tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Nov 04 16:04:24 1993

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Re: tlhIngan 'o' Humghach



On Nov 3,  5:58pm, The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common fol k wrote:
> Subject: Re: tlhIngan 'o' Humghach
> 
> Doch tlha' jatlh charghwi':
> [...]
> :      If you insisted on the original construction, "DughuHmoHbogh SoSlI'"
> : would have been better placed first in the sentence....

> Not necesarily. >nuvpu' DughuHmoHbogh SoSli'< = "your mother warns you
> about people". >nuvpu''e' DughuHmoHbogh SoSli'< = "the people your mother
> warns you about". It's a perfectly legitimate and proper construction, so
> much so that I'm not sure how else you'd say it.

     While I'm quite willing to accept corrections, I'd appreciate at least a
second opinion here. I doubt >nuvpu' DughuHmoHbogh SoSlI'< ever meant
anything remotely like "Your mother warns you about people." That would have
been something closer to >nuvpu' DughuHmoH SoSlI'<. Even then, there is no
clear way to indicate the word "about", and I'll confess that I'm just rusty
enough to feel a little stumped as to how to say this clearly. It feels more
like it is saying "Your mother causes you to be alert," with "people" being
tagged on as some vague kind of indirect object. I wonder if nuvpu'mo' would
be appropriate.

     I do agree about the word order now, however, as I go back to TKD 6.2.3,
page 63-64 and I begin to remember HoD Qanqor's Grammarian article on this
very topic. Without the 'e' suffix, the clause could either mean "The people
of whom your mother warns you," or it could mean, "Your mother, who warns you
of people." In this case, >nuvpu''e'< would disambiguate. I'll also assume
that the original absence of a space in the middle of >SoSlI'maHtaH< was a
typo.

     So if the original sentence was, "nuvpu''e' DughuHmoHbogh SoSlI'
maHtaH", I may find it vague and distasteful (mostly unnecessarily complex
for a simple idea), but I withdraw my mistaken criticism of the word order.

--   charghwI'



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