tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Sep 13 08:56:52 1993

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Compound Prepositions, and joq

Hey all.  Just some possibly lengthy comments on some things that occurred
to me over the weekend.  One is sort of a continuation on my mumblage about
{?chaH Hoch} vs. {Hochchaj}, and the other is some thoughts on Guido's
question regarding {joq}.

Before I get into this, a little forewarning.  I will be drawing examples
from existing Terran languages.  Note well, I do *not* mean to imply that
we can always assume that tlhIngan Hol behaves (or should behave) just like
this or that example of Terran jabber.  Klingon is its own language, and
has to be treated as such, not as a trekkified version of Swaihili or
Iroquois or whatever our favorite language is.  Nonetheless, I believe that
it is still valid to use these Terran language with similar features to get
some idea as to how Klingon might handle things where we may not be sure,
sort of as possible models.  So don't feel I'm trying to prescribe Klingon
to fit the models of the languages I'm giving, but do consider them.

<< Digression on above point, lest A. Appleyard accuse me of being
inconsistent when I fight him on his extensions to Klingon, which he bases
on the way most languages tend to develop, e.g. the putative "using"
suffix, which he claims would naturally derive from the conventional forms
of circumlocution, as similar prepositions have arisen from similar
starting points in Terran languages.  This may be true, but even you say
that they *would* or *will* develop.  This process can take hundreds of
years, if not longer, and our material is reasonably clear that it has not
happened yet, in the development of Klingon (Okrand is unlikely to have
simply omitted so useful a suffix, if one existed).  It may be that Klingon
will or would develop these things, if allowed to evolve as languages do,
but certainly not within ten years of introduction to the speaker-base!
English may someday determine that "thru" is the correct spelling for
"through", but I'd still mark it wrong on any third-grader's
spelling-test.  End digression. >>

OK, now after a solid page or so of rambling, we start getting to the
point.

1. Compound prepositions.

This is really an extension of my comments of {Hochchaj} as my preferred
way of saying "all of them" (and not {?chaH Hoch}).  Consider Klingon's
compond "prepositions" like "X bIngDaq" for "underneath X".  This
construction is obviously (from a syntactic point of view and also as said
by Okrand himself, Sect. 3.4, bottom of page 31) a use of the noun-noun
possessive, giving "X's underneath-area-at", or "at the area underneath X".
So far, so good.  Now, what happens if "X" isn't a noun, but a pronoun?
For instance, "under me"?  I submit that it should be {bIngwIjDaq}, "in my
under-area" and not {?jIH bIngDaq} (I flag the latter with a question mark
not so much out of confidence in my opinion, but because whether or not I'm
right, my version definitely does not break any grammar rules: I'm just
adding two suffixes in the right order to a noun.  The other one assumes a
grammar rule not yet known, namely that pronouns can participate in
noun-noun constructions the same as nouns.  Bear in mind that pronouns are
chuvmey, a totally different word-class than nouns).  For similar points,
consider a few Terran languages.  In Hebrew, "before" is often represented
by the word "lifney", which is really the preposition "l'-" (to) attached
to the construct form (p'ney) of the word "panim" (face).  Hebrew uses
noun-noun constructions for possessives too, except the order is reversed
wrt Klingon, and the first word is often in a special form.  Thus, it
really means something like "to the face of...", making "before the
officer" into "to the face of the officer".  When the object is a pronoun,
the word inflects exactly as does its base noun, "panim", taking on the
usual pronominal suffixes and all.  Similarly Welsh, with more or less the
same meaning, uses "o flaen", "of/at the front (of...)", and also relies on
its own noun-noun possessive to use this as a preposition.  Here, the use
with pronouns is more striking, since it's not all crunched into one word,
and Welsh uses prefixes and suffixes around and mutations of the thing
possessed to show ownership by pronouns.  Here it's very obviously treated
the same as any other noun, with the prefixes actually going around the
*noun* part of the preposition and not the prepositional part, giving "o fy
mlaen i/o dy flaen di/o'i flaen e/o'i blaen hi" and so on.  For a
contrasting point of view, consider English.  English avoids having to make
distinctions in its compound prepositions between ordinary nouns and
pronouns by using another form of possessive.  English has more than one,
after all, and can either say "the car's wheels" or "the wheels of the
car".  The first form is treated differently for pronouns ("the officer's
back" vs. "my back" and not "*me's back"), but the second is the same ("the
back of the officer" vs. "the back of me").  So in our own compound
prepositions, like "in front of", we use the second and manage not to have
to change depending on whether or not it's a pronoun.  It's "in front of
the officer" and "in front of me".  I don't consider this much evidence
against my opinion, since it, too, uses the methods of the language without
postulating anything new.  Consider if for whatever reason the idiom were
different, and we said "in the officer's front".  I bet we'd also say "in
my front" too.

OK, that was probably an overly long discussion of something that may not
have taken much convincing anyway, but as I said, this is a long posting.
I feel verbose.  Moving on...

2. joq.

My initial reaction to this question was "That's an interesting question,
but probably not all that important in practice; I'd expect a Klingon
probably to accept either singular or plural in such a case".  That may
still be true, but again I took to thinking about similar problems in other
languages.  English isn't the greatest place to look for examples, since
English verbs don't have all that many different personal forms in
conjugation.  But we can get some anyway.  We say, in English, "I go", but
"he goes".  What if it's he *or* I that must go?  We'd usually repeat the
verb, wouldn't we? ("Either he goes or I go.")  I doubt we'd say "[Either]
He or I go/goes."  It may sound wasteful and non-Zipfean to talk about
repeating a redundant verb, but let's face it, that's how lots of languages
do it!  And in Klingon, after all, verbs aren't likely yo be all that long
syllable-wise.  Same problem in Hebrew, which has more personal forms to
play with: the verb simply shows up twice.  I suppose, if forced, I can see
either of those languages using just one verb and sounding a bit stilted,
in which case the verb agreeing with the nearest subject (the last one)
sounds less bad.  Klingon has word-order backwards and also has objects to
worry about, but I'd probably generalize to the nearest of the choices, not
the last or the first.  I note, though, that at least some of the questions
in Klingon deal with {joq}, an explicitly inclusive OR, something not
handled in other languages I feel at all coherent in.  The examples I think
up in Hebrew and English tend to be using "or" exclusively, so the
situation may not be symmetric.  Still, I can sort of see repeating the
verb as making the most sense, and aside from that I probably wouldn't
count any conjugation that agreed with one or all of the possible options
wrong.

Ah, I needed a good ramble....

~mark

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