tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Feb 15 08:21:39 1995

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Re: KLBC: Another load of tribble....

Okay, back for round 2:

According to toDbaj, AberdeenDaq tlhIngan:
> 
> nuqneH!...
> 
> pIj yIH nay'mey DaSamlaHbe' Qe'meyDaq Suchbogh
> tera'nganpu'. 

I want to look at this sentence again, since last time I left
off the last word. Considering that, we still have problems.
You are trying to say, "In restaurants where humans visit,
you often cannot locate tribble dishes." First, I'd recommend
the verb {tu'} instead of {Sam}, since the former relates more
directly to successfully finding something ("discover, find,
observe, notice") while the latter relates more to the process
of searching ("locate, seek and find"). I tend to think of
{Sam} as the union of {tu'} and {nej}, and while you can
certainly {nej} for tribbles, you cannot {tu'} them in these
restaurants, so the use of {tu'} seems to better focus on the
part of {Sam} that you cannot do.

Meanwhile this whole phrase {Qe'meyDaq Suchbogh tera'nganpu'}
doesn't work. I've never seen any example of a relative clause
that had a head noun that was not the subject or object of the
verb with {-bogh}. You are trying to assign a locative as the
head noun of a relative clause. I can find no grammatical
justification for it. If it WERE justifiable (and I don't think
it is), then it would have to go where the head noun belongs in
the main sentence -- at the beginning -- because it is acting
as the locative for the main verb. Then, we would have problems
disambiguating the head noun, since we can't mark it with
{-'e'} because it already has the Type 5 suffix {-Daq}.

It's just one of those grammatical knots that makes me want to
scream, "Recast! recast! There has GOT to be a more graceful
way to express this."

tera'ngan Qe'meyDaq pIj yIHmey nay' tu'be'lu'.

> yIHmey Surghbe' machqu'mo' 'ej taj DaruQ nuqDaq 'e' DaSovbe'.

The first four words are a real mess. One way or the other, the
word order is wrong and trying to figure out WHICH way they are
wrong is irritating. Until I hit {'ej} I see, "Because of the
small, unskinned tribbles...", but there is no verb here and
you have a conjunction that tells us that we have already seen
a main verb.

I'm presuming that the {-mo'} as a Type 5 noun suffix applied
indirectly to {yIHmey} according to TKD 4.4. If you instead
intend for {-mo'} to be the Type 9 verb suffix, then the word
order is wrong because {mach} is intransitive. Every time I try
to come up with a correction, I run into problems because your
meaning is so unclear. Looking after {'ej}, I begin to wince.

WORD ORDER! WORD ORDER! WORD ORDER! IF YOU CAN'T DO A BETTER
JOB WITH YOUR WORD ORDER THAN THIS, PLEASE STICK TO SIMPLER
SENTENCES. ASKING ME TO UNTANGLE THIS KIND OF SPAGHETTI WILL
ONLY MAKE ME ANGRY. OKAY?

Repeat after me:

Locatives always come before verbs. {nuqDaq} is a locative.
Anything followed by {-Daq} always comes before the verb to
which it applies. If that verb has an object, it comes before
that object. Do not try to apply a locative to a noun. That
happens in English, but it does not happen in Klingon, where it
only applies to the action of the verb.

> yIH DaSamchugh yInbogh, chuSqu'. 'ach roqegh 'IwchabvaD nay' 'oH yIH'e'.

Look at the word {yInbogh} and try to explain why it is where
it is. Where is its head noun? Why is there a verb between it
and its head noun?

In English, if you use the right "helper" words, you can say
almost anything with your words in almost any order. In
Klingon, the word order does a lot of the work that helper
words do in English. If you write Klingon in the same kind of
random word order as English, just dropping all the helper
words, since they don't exist in Klingon, then you write
garbage that nobody can read.

The first discipline of anyone speaking Klingon must be to
place the words in the correct order. Again, if you cannot
handle this in simple sentences, you definitely cannot handle
it in complex ones.

>From the top, in Klingon, the most important thing is the verb.
That's why it gets so many affixes and why it can form a
sentence all by itself. The sentence structure begins with any
environmental settings for the action of the verb, like
locatives telling you where the action happens, or time stamps
telling you when the action happens, or adverbials telling you
how the action happens. Next comes the object of the action of
the verb. Next comes the verb itself. Last is the subject.

Relative clauses wrap themselves around the subject or object
of the verb. For all we know, Klingon only supports restrictive
relative clauses, since all examples show restrictive ("the
child who hit the officer" -- and not some other child) and not
nonrestrictive ("Captain Krankor, who likes racing targ's in his
spare time" -- there clearly being no confusion about who
Captain Krankor is which would be clarified by statements about
racing targs) relative clauses. A restrictive clause restricts
the head noun setting it apart from other similar nouns while a
non-restrictive relative clause simply adds a parenthetical
comment about the head noun without serving to specify this
noun from a larger set of similar nouns.

Before the incoming mortar fire, I'll point out that I may be
alone in this opinion about restrictive vs. nonrestrictive
relative clauses. Okrand does not distinguish between them,
though so far as I can remember, he has never given an example
of a nonrestrictive relative clause.

Adjectival verbs are all "stative" and intransitive, which
means that they cannot follow a noun unless the verb is being
used as an adjective. Transitive verbs cannot be used as
adjectives.

Sorry for spouting off so many things relating to grammatical
rules, but so far you have mangled all of these basic rules. It
doesn't mean that you are a bad person, but it does mean that
you need to step back a bit and work on speaking more simply
until you can handle long sentences without scrambling the word
order.

I appreciate efforts to write in Klingon and do not wish to
discourage people, but large submissions with major problems in
essential word order and grammar bury me. I do not believe that
you are learning from it. There is simply too much here for me
to respond to with a high quality of attention and too many
corrections for you to absorb meaningfully. Please offer either
simpler grammar or smaller quantities until you get better
control over your use of the language. At some point, I need to
protect myself (and any succeeding BGs) from burnout.

> Qapla'
> 
> -- toDbaj

charghwI'
-- 

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

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