tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Aug 26 13:26:21 1993
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Relatives (once more!)
- From: (Mark E. Shoulson) <[email protected]>
- Subject: Relatives (once more!)
- Date: Thu, 26 Aug 93 15:23:30 -0400
- In-Reply-To: Jacques Guy's message of Thu, 26 Aug 1993 10:43:12 +1000 (EST) <[email protected]>
>From: [email protected] (Jacques Guy)
>Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1993 10:43:12 +1000 (EST)
>> >"I saw the captain who shot the targ in the starbase"!
>>
>> Yes; I'm not sure I buy this about *any* type 5 suffix. There's also the
>> ambiguity of which clause the "-Daq" is part of. Did the seeing or the
>> shooting take place there?
>>
>The same ambiguity lurks in the English sentence. But disambiguation is
>easy:
Yes, it's there in the English, and in the Klingon, and I don't really mind
it in either place. Just pointing out that we can't expect Klingon to be
perfectly unambiguous any more than we can any natural language.
>1. The captain who shot the targ, I saw him in the starbase
>2. The captain who shot the targ in the starbase, I saw him.
>which, I think, would be (optional stuff in square brackets):
>1. targh bachpu'bogh HoD'e' 'ejyo'waw'Daq [HoD/ghaH] vIleghpu'
>2. 'ejyo'waw'Daq targh bachpu'bogh HoD vIleghpu'
Hrm. The usual convention (rule?) that I've heard is that anything not
subject or verb or object in a sentence/clause comes before the object
(apart from things like "jay'"). So your first sentence would be
questionable, and your second sentence would be as ambiguous as the
English, since the location-phrase's scope isn't defined. You might have
to use circumlocutions including multiple sentences (as your English is, I
note. Well, a sentence and a sentence fragment, I think you'll admit it's
of marginal correctness if we're being pedantic) to get those straight.
Perhaps "targh bachpu'bogh HoD'e' vIleghpu' 'ej 'ejyo'waw'Daq ghaH" "I saw
the captain who had shot the targh and he/she (not the targh, which would
have been 'oH) was in the starbase", and similar things with "bach" for the
other side (or no relative clause and just "The saw a captain. He'd shot a
targh in a starbase").
Note, by the way, that your method *would* work with objectified sentences
using "'e'", since "'e'" is a pronoun functioning as the object of the
sentence. So
jolpa'Daq yaS qIp puq 'e' legh qama'
yaS qIp puq jolpa'Daq 'e' legh qama'
would mean respectively
The prisoner sees (the child hit the officer in the transporter room).
In the transporter room, the prisoner sees the child hit the officer.
Granted, this is a lousy example, since in this case it seems unlikely that
the two actions happened in different places, but you can come up with more
meaningful examples. This is just the situation Qanqor was talking about
in HolQeD 1:2, p.4.
~mark