tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jun 09 05:52:24 1995
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irrealis
- From: Alan Anderson <[email protected]>
- Subject: irrealis
- Date: Fri, 09 Jun 95 07:50:39 -0700
I've been perusing the archives of this list from before I joined it.
One of the unresolved issues I find is how to indicate the "irrealis"
or the "subjunctive" or whatever. For example:
"If the emperor agreed with me, you would be a dead man."
As I see it, Klingon doesn't have a way to deal with hypotheticals.
I have a solution for this sentence in particular, and I think it's
general enough to take care of many similar situations. Just take
"If X had happened then Y would have happened" and turn it into
"Because X did not happen, Y did not happen." There's no need to
consider a nonexistent event as a hypothetical cause of another
nonexistent event. The quite real lack of occurrence of an event
can easily cause something else not to happen. This is something
like DeMorgan's theorem applied to language; the converse of the
inverse of a sentence's phrases is the same thing as the sentence
itself.
{muQochtaHmo' ta' bIHeghbe'}
"Because the emperor disagrees [continuously] with me, you don't die."
This implies that you WILL die if the emperor stops disagreeing,
but it doesn't imply that the emperor is likely to agree the way
"If the emperor agrees with me, you are a dead man" might.
-- ghunchu'wI'