tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Sep 08 23:01:15 2001

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RE: QAO's (was Re: Klingon WOTD: ghorgh (ques)

While I like ghunchu'wI''s recastings, I have others to suggest as well. I'm
even a bit surprised at how closely we agree on this one.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Friday, September 07, 2001 10:32 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: QAO's (was Re: Klingon WOTD: ghorgh (ques)
>
>
> batlh ghItlhta' ghunchu'wI' quv:
> >My basic point is that {'e'} is a pronoun with a very narrow
> purpose.  That
> >purpose is not defined to let it "answer" a rhetorical question.  I'm
> >uncomfortable with the idea of letting real-world usage so strongly
> >override the published rules of the language.
>
> This is a good point regarding 'e'. I would like to add only one other
> thing, and it is somewhat reminiscent of the corresponding debate
> among the
> lojbanists. It concerns sentences of the following genre:
>
> (a) ghorgh Haw' yaS 'e' Sov HoD
>
> Since ghorgh (and chay', qatlh, etc.) are naturally reserved for
> questions,
> this makes the default interpretation of this sentence that of a question,
> i.e. "When does the captain know the officer fled?" Awkward? Yes, but what
> did you expect?

Brilliant.

This is the crux of what I've been arguing about for years. As you later
point out, we've all been saying {nuq vIjatlh DaneH?} for years, intending
for the whole sentence pair to be a question. Remember that this really is
{nuq vIjatlh 'e' DaneH}, but we drop the {'e'} because the second verb is
{neH}. Meanwhile, even ~mark and Krankor think that using a question word
literally as a relative pronoun is bad. Note that the result of doing that
bad thing is a statement, not a question. Then there's this proposed
"indirect question" thing that's been haunting us. Note that the sentence
pair result of this "indirect question" is a statement, not a question.

So, in SAO, if you insert a question word in the first sentence, is the
resulting sentence pair translated as a statement or a question? What is the
grammatical scope of the question word? I suggest that of the following
three statements, likely only one is true. Consider which of the three you'd
feel most comfortable with being exclusively true:

1. We can say that {nuq vIjatlh DaneH?} is grammatically wrong and we've all
been making this mistake for years.

or

2. We can say that the proposed IQAO (Indirect Question As Object) resulting
in a statement is probably wrong.

or

3. We say that question words in SAO sometimes result in questions and
sometimes result in statements and there's no way to tell which except by
context.

Enjoy thinking this one out.

Meanwhile, another casting of your example is:

Haw'meH yaS poH Sov HoD.

> A more feasible example:
>
> (b) nuqDaq yuch pol ghaH 'e' Dalegh

yuch polmeH ghaH Daq Dalegh.

> Again, a question by default, thus lit. "You see that she keeps the
> chocolate where?", or "Where does she keep the chocolate? You saw that."
> More naturalistically, "Where did you see that she keeps the chocolate?"
> Pragmatically, it seems (to me) to work out kind of like, "Where does she
> keep the chocolate? You saw that. [So tell me already.]"
>
> This interpretation should take precendence over the non-interrogative
> interpretation, even if the post-'e' verb is an "answering" one,
> as in (a).
> Never mind that such things can be said *even* more succinctly in Klingon,
> cf. ghunchu'wI's own examples. If we had understood that to begin with, we
> would never have had this debate.

I suspect we would have, anyway.

> ghunchu'wI', if you do an article on this, I urge you to include some
> information on sentence-level recursion in Klingon. (That could
> easily span
> several pages. {{;-) Klingon does have sentence-level recursion,
> but how it
> works with 'e' and net is a good, interesting question (likely to cause
> riots). Frankly, it's nice to have this mechanism in Klingon. In some
> languages, it's hard to say things like, "What do you want me to
> say?", viz.
>
> (c) nuq vIjatlh DaneH
>  lit. You want that I say what?

If indeed this is not grammatically correct, I'd be really hard pressed for
another way to cast it. Maybe:

mu'tlhegh vIjatlhbogh yIngu'!

jIjatlhmeH mu'tlhegh yIchup.

That sort of thing. It works, I guess. If we've been wrong all these years,
I can adapt.

> That's what I usually say to people when they just want to hear
> what Klingon
> sounds like, and I don't feel like summoning to mind "taH pagh
> taHbe', etc."
>
> Andrew H. Strader
>   http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~strader


charghwI'

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