tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 23 15:55:55 1995

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Re: Relative clauses

>Let me try a different approach; what do you think of:
>'u' Sepmey'e' luSovbe'lu'bogh pa' jIleng.
>"As for the unknown regions of the universe, I travel there."

Interestingly enough, this lies at the very heart of the issue of the nature
of -'e', i.e., topic or focus. I myself am not on top of the issue, being
merely a 17-year-old of no one's time nor consideration, but I had a
conversation with d'Armond Speers, in which we dealt with this issue, and
this very type of construction arose. It was "As for the Ferengi, I sold him
a phaser" {verengan'e', ghaHvaD pu' vInob}. Earlier, Nick had mentioned to me
that the {ghaHvaD} may be omitted, despite the fact that it also neglects to
indicate the relationship of {verengan} to the verb (as a dative syntactic
marker), because many languages allow for such ambiguity. d'Armond was not
inclined to agree with this, and I suspect that it may have to go either way
without Word from Okrand.

We need an explanation of -'e' first.

d'Armond also suggested a reprieve to allow {verengan'e' pu'} as a N-N
construct, accidentally forbidden in TKD where it says no type 5 suffixed
noun may be first in a N-N.

Your construction here is highly relevant, maybe because it introduces
another way one would express a locative topic (/focus?).

'u' Sepmey'e' luSovbe'lu'bogh, pa' jIleng

pa' may be better replaced by bIHDaq, but it is rather irrelevant to say
before we ask O Exalted So-and-So Okrand as to the actual nature of -'e'. But
this sentence follows the pattern that may be set if and when we get news
about -'e'.

A side note: if -'e' is topic, then we may even be dealing with things like
{jIH'e' jIlujpu'}. Just a thought.

Guido

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