tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jan 16 13:50:53 1995
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Re: HolQeD 3.4. -wI'
I've been rethinking the deal with -wI' a little (please pardon lateness; I
had trouble getting to mail lately). I may be backing off a little from my
statement that beQwI' must be allowed to mean "flat object". I *do* still
maintain that it can, but I think it would sound unusual in just any old
circumstances. Watch:
Note that Glen's opinion is based on the TKD's listing of the meanings of
-wI' as "one who is, one who does, thing which does." I'm not sure
(despite the use of "who") that there's any implication of "person" here:
all he says is "one."
I took to thinking about languages like Hebrew in which adjectives and
nouns are sort of conflated. So the word "big" really means something
closer to "big one" and "The book is big" is closer to "the book is a
big-one" and so on. And I thought about how I'd use those adjectives as
nouns and what they'd mean (figuring that "big" as a noun would be
something close to "tInwI'"). And sure enough, just saying "gadol" for "a
big thing" sounded weird. With no other referent, it sounded more likely
to mean "a big person", just as Glen had said for tInwI'. But that's
because it, like tInwI', means "a big one"... a big what? One set of
things whose subsets/members we regularly talk about is the set of people,
so that seems to have become the default somehow. Note that this is true
for English as well, as Glen himself defaulted to understanding "one" as a
person. But there's more than one "one," so to speak. I could say "I was
watching for ships, and saw a big one," or "We each took one pie: Kang took
the small one and I took the big one." In each of these situations, I'd
use the bare adjective-as-noun in Hebrew, and indeed, the tInwI'
construction in Klingon sounds very nice to me.
So, still, I think -wI' can be attached to stative verbs for objects... but
maybe not completely freely without sounding a little weird.
~mark