tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Aug 14 09:47:39 1996
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Re: qep'a' highlights (Hey let us in on it, guys)
- From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: qep'a' highlights (Hey let us in on it, guys)
- Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 12:47:37 -0400 (EDT)
- In-reply-to: <[email protected]> (message from WillMartin on Tue, 13 Aug 1996 15:06:44 -0700)
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>Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 15:06:44 -0700
>From: Will Martin <[email protected]>
>On Wed, 31 Jul 1996 13:56:59 -0700 [email protected]
>wrote:
>> 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.
>I'd prefer a less idiomatic:
>yabDu'raj tIDubmoH 'e' vImaS.
Fair enough, but the question I find more interesting is whether or not the
imperative is right here, or should it be normal indicative
(i.e. "yabDu'raj tIDubmoH 'e' vImaS" or "yabDu'raj boDubmoH 'e' vImaS"?)
>> 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."
>And for this, I'd prefer:
>nuv HoHbogh vISovbe'.
>I don't know the humanoid whom he killed.
That works too, I suppose. But it is not generalizable.
Similarly, for "I don't know if he has arrived," I tend to use NOT -chugh,
but rather "pawpu''a'? 'e' vISovbe'."
>You may complain that this is ambiguous with one of the
>meanings paralleling:
>nuv HoHbogh vIghovbe'.
>If you want to express it as "I don't know the identity of
>the person he killed," then the Klingon Way (page 59) gives
>us the use of {qab} as symbol of one's identity, so you
>could say:
>nuv qab HoHbogh vISovbe'.
>Meanwhile, this is even MORE ambiguous, since it could
>obviously mean, "I don't know the bad person whom he
>killed." We could tweak things a bit.
>nuv qabna' HoHbogh vISovbe'.
This sounds like "I don't know the person's face he killed," as if he
killed the face, not the person. This is one of those cases Nick played
with, where the head-noun of the relative pronoun is the N1 in a N1-N2
construction. Apparently this is quite rare among languages. I'd think it
would have to be
nuv HoHbogh qabna' vISovbe'.
Which, of course, is ambiguous for "I don't know the person whom the
definite face killed" or "I don't know the definite face which killed the
person," but I'm not losing sleep over those possibilities.
~mark
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