tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Apr 25 19:38:32 1998
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Re: Top Gun reply to KLBC
ja' Qermaq:
>...Qov is also right that we have no way of saying for sure that <'e'> can
>be one of the two compared nouns in a SAO construction. But I suspect this
>is at worst intelligible - <jajlo' ghopDu'wIj vIlo'taHvIS qagh vISop 'e' pov
>law' Ho''oy' pov puS> "I eat qagh with my hands at dawn. It's better than a
>toothache."
I don't like it at all. At first read, it makes no sense to me. After I
ponder it a while, I see what you're trying to do -- and I reject it utterly.
{'e'} can only be used as the object of a sentence. The nouns in a {law/puS}
are certainly not objects. If anything, they act a little like subjects, and
Sentence-As-Subject is *not* something we do.
When I see the word "it" as the subject of a sentence, my Sentence-As-Subject
detector goes to Yellow Alert. Your Klingon sentence activates the Red Alert
sirens as soon as I manage to start parsing it.
Instead of calling on {'e'} as the word of choice here, how about something a
bit more concrete like {wanI'} or {nay'}?
{rut qagh Qop vISop. nay'vetlh qaq law' Ho''oy' qaq puS} "I occasionally eat
dead qagh. That dish is preferable to a toothache."
-- ghunchu'wI'