tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Apr 07 11:23:48 1995
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Re: Relative clauses; veqlargh & ghe''or
- From: [email protected] (chuck)
- Subject: Re: Relative clauses; veqlargh & ghe''or
- Date: Fri, 7 Apr 1995 11:23:43 -0700
>>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
>Go on with your bad self Marky Mark. I and I dread.
>