tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 17 09:58:01 2004

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Re: what kind??

David Trimboli ([email protected]) [KLI Member] [Hol po'wI']

From: "david fourman" <[email protected]>

>   I thought of another way of stating the question and I want to know if
it
> is valid grammar.  Could you say "Dargh'e' nuq DaneH?" -- as for the tea,
> what do you want?  This is basically a compound sentence involving two
> statements.  Or following the reasoning of 'ar, Dargh 'ar weghaj, would it
> not follow that one could say Dargh nuq wighaj? -- what tea do we have.

Dargh'e' nuq DaneH?
As for tea, what do you want?

What you have here isn't two statements, it's a single statement with the
following elements: a topic, a question pronoun as the object, and a verb.

Your sentence is indeed grammatical.  I also accept it as a valid way of
saying, "What kind of tea do you want?"  It might be a little vague: are you
asking whether I want tea, or what kind tea, or what do I want to do with
the tea?  However, we need only look at phrases like, {wa' yIHoH!
jISaHbe'.} "Kill one of them.  I don't care which" (Star Trek III), to
realize that this happens sometimes.

==

Dargh 'ar wIghaj
How many teas do we have?

{'ar} is a special word that follows its own rules.  Either it follows a
singular noun to ask how many or how much of that noun ({nIn 'ar wIghaj}
"How much fuel do we have?"), or it is used alone, possibly as Clipped
Klingon, to ask, "How much?"

{nuq} and the other question words do not act like {'ar}.  {nuq} and {'Iv}
act just like most other pronouns.  They do not modify nouns, they stand in
for nouns.  {'ar} does not stand in for nouns.  (It is unclear whether a
question word can stand in as part of a noun-noun construction.)  {Dargh
nuq} does not mean "what tea?"  As a noun phrase, it doesn't mean anything
at all, unless it's "the tea of what?"

SuStel
Stardate 4130.3

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