tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 22 06:43:48 1993
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Relative clauses continued
- From: [email protected] (Mark E. Shoulson)
- Subject: Relative clauses continued
- Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 09:43:31 -0500
- In-Reply-To: Nick Nicholas's message of Sat, 20 Nov 1993 17:19:24 +1100 (GMT) <[email protected]>
>From: Nick Nicholas <[email protected]>
>Date: Sat, 20 Nov 1993 17:19:24 +1100 (GMT)
>I had my look at Turkish, and Turkish does this with relative clauses:
>when the head noun is subject of the relative clause, it does a -wi'
>construction which is close enough to our -bogh
>when it isn't, it does something like a -ghach construction.
>Inspired by this, I propose the following translations:
>Because of the ship in which I ate.
>jiSopghach Dujmo'
>Because of (my eating's ship)
>Because of the ship in which I killed DureS
>DureS viHoHghach Dujmo'
>Because of ((my killing of DureS)'s ship)
>Because of the ship in which Worf killed DureS
>Now this one is much harder, and I didn't actually see a Turkish equivalent
>in my book. But I doubt we could do worse than:
>DureS, wi'orv HoHghach Dujmo'
Well, given our understanding of "-ghach" we'd probably do {DureS HoHghach
wi'orv(?) Dujmo'}, yielding plenty of ambiguity in the N-N construction,
but that's life.
>--- It's grammatical in that it's a sequence of nouns, though the relations
>between them are pure extrapolation, and there's ambiguity lurking. But
>sometimes you have to cut the Gordian knot.
Hmmm. Well, it *is* grammatical, and the relationship between nouns in N-N
construction is (at least in the view I've been taking) fairly free and
open to possibilities, but I don't know that I like the construction much
for a general answer. For simple situations, like maybe your first
sentence, I can sort of see it, but when it gets more complex the N-N
ambiguities mount up and obscure the gain of disambiguating who the head
noun is. It doesn't work all that great for me, at least not in general.
~mark