tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jul 12 18:51:51 1998

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Re: QoghIj qaD

---Alan Anderson <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> mujang SuStel:
> >>Qermaq jang SuStel:
> >>>>nuq vIje' vIneH?
> >>>
> >>>Ick: question as object.
> >>
> >>In this case, it *is* a question, so it doesn't sound wrong to me.
> >>The question word substitutes for the answer, exactly the way
questions
> >>are supposed to work in Klingon.
> >
> >In other words, you *like* this one, so you're not going to argue
against
> >it.
> 
> I'm not going to argue against it because it carries the correct
meaning
> if the grammar is interpreted as explained in The Klingon
Dictionary.  I
> "like" it basically because it works the way Klingon interrogatives
are
> intended to be used.
> 
> >I believe Okrand recently told us (or rather, told one of us at a
> >convention) that questions cannot be objects.  In {nuq vIje' vIneH}
you have
> >a question as an object.  Whether you like it or not, it is a
question as
> >object sentence.
> 
> It will take some more explanation than the near-hearsay of Okrand's
> statement that a "question" (not my quotes, but I'm not sure if they
> are Okrand's either) cannot be used as an object before I will state
> that {nuqDaq maba' DaneH?} is ungrammatical.

I don't think it's ungramatical, but that's because I see it as {maba'
DaneH} with a {nuqDaq} in its proper position to make the statement
into a question.

> >Perhaps it IS correct, but I haven't seen any objective reason to
believe
> >that.
> 
> The primary argument against Sentence-As-Object was that they weren't
> obviously using the question word to ask a question, and if they were
> interpreted as a rhetorical question, the object of the second verb
> was referring not to the questioning sentence itself but to a single
> word of its answer.  That flaw does not exist in {nuq vIje' vIneH}.
> I think your "Ick" is a knee-jerk reaction to something that merely
> resembles a pattern of poor or incorrect grammar.  Like {-ghach}, it
> isn't a priori a bad thing.

Coming in to the middle of this, I was baffled as to the intended
meaning.  {nuq vIje' vIneH?}  */I want what do I feed?/  */I want what
will I buy?/ In comparison to ?/nuqDaq maba' DaneH/ it looks like
"what do I want to feed/buy" but that doesn't make much sense either.

I guess the question is, can we group (nuq (vIje' vIneH)) instead of
((nuq vIje') vIneH)?  I don't think so. 
==
Qov - Beginners' Grammarian 

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