tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun May 31 14:36:33 1998
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Re: cheghta' be'nalwI' - jajmaj wa'DIch
>ja' pagh:
>>(1) I've always been curious about this usage - *Sarah* lupDuj =
>>"Sarah's plane". I'm not sure the Klingon can go there. She certainly
>>doesn't own the thing - it is just associated with her for the moment to
>>differentiate it from all the other planes at the airport. I don't know
>>if this usage is idiomatic to English or fairly universal. This will
>>probably start a long debate...
>
>The debate has already occurred at least once. Canon usage suggests that
>the noun-noun "possessive" construction is not strictly limited to owners.
>{peq chem} and {woj choHwI'} are the usual examples cited to support the
>expanded "attributive noun" interpretation.
>
>-- ghunchu'wI'
{*Sarah* lupDuj} is perfectly kosher. In fact, in ST5 Okrand used a nearly
identical phrase:
Vixis: nImbuS wejDaq 'ejDo' 'entepray' ngeHlu'pu'.
The starship Enterprise has been dispatched to Nimbus III.
Klaa: 'entepray''e'? qerq Duj 'oH!
Enterprise? That's Kirk's ship!
Obviously Kirk doesn't possess or own the ship, it's just closely associated
with him. There's another noun-noun construction here {'ejDo' 'entepray'}:
again the "starship" doesn't actually own the Enterprise, Starfleet does.
The confusion comes in Okrand's infelicitous choice of the term "possession"
for one noun directly modifying another. Indeed, in his first example in TKD
(p.31) {nuH pegh} "the secret of the weapon, the weapon's secret", there is
no question of ownership. He probably wanted to avoid terms like "genitive"
or "construct" in what was, after all, intended as a popular book on the
Klingon language.
Voragh