tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Aug 14 12:20:28 1995

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Re: }} {-wI'} on sentences

According to R.B Franklin:
> 
> Fri, 11 Aug 1995, ghItlh ghunchu'wI':
> 
> > You falsely accuse me, sir...
> 
> You are correct, in this example, "meat" is not an adjective, it is an 
> attributive noun.  Adjectives are a part of speech whose function is to 
> modify nouns.  In English, many nouns can be used as adjectives.  They 
> are technically not adjectives, they are attributive nouns.

Thank you. I knew what it was, but did not have the correct
term for it. I like the term "attributive noun". It makes
perfect sense here, and I can see, as you suggest, that an
attributive noun can convey some of the types of genitive
relationships in a noun-noun construction. In particular, it
explains the use of the term {tlhIngan Hol}. Here, the
attributive noun is {tlhIngan}.

... 
> The word "meat" in "meat eater" in also an attributive noun.  "Meat" is 
> neither an adjective not the object of eat.

I completely agree. I did not mean to say that it WAS and
adjective, but that it was grammatically functioning as an
adjective in English. Note that if it would be functioning as
an adjective in Klingon, ... well, one much remember that
Klingon doesn't HAVE adjectives. It has verbs that can be used
adjectivally or which can imply a state of being describable by
an adjective. {tIn} is not an adjective, though it can describe
a noun as the adjective "big" would describe it.

So, as we know that Klingon can convey the function of an
adverb through either adverbials or verb suffixes, and we know
that the function of prepositions can conveyed through noun
suffixes or appropriate nouns, we should now know that we can
convey the function of an adjective either with an appropriate
verb or by an attributive noun used in a noun-noun construction.

> Here's a different example.  {romuluSngan maghwI'} means "Romulan traitor".
...

Good example well explained.

> 
> {romuluSngan maghwI'} is also not possessive.  The traitor is not owned or 
> possessed by the Romulans.
> 
> I believe that the first noun in a N-N construction can behave like an 
> attributive noun.

qaQochbe'chu'.

> > >> It's probably an accident that it matches the word order for genitive or
> > >> adjective, or maybe the English adjective form is derived from the "noun
> > >> clause" form.)
> 
> > >There is no noun clause here. There is a noun with a modifier
> > >which happens to be another noun. I believe that the most
> > >common interpretation would be that the first noun is genitive.
> 
> I think some of the these terms are being used rather loosely and 
> inaccurately.

I thank you for providing better terms to use. As one
non-linguist who is inexplicably drawn to the study of language
to another, you have improved the tools with which I can do
this thing I am drawn to do.

> "Possessive" describes ownership; it answers the question "whose".
> E.g.  Whose book is that?  {ghunchu'wI' paq 'oH.}  (It's ghunchu'wI''s book.)
> 
> "Genitive" includes the possessive, but it can also denote a relation.

Thank you. I did not know for sure that possessive was a subset
of genitive.

> You can describe the innumerable uses of "of" as genitive.
> "an act of agression"; "a glass of water", "a house of straw", "the 
> reading of a book"; "the Book of John".
> 
> For the record, I don't think the N-N construction can have all the uses 
> or meanings the word "of" does in English.  I would translate some of the 
> above examples differently in Klingon without using a N-N construction.

I'd have the biggest problem with "the reading of a book", but
that relates to the awkwardness of {-ghach}. If there were a
noun for "agression", I'd have less of a problem with it, but
as it is, I'd be drawn to recast it in order to sidestep the
vagaries of {-ghach}. The suffix has its place, but most of the
time people actually try to USE it, they wind up creating the
kind of words that ~mark complains about so much. If you start
out knowing what the word means, you see how the word was
created. If you start out seeing what the word is, you can
easily be quite confused about what it might mean.

This is the opposite of what I'm trying to do with this
language. When I write in Klingon, I want readers to know what
it means even if they do not know ahead of time what I had set
out to say.

> "Adjectives" are a part of speech whose function is to modify nouns:
> "big", "bad", "heavy", "slow".

Note that Klingon doesn't have adjectives. "Slow" is especially
interesting, since the closest you can get to "slow" in Klingon
is an adverbial. You can't just "be slow". You have to do
something specific and have that action described as happening
slowly.

Since that is what being slow really means, it points to the
inherant weirdness of the adjective "slow". It is really an
adverb that has transmogrified into an adjective.

> "Attributive nouns" are nouns that are semantically functioning in the 
> role of an adjective:
> "music festival", "rain poncho"; "insect repellant"; "love song" 
> In Klingon, you would often make a compound noun to translate these but 
> we also some canon examples of some attributive N-N constructions.

I tend to think of this as the union between compound nouns and
the noun-noun construction. There are terms that would be valid
as either one word or two. I tend to think of compound nouns as
noun-noun terms that are commonplace enough as pairs that the
pair itself becomes a single word.

> >  -- ghunchu'wI'
> 
> yoDtargh

charghwI'
-- 

 \___
 o_/ \
 <\__,\
  ">   | Get a grip.
   `   |

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