tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Aug 02 00:27:44 1995
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Re: }} -mo' and N1's N2
- From: [email protected] (Alan Anderson)
- Subject: Re: }} -mo' and N1's N2
- Date: Tue, 1 Aug 1995 23:27:44 -0500
yoDtargh wrote:
>The way I think of it, is that the last noun is the main noun and
>the noun which preceeds describes that noun in some way.
I challenged his use of the word "describes" which I felt implies an
adjectival use of the noun. I pointed out that TKD (see sections 3.3.4 and
3.4) calls N-N "the Klingon possessive construction for a noun possessed by
another noun."
~mark defended yoDtargh with an argument for a looser interpretation of N-N.
~mark writes:
>It's more than my opinion, though. We have canon:
>
>"peQ chem" is "magnetic field". "peQ" is magnetism and "chem" appears to
>be field. Magnetism doesn't *own* the field (how can it own anything?),
>but rather the field is modified by magnetism, it's somehow associated with
>it.
Well, "magnetism's field" certainly sounds right to me. It's the field
which belongs to magnetism. I don't see a need to dilute the
"possessor-possessed" rule for this one.
> "HoS lIngwI'" ... "Hergh QaywI'" ... "tuj muvwI'" ... "woj choHwI'" ...
>
>So I think that there is plenty of evidence for a broader interpretation of
>N-N constructions.
I see a pattern here. I agree that these examples stretch the concept of
possession pretty far if you take them as simple noun-noun phrases, but
I've got a counter-argument. Notice that each of them is of the form
noun-verb-wI'. Instead of relaxing the possession concept in general, we
analyze the N-VwI' slightly differently. Instead of translating {HoS
lIngwI'} word-by-word to get "energy generator" or "generator of energy",
we start with the sentence {HoS lIng} "it generates energy" and put the
{-wI'} on the verb to get a descriptive phrase "thing which generates
energy". All other type 9 verb suffixes work on entire sentences this way;
why shouldn't {-wI'}?
I'm very proud of this argument, but I'm willing to listen to criticism.
-- ghunchu'wI'