tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Sep 02 08:58:33 1993

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Re: Where am I?



I certainly do not intend to "put anyone in their place"; this is a 
very dangerous thing to do in a Klingon context, and I am not authorized
(not a grammarian).

Do I gather correctly that naDev is a noun with the peculiarity that it
does not require the locative suffix when used locatively?  If this is
the case, then I agree with charghwI' that both parses are correct.

Ah, ambiguity!

By the way, I have no problem with ambiguities arising from relative
clauses -- the _English_ relative clause constructions are thoroughly
ambiguous!  I'm the "official resident logician" for Institute Loglan
(as opposed to Lojban), which does have unambiguous relative clause
structure, but this is achieved at the cost of considerable effort,
not taken in any natural language, and certainly not needed in
tlhIngan Hol.  It is clearly intended that context will disambiguate
relative clause structure (in practice, to the point where one is not
really aware of the implausible readings of any given sentence, as in
English). 

Another point:  I have assumed that conjunctions can be used between
relative clauses, on the legalistic ground that relative clauses are
in fact _sentences_, and so can be joined with sentence conjunctions.
I believe this is what a recent reference to "coordinating
conjunctions" was referring to?  (I was on vacation, and read 117
messages very quickly on my return home, but not in depth).

				--Randall Holmes mughlaw'wI'




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