tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Feb 20 08:21:38 1995
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Re: KLBC: Another load of tribble....
According to R.B Franklin:
>
> On Thu, 16 Feb 1995, R.B Franklin wrote:
>
> > Also, I found one canon example of a locative on the head noun
> > of a relative clause on DS9 trading card #99:
> >
> > loS...qIb HeHDaq, 'u' SepmeyDaq Sovbe'lu'bogh lenglu'meH He ghoSlu'bogh
> > retlhDaq 'oHtaH.
> > "It waits...on the edge of the galaxy, it remains next to a route which
> > they come to in order to travel to unknown regions of the universe."
>
> After reading this again, I think Okrand made a mistake. Shouldn't {'u'
> SepmeyDaq Sovbe'lu'bogh} be {'u' SepmeyDaq luSovbe'lu'bogh} instead?
This is the root of the problem with the whole example. You
would be right if {Sepmey} were the object of {Sov} but it is
not. It is merely the locative... but then it is NOT the
locative of {Sov}. It is the object of {Sov}, while it is the
locative of {leng}. But objects don't take {-Daq}.
In short, it is a jumbled mess with no explanation. My concern
is that it will inspire a lot of very confusing text that may
be written to emulate this new appendage to the grammar with no
explanation from Okrand as to just how this should work.
I don't think the mistake was to forget the {lu-}. I think the
mistake was to allow a relative clause head noun to be the
locative of another verb.
Think about it. If {leng} were transitive and had an explicit
object, this sentence would be a royal mess, since you can't
use {-'e'} to label {Sepmey} as the head noun of the relative
clause. At that point, our new noun could be the subject and
head noun of the relative clause or the object of the main
verb, or both and the locative could apply only to the relative
clause or to the main verb or both, or it could be (as it was
intended) as the direct object and head noun of the relative
clause and the locative for the main verb.
It is not merely complex. It weakens the strength of Klingon
grammar, since position does for Klingon what helper words does
for English, and this weakens the specificity of meaning
related to word position within a Klingon sentence.
I think Okrand was given weird text to translate in the first
place and that he tried to mirror it too literally and fudged
this solution which does not deserve to be emulated.
> yoDtargh
charghwI'
--
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