tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jan 24 22:24:01 1998
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bug and hand
- From: Qov <[email protected]>
- Subject: bug and hand
- Date: Sat, 24 Jan 1998 22:23:09 -0800
charghwI' wrote:
>According to David Trimboli:
>> -----Original Message-----
>>
>> From: Qov <[email protected]>
>> Subject: Re: KLBC Poetry
>>
>> >At 00:59 98-01-10 -0800, tlhIbwI' wrote:
>> >}>The bug on the hand died.
>> >}Hegh ghopDaq 'oHbogh ghew'e'
>> >}
>> >Relative clauses with locatives
>>> >in them are hairy.
I got this much right. :-)
When charghwI' and SuSnuv both jump in to correct a KLBC and they
contractict each other as well as me, you know it's hairy. I'm going
to step through this and separate my ignorance from my opinions,
because there is a bit of both.
> >The only one we have is {meQtaHbogh qachDaq Suv
> >qoH neH}. I believe that what you have written follows the rules
> >as we know > them.
>
> No, it doesn't. You can use locatives in combination with relative
> clauses as long as the locative noun is either the subject or object
> of the relative clause. (Okrand said this somewhere, can someone
> tell me where? It was along the lines of, "I can't seem to make the
> locative be anything other than subject or object of the clause.")
One of us remembers this incorrectly. I remember Okrand as
saying that he could not make the relative clause thing work
for him for anything but subject or object of the MAIN clause.
In other words, his own {meQbogh juHDaq} example violates what
he said. We clearly need someone to pull out a literal quote
here. You may very well be right, but if you are, I
misunderstood when I heard this the first time.
> meQtaHbogh qachDaq
> In a house which is burning.
> The locative {qachDaq} is the subject of the relative clause. No
> problem.
Well, having a locative suffix on a noun acting as subject of
ANY clause is worthy of some concern. I know that you see it as
adding {-Daq} to the entire clause, and perhaps you are right.
It just makes me wince again. I guess I do that a lot.
> qIb HeHDaq, 'u' SepmeyDaq Sovbe'lu'bogh lenglu'meH He ghoSlu'bogh
> retlhDaq 'oHtaH. on the edge of the galaxy, beside a passage to
> unknown regions of the universe, (SkyBox card 99)
>
> This is an exceedingly complex sentence fragment, but it works. It's
> got one locative relative clause (making a grand total of two that
> we know about):
>
> 'u' SepmeyDaq Sovbe'lu'bogh
> to unknown regions of the universe
> The locative phrase is the object of the relative clause. Note that
> this should properly be {'u' SepmeyDaq luSovbe'lu'bogh}, though it's
> tricky to see why.
ug.
Ugh indeed. You know if Okrand anonymously posted his Skybox
stuff under the KLBC flag, I'd savage him over most of it, for
literally translating English grammatical forms.
> Unfortunately, the suggested sentence does NOT follow
> the known rules.
>
> Hegh ghopDaq 'oHbogh ghew'e'
>
> The locative is *modifying* the relative clause, not acting as its
> subject or object, and we have no way of knowing whether this is
> correct. From what Okrand has said, I'd have to say this DOESN'T
> work. (The fact that this isn't a verb but a pronoun just makes this
> sentence even ickier.)
Waaaay icky, especially since it seems to say the same thing as
{ghopDaq Hegh ghew.} Perhaps there may be other examples,
however, that really do need a locative for the relative
clause, so long as the locative noun is not the head noun of
the clause. I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with that
idea. My problem is that this is a convoluted way of saying a
simple thing, twisted by its English origins.
I would have said the same, and intended that meaning. But I can appreciate a
difference between "The bug died on the hand" and "The bug on the
and died," even though I didn't write it to express the differnce. I was
just putting the locative at differnt points in the English sentence to get
edy to move them all to the beginning.
Qov [email protected]
Beginners' Grammarian