tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 22 06:38:03 1993
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themscrewyrelativeclauses
>From: [email protected]
>Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1993 19:47:50 -0400 (EDT)
>~Shoulson came up with a idea for translating those dreadful relative
>clauses with the head noun functioning as a syntactic marker in the
>relative clause. Bla! Gives me cold shivers just thinking about it.
>His example was "I see the ship from which I fled," which came out
>*{'oHDaq vIHaw'pu'bogh Duj vIlegh}. I tell you what this looks like to
>me: "To it I fled, I see the ship." Your major problem here is that
>the antecedent for {'oH} is {Duj}, and {Duj} follows the pronoun. What
>could be screwier than that?
>It's just like saying {loD latlh tlhej bangDaj 'e' Sam loD} where we
>don't at first know who {-Daj} is refering to until we hear {loD} later
>in the sentence. We don't ever say in English "his wife was found by
>the man." It sounds like "his" refers to someone other than "the man."
>I used the passive voice here to make the OVS sound more natural in
>tera'nganHol.
So it's the cataphora you object to; the fact that the pronoun anticipates
its antecedent? Well, that's reasonable, I guess, but then so is
cataphora: I should point out that natural languages *DO* use pronouns
before defining them. English not so much as others, but we have it in
specific cases like "It was advisable not to fight." In Aramaic and
Mishnaic Hebrew you get hanging pronouns all over the place: "amar leih R.
Ami l'R. Asi", literally "Said to him Rabbi Ami to Rabbi Asi", that is
"Rabbi Ami said to him, to Rabbi Asi". Happens all the time. Lots of
things could be screwier than that (like maybe not considering all the
things natural languages do). Would you prefer it if I'd said ?{DujDaq
vIHaw'pu'bogh 'oH vIlegh}? That would keep your precious anaphora in the
order you like it. This would then be another example of appositive nouns,
only this time they wouldn't be in grammatical agreement.
Actually, I probably came up with this method taking an idea from Hebrew.
See, relative pronouns as we have them in English, I think, are in IE
trick. Hebrew does its relative clauses by introducing them with a special
word and then holding the place of the head noun with a pronoun inside the
clause. This would be equivalent to the English paraphrase "I saw the ship
which-is-such-that I fled in it." You'll note that this is a very flexible
and regular way to handle relative clauses, no matter how complex. Compare
Lojban relative clauses which work the same way (with a special pronoun),
and even Welsh (an IE language) which is similar (Rydw i'n gweld y long rwy
wedi ffoi ynddi: I see the ship I fled in it). These are not reasons to
adopt the usage into Klingon, make no mistake. As people are so fond of
pointing out, Klingon is neither Hebrew not Welsh nor Lojban. However,
neither is it English, so your complaint about how "his wife was found by
the man" makes no sense is equally meaningless. These *are*, though,
reasons to consider these methods, and maybe suggest them to Okrand, for
approval.
>I thought we had concluded that head nouns could only function as the
>subject or object of a verb with {-bogh}. This is another one of those
>alienousities of Klingon that prevent it from looking like a code for
>English. The only reasonable alternative I see would be to flop the verbs:
>Make it {Dujvo' vIleghbogh vIHaw'pu'}--"I escaped from the ship which I
>see."
Perhaps. Or maybe use Nick's proposal of {jIHawpu'ghach Duj vIlegh}, which
I'll probablu have to adress in another letter. But that may not always be
the case. What about "I need to get fuel for the ship in which I fled"?
Now we have "Duj" which needs "-Daq" on it for the inside of the relative
clause, and "-vaD" on it for the main clause. Reversing thoise won't help.
Using the pronoun anaphora would give us ?{DujDaq vIHa'pu'bogh 'oHvaD nIn
vIghajnIS}.
>You heard it here, folks!
>'ach pabpo' ru' povqu' ghaHbej_taH_ ~'e'.
jInIDqu'.
>Guido#1, Leader of All Guidos, Follower of All TemporaryOfficialGrammarians
~mark