tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 23 09:25:04 1995
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Re: Relative clause ambiguity
- From: "A.Appleyard" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Relative clause ambiguity
- Date: Thu, 23 Feb 1995 16:46:14 GMT
- Priority: normal
Nick Legend Nicholas wrote:-
> charghwI' recently complained about the use of forms such as: {DujDaq
vIqIpbogh vIlegh}, because they are ambiguous (between "I saw him in the ship
that I hit", and ).
"William H. Martin" <[email protected]> replied (Subject: Re: Relative
clause ambiguity):-
> ...I guess I didn't make my point clear. My problem is not merely that the
result is ambiguous. My problem is that the pieces don't fit well. When I see
{DujDaq vIqIpbogh vIlegh}, I see a relative clause with no head noun and I
don't know what to do with it.
{DujDaq vIqIpbogh vIlegh} = "ship-in I-hit-(him/it)-REL I-see-(him/it)".
i.e. you don't know which of the prefix pronouns means itself and which is
there merely to agree with a noun. Likely the only way out of this ambiguity
is to put in a separate object pronoun:-
(1) {DujDaq vIqIpbogh ghaH vIlegh} = "I saw him in the ship that I hit"
(2) {DujDaq ghaH vIqIpbogh vIlegh} = "I saw the ship in which I hit him"
OK, likely separate pronoun with a verb likely should be for emphasis only,
as Latin `ego scribo' rather than `scribo': but how else to disambiguate here?
But even with the {ghaH} (2) looks like "I saw him who I hit in the ship".
For the intended meaning of (2) I would likely have to say two sentences:
{DujDaq vIqIp: Daqvetlh vIlegh} or = "I hit him in a ship: I saw [that ship |
it]". Ambiguities and compulsory long-winded constructions occur: rules get
bent: languages evolve. It was the same in Swahili, which once only had a
relative prefix put on the verb just like in Klingon, and many "in which" and
similar constructions had to be said as two sentences - until a rule got bent,
and an old verb `amba' = "say" got used as a pronoun = "the aforesaid, that"
and slid into being used as an English-style relative pronoun.
If Klingon word order was flexible enough to put the {DujDaq} after its
verb, (2) would become {vIqIp DujDaq 'oH vIlegh}, and {'oH} would start to
look a bit like an English relative pronoun, and the construction would be
clearer with the {'oH} next to its antecedent.
An English multi-nested relative clause constructions can be clear because
every antecedent can be brought to the end of its clause, whether by varying
the S-V-O order to O-S-V (e.g. "the man <who I saw>"), or to O-V-S by putting
the verb in the passive, and so every clause can be completed before starting
the next clause. This would not be so in Klingon. (How illegal is {vIqIp
DujDaq} in that order, anyway? Its meaning is clear.) I have also seen
ambiguous Klingon relative constructions which would be disambiguated by a
comma between the clauses.