tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Sep 11 22:26:32 1993

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Re: law'puqpu'



>I understand the basic concept of the verb "to be" now and
>how to use "'e'" to indicate the subject is not the pronoun.
>(i.e. that the pronoum is actually a verb in this case)  I do
>have a question regarding Krankor's recasting of my sentence as:
> 
>         puqbe' chaH wej puqpu'ma' wa'DIch'e'
> 
>It seems to me that it should be:
> 
>         puqbe' chaH wa'DIch wej puqpu'ma''e'
> 
>Since the subject of the sentence is "children", not "first".
>I also noted that Krankor reordered the subject and supporting
>modifiers.  I do not understand why.  I think the basic problem
>I have is in dealing with adjectives.  I know that the TKD states:
> 
>  There are no adjectives as such in klingon.  Those notions
>  expressed as adjectives in English are expressed by verbs
>  in Klingon. [p. 49 section 4.4]
> 
>However, in the sentence "Our first three children were girls", at
>least one of the words "Our", "first", or "three" is an adjective
>in the sense that it modifies the noun children.  How is it handled?
 
In fact, this last supposition is incorrect, or at least misleading.
Yes, in *English* these words are adjectives, but they are not so in
Klingon.  The passage you cite (4.4) is in reference to the Klingon
adjectival verbs, but none of the concepts here is something which
is handled by an adjectival verb.  The "our", of course, is handled
by the -ma' suffix, so it's not even a whole word, let alone an
adjective.  The "first" and "three" concepts are handled by number
words, and those words have grammatic rules all of their own.  I
refer you to section 5.2, particularly the second half of page 54,
which gives the grammatic placement of normal and ordinal numbers.
I think you will find that my chosen word order follows from those
rules.  The parse tree would look like this:

                wej puqpu'ma' wa'DIch
                 |      |       |
             number   noun      |
                  \   /     ordinal number
                   \ /          |
                noun (phrase)  /
                     \        /
                      \      /  
                       \    /
                        \  /
                         \/ 
                        noun (phrase)

What's of more interest is where the -'e' should go.  I have put it
on the wa'DIch simply because that is the end of the noun phrase. In
fact, this could be considered a murky area of the grammar.  If
someone were to insist that it should be wej puqpu'ma''e' wa'DIch, I
don't know if I could claim that they are wrong.  But, the closest
similar thing that I can find is the rule for putting type 5 noun
suffixes on adjectival verbs (4.4, page 50), which is a similar
(though admittedly not identical) case.  So I put the -'e' on the
last noun of the noun phrase, which seems safe.  As a side note, it
is possible to create even more complicated subjects where it can
become even more of a problem deciding where the -'e' should go.

                --Krankor



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