was a woman
who was posing as the devil-figure of a particular planet, which had a myth
that she would return on a specific date and enslave the populace in return
for some service in the far past. As she was insisting she really was this
mythical figure, she said she was also various other devil-figures, and
took their forms momentarily, including a gentleman in a bright red suit
with horns and a pitchfork, and a drooling Klingon we were told was
Fek'hlr, tho we don't hear anything much else about him. Come to think of
it, Picard takes the same form at one point...
~mark