tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 03 12:29:42 1998
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Re: Locatives and {-bogh} (was Re: KLBC Poetry)
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Locatives and {-bogh} (was Re: KLBC Poetry)
- Date: Tue, 3 Feb 1998 15:29:30 -0500 (EST)
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]> from "Marc Ruehlaender" at Feb 3, 98 09:29:14 am
According to Marc Ruehlaender:
>
> Despite the example of {SepmeyDaq luSovbe'lu'bogh}, I'd like to
> comment on charghwI's sentence below...
>
> > If we use the Type 5 "postposition" idea and combine it with
> > Krankor's use of {-'e'} to disambiguate, we can have these
> > different meanings more clearly stated:
> >
> > qachDaq Sopbogh HoD puq vIlegh.
> >
> > I saw the captain's child who ate in the restaurant.
> >
> Rather: "I saw the child of the captain who ate in the restaurant.", yes?
Nope. I meant "the captain's child, who ate in the restaurant".
The captain fathered the child, but the child ate in the
restaurant. It does end up being ambiguous, however. I
personally would not try to say, "The child of the captain who
ate in the restaurant" in Klingon. I'd break it into two
sentences. I see noun-noun as functioning as one noun with the
second one functioning in the larger grammatical context. The
first one just identifies the second. It gets messy any time
you try to modify the first noun.
As an example, just try saying, "I saw the big captain's child"
(which even in English is ambiguous, since it can be
interpreted as "I saw the captain's big child"). In Klingon,
you wind up with {HoD tIn puq vIlegh}, which looks REALLY strange.
Maybe there is canon for this somewhere, but I dislike it
enough that I'd split it into two sentences:
tIn HoD. HoDvam puq vIlegh.
It is simpler.
> Could it be disambiguated by
>
> ?{qachDaq Sopbogh HoD'e' puq vIlegh}
> (it's the captain who ate in the restaurant)
You can't put a Type 5 on the first noun of a noun-noun
construction. I wish you could, but you can't.
To say this, I'd fall back to two sentences:
qachDaq Sop HoD. HoDvam puq vIlegh.
> {qachDaq Sopbogh HoD puq'e' vIlegh}
> (it's the child who ate in the restaurant
It's a nice idea, but you can't put a Type 5 on {HoD}, so
putting it on {puq} doesn't tell us anything we likely didn't
already know. We already knew that it was the child that I saw
and I would tend to assume the child ate in the restaurant,
since I see noun-noun as one unit.
> or is the first one forbidden, because {-'e'}, being a type
> 5 noun suffix (or whatever), cannot appear "inside" a noun-
> noun construction and the relative clause as a whole functions
> as the N1 in N1-N2?
You are right about the first part. It is forbidden. As for the
second one, well, the first noun does modify the second, and a
relative clause also modifies its head noun. In both cases, the
modified noun functions as a lone noun in the larger
grammatical context. If that's what you mean, I agree.
> Marc Ruehlaender
> aka HomDoq
> [email protected]
>
charghwI'