tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Nov 19 17:52:02 2000

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Re: Grammar Highlight Each Day (nominative pronouns)

ja' peHruS:
>Disclaimer:  This highlight is incomplete and uses terminology other than
>that of TKD.  Check TKD for further study on the following subject:
>nominative pronouns.

Check *where* in TKD?  You don't explain what "nominative pronouns" are,
and the phrase isn't in the table of contents.  The closest match is
section 5.1 "pronouns" on pages 51-52.

>Klingon has no particular word for the English concept of the copulative "to
>be."  Instead, Klingon says the object of the sentence and a pronoun.

*I* know what you mean by "copulative", and most people who already know
Klingon undoubtedly recognize what you're talking about when you mention
"to be" along with pronouns.  But the beginners at whom these "Highlights"
are targeted probably don't, and they certainly wouldn't find it in a
typical dictionary.  What they'll very likely find when they try to look it
up has nothing to do with grammar!  The word in *my* dictionary is
"copula", and the common school term for the concept is "linking verb".

Now that we see you're talking about using pronouns to mean "to be", I have
to wonder why you chose to label this highlight as talking about
*nominative* pronouns.  The "to be" usage treats them like verbs, not like
nouns.  At least "To be" does appear in the TKD table of contents:  section
6.3, pages 67-68.

>Examples:
>
>loD jIH = I am a man (loD = man; jIH = I)
>
>There is no word for "am" here.  Don't assume it is part of {jIH}.  Just
>realize that no copulative is necessary in the Klingon way of thinking.

This advice is misleadingly incomplete enough that I'm going to call it
wrong.  TKD does avoid including the "is" idea when translating the pronoun
in isolation the on the one instance it might have, but the last part of
TKD section 6.3 discusses using things other than pronouns as the subject
of a "to be" sentence, and such usage does require the pronoun-as-verb to
be present.  Whether or not the Klingon way of thinking needs one, it is a
necessary part of the Klingon way of *speaking*.

I suspect you're projecting onto Klingon your knowledge of another language
(perhaps Hebrew).  There are languages which put two nouns next to one
another to express ideas like "I am a man" or "the gift is a book" without
any other syntax.  Klingon is not one of those languages.

>This highlight does not go into how the pronouns have other usages
>(accusative, dative, genitive, allative, ablative--words which are not even
>in TKD).

Why do you even mention these words if you're not planning to use them?

-- ghunchu'wI' 'utlh

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