tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 22 06:58:03 1993
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Relative clauses continued
>From: [email protected]
>Date: Sat, 20 Nov 1993 08:06:33 -0400 (EDT)
>NickNicholasvaD:
>Your proposed relative clause constructions scare me. Take a gander at
>{jISopghach Dujmo'} There's one big fat glaring mistake standing there
>proclaiming arrogantly its erroneous stauts. "Look at me! I'm illegal!"
>The reason this phrase is screwy (and don't take this personally; maybe
>it does come out a whole lot better in Turkish) is that I see nothing
>here that indicates that the eating occured inside the ship. I suggest
>this mistake be put out of its misery.
Illegal? Where does it yell that? You mean noun-noun phrases aren't legal
all of a sudden? Whoah, that changes things! Maybe you don't like
{jISopghach}? Granted, that's stretching "-ghach" a bit. Would
{SopghachwIj} work better for you?
Illegal it isn't. But maybe it's too ambiguous for your tastes, and maybe
for mine, but maybe not for Nick's. Moreover, how much ambiguity is
acceptable depends dramatically on the context and pragmatics. "He killed
his wife" is perfectly acceptable English, and completely unambiguous....
if it's said by someone pointing his finger at the people in question for
each pronoun. It would be prettty rotten in isolation, though. Under the
right circumstances, depending on what's being discussed, the relationship
might be understood. "I ate lunch on the _Hot Needle of Inquiry_". "Oh?
I ate on the _Painstick_. The service was great." "Well, the ship-of-my-
eating is fully automated, so the service and the food was fantastic." We
wouldn't say that in English, but if "The ship on which I ate" was hard,
what's wrong with it? Given the context, is it likely that the
relationship would be misunderstood?
>I used to do what some of you guys do. Try to bend the rules almost too
>far to reach that expressiveness that you can
>'t quite reach in tlhIngan Hol. Once way back in ancient history I came
>up with an idea for tacking Type 5 noun suffixes onto relative verbs
>to say things like "I see the ship from which I flew," --
>*{Duj jIpuvboghvo' vIlegh}. I was even about ready to send it off to
>the KLI before I eventually convinced myself this proposition is too nuts
>to try to get an Okrandian sanction. My philosophy is that when dealing
>with the relative clauses as we know them, the head noun can function
>only as the subject or object of the relative clause. Why not leave it
>at that?
Maybe you're right. I guess we just haven't yet convinced ourselves of the
possibility, especially in the light of more complex sentences where it's
not obvious how to recast so that the relative clause is always the subject
or object. The subject's not closed for us all.
>Guido#1, Leader of All Guidos
>Bonus: mu'meyvam noy yImugh <taH HaghwI'>
~mark