tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Nov 10 09:14:44 2006
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RE: [Klingon_Language] (unknown)
> > Voragh:
> >>>> So with those examples in mind, how would you render the
> >>>> difference between:
> >>>>
> >>>> "Kruge killed the traitor with his (i.e. Kruge's) knife."
> >>>> "Kruge killed the traitor with his own (i.e. the traitor's) knife."
> >>>>
> >>>> {tajDaj} "his knife" alone is ambiguous. One could always repeat the
> >>>> noun - {Qugh taj} "Kruge's knife" vs. {maghwI' taj} "the traitor's
> >>>> knife" - but I don't think this captures the irony (or justice?) of
> >>>> the second.
>
> > DloraH:
> >>> Without the (), the english is just as ambiguous.
>
> > Russ Perry Jr:
> >> While grammatically both sentences are ambiguous (possibly excepting
> >> if you knew the traitor was female), I think most English speakers
> >> will tend to perceive the sentence having "his knife" to imply Kruge,
> >> and even more so the sentence having "his own knife" to imply the
> >> traitor, as the owner of the knife, respectively. This distinction,
> >> I believe, is what the original poster meant (specifically that "his"
> >> vs "his own" tends to disambiguate on a perception/assumption level,
> >> not a grammatical one).
>
> > That's exactly it. Absent any other context, I would naturally assume
> that
> > "his own" referred to the traitor, not Kruge. (I'm not sure why - perhaps
> > because "his own" is closer to the word "traitor" in the sentence?)
Russ Perry Jr:
>I believe it's more due to the expectation. If Kruge and the traitor are
>fighting, and the traitor is killed with a knife, the normal expectation
>would be that the victor, Kruge, owned the knife that did the deed. The
>"own" implies that it is unexpectedly the traitor's because otherwise the
>word is redundant and most often left out. The flipside is that without
>a word like "own", the sentence enforces that expectation that it was
>Kruge's knife that killed the traitor. So in this case, ambiguity is
>essentially -- but potentially incorrectly -- minimized by expectation.
I thought of a few more variations implying various scenarios, which may or
may not be translatable into Klingon. Here's the whole sequence:
"Kruge killed the traitor with a knife." (any knife; e.g. one that was
lying around)
"Kruge killed the traitor with the knife." (a particular knife, already
mentioned)
"Kruge killed the traitor with his knife." (Kruge's knife)
"Kruge killed the traitor with his own knife." (the traitor's knife)
"Kruge killed the traitor with his very own knife." (the traitor's knife -
how's that for irony!)
--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons