tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jun 09 17:02:20 1997
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Re: Object wIjatlhlaH'a'
|>From: [email protected]
|> [...] Still, I get the feeling we can put verbs of speaking after that
|>"sentence" which is spoken, thus identifying the "sentence" as the Object
|>of the verb of speaking.
|
|I think this is canon, that verbs of speaking can precede or follow the
|sentence spoken. Okrand says so. There's some debate over whether or not
|the sentence spoken thereby does or does not constitute the object of the
|verb of speaking. The current feeling is that it doesn't, but personally I
|can't really shake it myself. I keep wanting to hear vI- and Da- prefixes
|instead of jI- and bI-.
|
|~mark
My feeling exactly. However, I looked through my corpus again but, aside
from the well-known joke with the prisoner and the guard ('avwI'vaD jatlh
qama' <<jIghung>> etc.), could only find this from CK:
<<'eb Qav!>> jatlhpu'.
He said, "Last call!"
Which proves nothing since Klingon verbs take no verb prefix in the 3rd
person singular--with or without an object. (Oops! I know: more accurately
they take a zero prefix, but that's just a matter of terminology). The
position of {'eb Qav} before {jatlh} is suggestive though. Other than
these, the only object Okrand has used with {jatlh} is a language.
Well, there's always his new book come Fall...
BTW you'll note that {'eb Qav!} is an incomplete sentence which shows that
Klingons, just like the rest of us, *do* talk in sentence fragments relying
on context for clarity. Some grammarians don't allow beginners to do this.
But this is merely a stylistic preference, not a grammatical rule.
Pedagogically, of course, this is a good idea: you should understand the
rules thoroughly before you can break them with any style.
-- Voragh