tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 22 06:43:48 1993

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Relative clauses continued



>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



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