tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Aug 25 17:26:57 1993

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Re: relative clauses (again)

On Aug 24,  7:58pm, Jacques Guy wrote:
> Subject: Re: relative clauses (again)
...
> These constructions occurred to me, without thinking:
> 
> yaS vIlegh qIppu'bogh puq = I see the officer whom the child hit
> yaS qIppu'bogh puq vIlegh = I see the child who hit the officer
...
     He then went on at length with other examples with this construction as
the foundation. Meanwhile, I don't think this construction does what you
think it does. I'm accustomed to seeing most clauses (or phrases) other than
the main o-v-s event of Klingon sentences come before the o-v-s part of the
sentence, so the first example looks strange to me. It doesn't look Klingon.
The relative clause is in the subject position, which feels wrong. Could
higher authorities than I help me out here? I doubt it is explicit in TKD,
but I simply haven't seen this done.

     The second example suffers worse. Just because <puq> comes both after
<qIppu'bogh> and before <vIlegh> does not mean that it serves as both subject
for the relative clause and object for the main verb. It's very clever, but
there's no precedent for it at all. All precedent says that <puq> belongs to
the relative clause. Again, please correct me if I'm wrong. I've been
enthusiastically wrong before, so I can deal with corrections, though there's
quite a bone mass under the ridge, so I sometimes require substantial effort
at convincing. {{:)>

     Once again, I prefer Krankor's suggestion repeatedly referred to in
HolQeD. It is simpler, endorsed by Okrand and works quite well. Why are we
spending so much energy reinventing a wheel that rolls fine and bears all the
weight it needs?

--   charghwI'

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