tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Apr 20 09:24:54 2002
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Re: to'nech 71-80
From: "Sean M. Burke" <[email protected]>
> >The only words that are actually verbs of speaking are /jatlh/ and /ja'/.
> >Anything else is just a regular verb.
>
> TKD 6.2 says net/'e' aren't used "with verbs (say, tell, ask, etc.)". I
> wasn't terribly sure what would constitute a "verb of saying",
Neither were we, until Okrand told us. It's in HolQeD somewhere . . . .
If you want to say, "He asked me 'Did you kill the captain?'" you say
mughel; jatlh HoD DaHoH'a'?
He asked me a question; he spoke, "Did you kill the captain?"
> but inferred
> that it wasn't just two words, what with the "etc." there.
I'm not terribly thrilled with the restriction either, but there you are.
> And "ask" seems
> to mean that {tlhob} is in that class too, even tho that's not a verb of
> declaring/informing.
I think it was, originally, but Okrand changed his mind. For instance, in
Power Klingon, one of the jokes has a line:
lutlhob naDevvo' vaS'a'Daq majaHlaH'a'?
They ask him, "Can we get to the Great Hall from here?"
Three elements of this sentence are now obsolete. The first two are about
/tlhob/. For one thing, the verb /ghel/ didn't exist when he wrote this
sentence, but he since wanted a difference between "ask a question" (ghel)
and "make a request" (tlhob). Next, as mentioned above, /tlhob/ is now no
longer considered a verb of saying, and so /jatlh/ or /ja'/ should really
come into play here. Finally, Okrand has added the rule of "verbs of
motion," where certain words, like /jaH/, have a locative concept applied to
their objects, which must be destinations, and so if they have an actual,
non-object, marked locative noun, that means the place of the action, not
the destination.
To conform with what we now know, one must change this sentence:
lutlhob; jatlh naDevvo' vaS'a'Daq wIjaHlaH'a'?
or a whole bunch of minor variations of it.
SuStel
Stardate 2301.3