tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Apr 28 12:40:26 1995
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Re: law'-puS in reverse?
On Fri, 28 Apr 1995 11:32:32 -0400, "William H. Martin" <[email protected]> said:
[re the {law'/puS} construction]
> It is unlike anything else in the langauge. I believe that it
> is also one of the few elements in the language which really IS
> specifically reflecting a specific human language. While I may
> certainly be wrong (since I heard this as a rumor), there are
> Native American languages which have only this sort of
> structure for comparatives.
It is true. One of the 30 languages which Greenberg used as guinea pigs
for his fundamental work on linguistic universals (I can't recall its name
at the moment, but I'll look it up) says literally `X is big, Y is small'
for `X is bigger than Y'. Very likely `X is big much, Y is big little'
is also found somewhere, and that would come very close to Klingon.
The only unusual thing about the Klingon construction is that its two
halves are not well-formed sentences: {X tIn law'} means `many big Xs'
(if anything) on its own, not `X is big(ger)'. That may or may not be
the case in the Amerindian languages which have inspired Okrand.
[re topic/focus]
> Mostly, in other languages, it seems that a topicalized noun is
> set apart from the rest of the sentence, while in Klingon, the
> topicalized noun must fit gramatically into the sentence. It is
> positionally a normal noun in a sentence, requiring normal
> justification for its position. It simply has the topicalizing
> suffix on it (which essentially emphasizes the noun).
And it must be a subject or an object, since {-'e'} is incompatible
with the four overt case suffixes.
> Take the example: "As for Krankor, his ship is too small." The
> topic is Krankor, and he is not even represented at all in the
> sentence. You can't say this in Klingon, because the only
> logical place for "Krankor" in the sentence is a noun-noun
> possessive structure with {Duj}, but we are explicitly
> instructed that we can't place a Type 5 noun suffix on the
> first noun in a noun-noun construction.
And rightly so: topicalisation is something that is done to immediate
constituents of the sentence, and {Qanqor} in {Qanqor Duj} is a
constituent of a noun phrase. You might be able to use the same kind
of circumlocution as in English, and say something like `Referring to
Krankor, his ship is too small'. {Qanqor qellu'DI' machqu' DujDaj.}
--'Iwvan