tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Aug 26 02:56:35 1993
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Relatives; translating prepositions
- From: [email protected]
- Subject: Relatives; translating prepositions
- Date: 26 Aug 93 09:47:21 GMT
- Priority: normal
[email protected] (Jacques Guy) wrote on Thu 26 Aug 1993 10:22:08 +1000 (EST)
(Subject: Instrumental):-
> ... Chinese ... does very nicely with "yong4", literally: to use. You
would say in Chinese: "I use phaser destroyed ship", with the perfective
expressed only on "destroy" ...
That is the way that prepositions and postpositions arise!, by other words
being used as prepositions, e.g. English "despite" from the noun "spite".
> ... Pidgin English of Vanuatu, the syntax of which is modelled on that of
the native languages (mi faerem fesa, mi brebrekem sip) ...
i.e. two separate clauses.
[email protected] wrote on Wed 25 Aug 1993 18:00:29 -0400 (EDT) (Subject:
still more on relative clauses:-
> ... Appleyard's make-believe Instrumental -lo'. For ... "I shot him with
the phaser," instead of {pu'lo' vIbachpu'}, why not ... "I used the phaser in
order to shoot him." {vIbachpu'meH pu' vIlo'}
Mark E. Shoulson wrote on Wed 25 Aug 93 10:15:09 -0400 (Subject: Relatives;
mu' chu' lIngghach):-
> ... is an instrumental suffix really so vital? What do we do in English?
... "I shot him using a phaser". ... "pu' vIlo'taHvIS vIbachpu'"? ...
In clipped speech (TKD edition 2 p72 etseq) `vIlo'taHvIS` would likely start
shedding its prefixes and suffixes, gradually tending to `-lo'`, in a replay
of the way Klingon suffixes arose from what long ago were separate words whose
grammatical roles were distinguished by now-vanished case etc endings.
> "[he is] in the ship" as opposed to "at the ship" ... "Duj XXXDaq ghaH".
It's completely analogous to "Duj bIngDaq ghaH"--"he is below the ship" ...
Point taken.
> ... check me on your [= A.Appleyard's] quoting convention: quoted text
starts with a '>' and continues until the next indented line? ... ~mark
Yes, usually.
Mark E. Shoulson wrote on Wed 25 Aug 93 10:00:05 -0400 (Subject: relative
clauses (again)):-
> ... Note there is ambiguity here as to where to split the clauses ...
That is why I feel need for a verb suffix `Z` which would cause `A X B` to
be synonymous with `B XZ A`, to get any desired noun to the beginning or the
end of its clause for clarity or expressiveness, including to get a relative
clause at one end of the main clause rather than inside it.
[email protected] wrote on Wed 25 Aug 1993 18:00:29 -0400 (EDT) (Subject:
still more on relative clauses:-
> "the restaurant at which," ... flip it around: "We ate in the restaurant
which burnt down." {meQqu'pu'bogh Qe'Daq maSoppu'}. It's equivalent...
Mark E. Shoulson wrote on Wed 25 Aug 93 10:00:05 -0400 (Subject: relative
clauses (again)):-
> ... to hook the sentence up the other way ...
In English, "A saw B, who shot C" (with comma) is indeed the same as "C was
shot by B, who was seen by A", as both clauses are new information. But e.g.
"A saw B who shot C" (without comma) implies that the information in the
relative clause is known already to the listener/reader, and the sentence
can't as easily be inverted to "C was shot by B who was seen by A".
This is apart from the risk that textual order left to right may represent
time order of events, as it sometimes does in English.
> ... This stuff doesn't seem to help all that much with the "On the ship on
which the officer ate qagh" problem; you wind up wanting to put two "-Daq"'s
on the same word. But maybe one will do.
Sometimes you will have to forget relative clauses and use two sentences, as
Swahili sometimes had to before someone invented its separate relative pronoun
`amba`. Note the ways that relative words may have arisen in some languages:
Relative clauses using the relative pronouns English 'wh-', Latin 'qu'-,
started as rhetorical questions, or extended from indirect questions.
The Indo-European relative pronoun 'yos' (Greek 'hos', Sanskrit 'yas') is an
altered form of 'is' = "this, that".
Hebrew relative clauses are a descriptive clause like a main clause but with
the word `'(a)sher` prefixed. Likewise Arabic with prefixed word `'alladhii`.