tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Aug 01 11:53:45 1996
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Re: qep'a' highlights (Hey let us in on it, guys)
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>Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 13:56:59 -0700
>From: [email protected]
>qaSDI' 96-07-30 09:29:56 EDT, jatlh ~mark:
>> >yabDu'raj tIjejmoH 'e' vImaS. I prefer that you sharpen your minds.
>>
>> Hmm... Interesting. Does the imperative work here? I think it does in
>> Esperanto (mi preferas ke vi akrigu...) Does it make sense though?
>> Something to think about. Maybe a simple indicative is more sensible.
>This sort of thing has always struck me as a slightly "marked" (I've never
>used this word in this way, or frequency, until signing onto this list!) way
>of speaking. Similar to the trick of saying something like
>~'Iv HoH 'e' vISov~ "I don't know whom he killed."
>A more accurate translation of this might be "Whom did he kill? I don't know
>that." Which is really two sentences. Sticking an {'e'} construction on here
>sounds like an afterthought. Examples of which may be found throughout this
>paragraph. Because I'm doing just that.
Actually, this is my preferred way of doing relative pronouns, mostly
because I can't think of another one that can handle the cases needed.
However, since I explicitly am NOT trying to imply that Klingon
question-words really are relative pronouns, etc., I've decided that when I
do it, I will punctuate it to show it properly, as a question used as the
object to another sentence: 'Iv HoH? 'e' vISovbe'. The fact that the
English translation winds up using a relative pronoun is an artifact of
translation, not an indication that Klingon relative pronouns are just like
the English ones. And there are probably examples where the
question-as-'e'-sentence diverges from relative pronoun use, and the writer
should watch for those and not use it mechanically. Remember that it's
very common for Klingon sentences to be shorter than English ones and to
encompass less material. Also that the sentence-boundary in Klingon
doesn't seem to be as rigid as in English (as the existence of 'e' for
sentence-as-object indicates).
~mark
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