tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Sep 01 22:44:26 2013
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: naj
<div dir="ltr">Thanks for your patience. Dyslexia, presbyopia, and clumsy typing add up to a perfect storm, especially in a language with which I am insufficiently familiar. I finally increased the font size in my browser, which should cut down on my typos, so hopefully I will only make instructive mistakes from now on.<div class="gmail_extra">
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</div><div class="gmail_extra">{vabDot} would be darned useful, as is {neH}. Where did you see it?<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">About relative clauses, I forgot about the "fool fights in a burning house" example. Unfortunately, one could use {-bogh} with Type 5 suffixes other than {-'e'} to get a sentence that is at best ambiguous, e.g. {*mangvaD leghbogh yaS waq vInob} Is it even intelligible? "I give a shoe to the soldier whom (or for whom?) the officer sees." Probably the only way the Type 5 suffix other than {-'e'} can work reliably is if it is on the subject noun of the relative clause and the relative clause is some sort of object in the main clause, as in<span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px"> {meQtaHbogh qachDaq Suv qoH neH}</span>. In other words, if the relative clause were eliminated except for the head noun, the sentence would still make grammatical sense: <span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px">{qachDaq Suv qoH neH}</span>. Having a subject of a sentence be a relative clause with a head noun marked with -vaD, -mo', -vo', or -Daq probably may not work reliably: {?mulegh mangvaD waq nobbogh yaS}. Does that make sense? Maybe so. {?mulegh mangvaD waq nobbogh yaS'e'} seems to make sense as /The officer who gives the shoe to the soldier sees me/. I recall MO stated he couldn't make relative clauses work except with head nouns as either subject or direct object.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">My intuition decades ago (when I was considering Klingon grammar but not really trying to use it) was that the fixed word order of obj-verb-subj would create problems with complex sentences, and I supposed then that Klingons might get out of the mess by devising a verb affix to reverse the sense of the verb, sort of like passive voice but not just for indefinite subject. The reversing affix would work like this: {qIrq HoH#reverser# Qugh} /Kruge is killed by Kirk/ or simply /Kirk kills Kruge/. Or perhaps it will turn out that the topic suffix was only assumed to be a Type 5 since it had never been observed following a Type 5 suffix.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">However, it seems to me that neither of these expedients is sufficient to let relative clauses in Klingon do everything they can do in Earth languages I'm familiar with. How for instance would one translate "I gave the restaurant where we ate a good review"? "Restaurant" is a dative object to the main clause, but a locative object to the relative clause. Even if you could have {*Qe'vaDDaq} or {*Qe'DaqvaD}, the sentence would be unintelligible. The resulting gibberish could as easily be interpreted as "I gave a good review at the restaurant for which we ate."</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">My hope is that since MO is a linguist, he can surely devise the right questions to ask Maltz to resolve the problems of relative clauses.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">~'eD</div><div class="gmail_extra">
<br><div class="gmail_quote">
On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 10:08 PM, Alan Anderson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:[email protected]"; target="_blank">[email protected]</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
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Try {...vabDot jInajtaHvIS} "even while I am dreaming". We're not<br>
completely sure how {vabDot} works yet, but I think it's a reasonable<br>
guess that it is an adverbial that means pretty much what you want.<br>
We've only seen it at the beginning of a sentence. (It might also be a<br>
noun, but how that would work is less clear.)<br>
<br>
> Is it just me (you'll probably say it<br>
> is, Qov) or is there a shortage of adverbials?<br>
<br>
There is certainly a limited number of them, but I wouldn't call it a shortage.<br>
<br>
-- ghunchu'wI'<br></blockquote></div>-- <br>My modeling blog: <a href="http://bellerophon-modeler.blogspot.com/"; target="_blank">http://bellerophon-modeler.blogspot.com/</a><br>My other modeling blog: <a href="http://bellerophon.blog.com/"; target="_blank">http://bellerophon.blog.com</a> <br>
</div></div>
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