tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Aug 09 12:05:53 1995
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Re: }} Special Klingon Cards
- From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: }} Special Klingon Cards
- Date: Wed, 9 Aug 1995 12:05:53 -0400
>Date: Tue, 8 Aug 1995 19:28:34 -0700 (PDT)
>From: "R.B Franklin" <[email protected]>
>Tue, 8 Aug 1995, ghItlh Soqra'tIS:
>> (vIghItlhmeH veqlargh mura'ta'... Damn! Now I'm second guessing myself....
>> what I'm TRYING to say is "The veqlargh ordered me to write that", someone
>> correct me please, (*sigh* it's no fun if you can't get it correctly!))
>>
>> [Soqra'tIS shuffles off down the hall muttering "What's the bloody
>> Object... What's the bloody Object... ? The men in white coats jump out of
>> an adjacent hall way and give Soqra'tIS a nice new white sports coat with
>> wrap around sleeves..... ]
>"Fek'lhr" is the subject and "order" is the verb. The reason you're
>probably confused is that this is apparently an example of a ditransitive
>construction: in Klingon, the verb has two objects.
>I would avoid this thorny issue (Okrand has not explained how to handle
>ditransitive verbs fully) and write the sentence as a quote:
>yIghItlh mura'pu' veqlargh. ("Write it," Fek'lhr ordered me.) or
>mura'pu' veqlargh yIghItlh. (Fek'lhr ordered me, "Write it!")
That's a working method.
There really isn't the double-object problem here, even if you don't use
quotes. After all, you have two sentences: "I wrote it" is one, and it's
the object of "Fek'lhr made/caused X". So you could use "'e'" and do
"vIghItlh 'e' qaSmoH veqlargh". But we can do better than the tired old
qaSmoH. You can do "veqlarghmo' vIghItlh". Or "muraDmo' veqlargh
vIghItlh."
~mark