tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jun 28 12:54:30 1995
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Re: More on "Which?"
- From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: More on "Which?"
- Date: Wed, 28 Jun 1995 15:54:29 -0400
- In-reply-to: <[email protected]> (message from David E G Sturm on Wed, 28 Jun 1995 13:30:12 -0400)
>Date: Wed, 28 Jun 1995 13:30:12 -0400
>Originator: [email protected]
>From: David E G Sturm <[email protected]>
>Good point, ~mark, on ?'arDIch and ?nuqDIch....
>I might extend the analogy a bit to suggest that
>?'arDIch would ask which of a number of sequentiae one might want,
>and
>?nuqDIch would ask in what position one would want something placed in a
>sequence.... sort of a "where do you want it" question.... to which the
>answer would be "first, second, etc." thus the use of nuq follows the norm.
Sorry, you lost me with this. "which of a number of sequentiae.."? I'm
confused.
I would see "*'arDIch" as asking where in a sequence something fits in, as
in maybe "which guard killed the prisoner?" and I expect an answer like
"the third". In this case, "which" means something like "the how-many-th",
and thus "*'arDIch" makes a lot of sense. Using "nuq" instead yields "the
what-th" which sounds reasonable but only because we blur that meaning
over "how-many-th", which is really what the sentence is asking. Near as I
can tell, my view of "extending the analogy" puts "*'arDIch" where you'd
put "*nuqDIch", at least in part because I have no idea what you mean by
"which of a number of sequentiae."
Once again, the reason I don't like "*nuqDIch" is that it attaches a
numerical suffix (-DIch) to a question-word that doesn't seem the least bit
numeric (nuq). No matter what you say about possible meanings, unless you
address that basic problem the construction will *still* bother me (now,
whether or not the fact that it bothers *me* is at all significant is
another question altogether).
~mark