tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jun 23 06:19:10 1995
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Re: More on "Which?"
- From: [email protected]
- Subject: Re: More on "Which?"
- Date: Fri, 23 Jun 1995 09:15:34 -0400
In a message dated 95-06-23 03:50:46 EDT, peHruS writes:
>targhmey nuq targh Daje' DaneH
>= Which targ are you going to buy?
As in, "what targ of the targs". A couple of points. We have NO IDEA how to
indicate a partitive sense in Klingon. This was one of the points of my
article in HolQeD 3:3 and 3:4. Perhaps it will turn out that this is how we
convey a partitive, but we just don't know.
This issue aside, we continue...
>Here we see redundancy being employed to indicate the question: which? In
>that Klingons have a tendency to "clip" almost as much as they can get away
>with, <targhmey> will often get dropped, leaving:
>
>nuq targh Daj' DaneH
The process of clipping isn't really described very thouroughly. But every
example that Okrand discusses in section 7 involves the clipping of a verbal
prefix. There's no mention, explicitly or in the examples, of either noun or
verb suffixes, much less a component of a complex construction like a N-N.
There are those like Nick who favor "zero anaphora", and the language seems
to support this, but I wonder whether this can be extended into a complex
construction like N-N. My first reaction is "ghobe'".
That said...
>Is this going to cause problems? Now we have a noun-noun construct <nuq
>targh>. Does this mean "targ of what" or "what targ," quite literally in
>that order.
I admit I haven't been following this discussion very closely, although I've
been aware of it. I realize that in English we make a distinction between
WH-proforms for full NPs ("what") and for partial NPs ("what targ"). Why do
we want to assume that Klingon does the same? In what sense is /nuq targh
Daje' DaneH/ unsuitable, critically ambiguous, or insufficient for the
intended meaning? We make a distinction in English, we don't in Klingon. It
happens. It's not a problem.
>bIQochchugh pagh bIQochbe'chugh pejang
qajangpu'neS.
>peHruS
--Holtej