tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Nov 05 16:51:34 2009

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing



[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: Sentences as objects

Steven Lytle ([email protected])



On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 7:47 AM, David Trimboli <[email protected]> wrote:
> Tracy Canfield wrote:
> > I am still sorting through these to see what patterns they suggest, but
> > here's something that jumped out:
> > yIntaH qIrq 'e' vIneH.
> > Kirk I want alive.
> > "I want that Kirk keeps living." (STConst)
> >
> >  'e' neHbe' vavwI'
> > That wasn't what my father wanted. ST6
> >
> > TKD 6.2.5 says "When the verb of the second sentence is neH 'want',
> neither
> > 'e' nor net is used."  With two occurrences of neH with 'e' in the
> corpus,
> > can we safely say that 'e' is optional with neH?
>
> No, we can't. TKD gives us the "best practice rules" of Klingon.
> Anything from Okrand that seems to violate those rules are exceptional,
> unless they appear with extreme regularity, or he explains the new rule.
> We can speculate as to why we see apparent violations, but we can't
> generalize new rules from them.
>
> I believe (without evidence) that your second example occurs because
> Azetbur, who spoke the line, was using someone else's sentence as the
> object of her sentence. There may be a rule, not given in TKD, that says
> it's all right to use {'e'} with {neH} when you haven't actually
> supplied the previous sentence yourself.
>
> Other explanations are possible. Maybe Azetbur misspoke. Maybe {'e'} is
> allowed for emphasis. We can only speculate; we cannot make new rules.
> TKD gives us only the most basic rules; the more subtle ones and the
> exceptions usually do not appear. The saving grace of this is that we
> are told most Klingons won't even notice that we're using baby talk.
>
> --
> SuStel
> tlhIngan Hol MUSH
> http://trimboli.name/mush
>
>
>
>
Another issue with Azetbur's usage of {'e'} with {neHbe'} is that without
{'e'}, {neH} would have "no" way to say what its subject is.

lay'tel SIvten






Back to archive top level