tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Aug 12 10:06:22 1995
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Re: }} {-wI'} on sentences
- From: [email protected]
- Subject: Re: }} {-wI'} on sentences
- Date: Sat, 12 Aug 1995 10:06:22 -0400
The continuing saga...
> The only two ways I see to "deal with it" are: 1)
>to expand noun-noun yet further to encompass everything that "N1's N2" or
>"N2 of N1" means in English, or [....] I personally prefer to limit
noun-noun to as
>close to "possessive" as possible.
>
>MEanwhile, I see a dilution in the quality of translation if Klingon's
>N1-N2 is interpreted to mean exactly "N1's N2" or "N2 of N1" in English.
You have called on charghwI' to clearly state his position on the
interpretation
of /woj choHwI'/, and yet you misrepresent your position with these
two statements. If I understand you correctly, you do not, in fact, want to
limit N-N to 'possessive.' I know you give examples of what you believe
'possessive' should mean, but they go beyond what the lay reader
interprets "possessive" to mean. With any field, there's a technical jargon
that develops to handle this problem, and it's the same with linguistics.
When I wrote my article, I was responding to a claim by Guido that N1-N2
was interpreted identically to compound nouns. I think it says something
that it never even occurred to me that /woj choHwI'/ and /Hergh QaywI'/
were anything but compound nouns. I intentionally left the meaning of
genetive ambiguous, not presenting a list like you did in your post,
in order to prevent my argument from becoming circular. [genetive
includes these things, stipulated. This is one of these things, thus,
this is an example of genetive]. You give a list of what you think
"possession" is, show how these sentences are not included in
that list, and then conclude that, therefore, these things aren't possessive.
Instead, I made a claim about
some "relation" between the nouns, and described how each canon
example could fall within that vague categorization. And, I believe that
any more clearly stated interpretation of possession and genetive
constructions will probably have to come from Okrand.
To re-state your last sentence,
>MEanwhile, I see a dilution in the quality of translation if Klingon's
>N1-N2 is interpreted to mean exactly "N1's N2" or "N2 of N1" in English.
Specifically, not this. We absolutely don't want to claim some formulaic
transformation between Klingon and English constructions. In particular,
we don't want to conclude that the N1-N2 construction is the appropriate
grammatical construction for the partitive in Klingon, though it is in
English. I though I'd made this point clearly in my article, but I guess
not.
I think that's enough for today...
> -- ghunchu'wI'
--Holtej