tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Apr 20 14:06:08 1998

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Re: pab mu'mey



<<chuvmey>> bolIjlaw'. Okrand tells us that Klingon linguists
consider there to be three kinds of words: nouns, verbs and
left-overs. He gave us words for all three. You want terms to
classify words into subtypes Klingon linguists apparently do
not consider.

charghwI'

According to Steven Boozer:
> 
> : 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 Collegiate 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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