tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Oct 29 19:24:48 1996

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Re: The FAQ section 3.5 -- charghwI' !?!

ter'eS writes:
>As a practical matter, then, how do you say things like "How do you
>say..." or "I said...".  consider the following exchange:
>
>SuvwI' wa'DIch:  chay' yaSvaD bIjatlh?
>SuvwI' cha'DIch:  jIjatlh.  bIjatlh 'e' yImev.
>wa'DIch: bIjatlh 'e' vISov, 'ach jIjatlh 'e' vImevQo'.  chay' yaSvaD bIjatlh?
>...

Huh?  This doesn't seem ambiguous to me at all.  You've made it very
clear that {jIjatlh} and {bIjatlh 'e' yImev} are separate sentences,
unrelated to one another, because you punctuated them with a period.
If this were a spoken exchange, I expect that the pauses, or lack of
them, would make the meaning obvious.

Take another look at TKD's description of verbs of saying in section
6.2.5, where it says "The two phrases simply follow one another...."
The quoted phrase and verb of saying are not referred to as separate
sentences, and no punctuation is used to separate them.

>I know some people don't like to sully Klingon discussions with issues
>like practicality, but some of us want a language we can actually use.
>If you want to study an unintelligible language, why not switch to Lojban?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't lojban supposed to be unambiguous
and completely *in*telligible?

-- ghunchu'wI'

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