tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Apr 17 10:31:36 1998

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Re: pab mu'mey

: But, how in the world could we say "pronoun" with the existing vocabulary?
: Bear in mind that the Klingon pronoun can clarify the subject or object when
: it might otherwise be ambiguous, can stress the same when it is not
: ambiguous, and can act without a <wot> as a sort of "pro-verb" to imply
: being a thing or at a location. While the other terms (with the provisional
: exception of the adverbial - I cannot find the word to use, but I know it's
: there someplace) are readily translatable in terms of how TKD defines them,
: the pronoun defies my best attempts.
: 
: Qermaq

Glen Proechel once proposed *{DIpvaD tam} "substitute for the noun", but
*{DIpvaD} is a far too literal translation.

Merriam-Webster's CollegiateŽ Dictionary defines "pronoun" as:

     pro.noun n [ME pronom, fr. L pronomin-, pronomen, fr. pro- for +
nomin-, nomen 
     name--more at pro-, name] (1530): any of a small set of words in a
language that 
     are used as substitutes for nouns or noun phrases and whose referents
are named 
     or understood in the context 

We already have an excellent word for this: {lIw} "a substitute, stand-in,
temporary surrogate" (KGT), which exactly describes the role of a pronoun in
a sentence. Okrand wrote in HolQeD 5.1: 

     The word {qa'meH} ... has become accepted as a noun in its own right,
meaning 
     replacement in the sense of something that takes over for or is used
instead of 
     something that is gone or that has been lost. It is not used for a
temporary 
     substitute or a stand-in; the word for that is {lIw}.

Although {lIw} is perfect by itself in a grammatical context, I suppose you
could also say *{lIw DIp} - or even *{lIwDIp}! - for "a stand-in noun".  

What we really need is a word for "adverbial".


Voragh

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