tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Dec 03 11:09:55 1996
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Re: Embedded wh-questions
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Embedded wh-questions
- Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 14:08:23 -0500 ()
- Priority: NORMAL
Pardon my digging back to the original.
On Mon, 2 Dec 1996 10:06:51 -0800 d'Armond Speers
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> There's a question that's been gnawing at me for a while...
>
...
> Now, in Klingon. Let's say, the officer hits the child.
>
> puq qIp yaS.
Fine. Well, not if he were MY kid, but grammatically, I have no
problem...
> Who does the officer hit?"
>
> 'Iv qIp yaS?
Fine.
> "I think that the officer hit the child." (And we can argue about
> "Klingon"-sounding this syntax is):
>
> puq qIp yaS 'e' vIQub
puq qIp yaS 'e' vIpIHbej.
> Now, what I'm wondering is, how do we say, "who do you think the officer
> hit?"
>
> 'Iv qIp yaS 'e' DaQub?
The problem is that your verb mismatches the function you seek
for it. A question is not an acceptable object for the verb Qub.
You ask questions, you don't think them. Also, a question only
carries to another verb as a quotation, not as an object. That
is MY problem with quotations as objects of other verbs.
Instead, consider:
nuv'e' qIpbogh yaS yIngu'!
Or:
vay' qIpba' yaS. 'Iv DapIH?
> This doesn't feel right to me. It doesn't feel like we're questioning the
> matrix clause here. It feels more like "Who did the officer hit? You
> think that." Other attempts by my mind to twist this into a more
> reasonable form (semantically) fail syntactically.
I think you are trying to build the grammar deeper than it goes
without collapsing. This is why many long English sentences
become multiple Klingon sentences in translation. It becomes
obvious which elements carry from one sentence to the next. You
don't need to pack it all in before the same period.
charghwI'