tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Apr 10 07:59:22 1994
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Re: KLBC: qajatlh
- From: trI'Qal <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: KLBC: qajatlh
- Date: Sun, 10 Apr 1994 18:19:21 -0400 (EDT)
charghwI'vo':
>> tlhIngan Hol vIghojtaHmo', vIHem.
>> "Because I am continuing to learn Klingon, I am proud"
>> --HoD trI'Qal
>
> Good. I'd like to add another possible version of this:
>
> tlhIngan Hol vIghojtaH 'e' vIHem
> "I am proud that I am learning Klingon language."
I seriously considered offering this for a while. However, I realized that
this bumps into the "Transitivity Question," one of those ages-old debates. I
felt it would have been inappropriate to offer this, because both my Klingon
and my English insticts tell me this is *wrong*. I think someone mentioned
this later. I also didn't want to start up a transitivity debate again.
> When I saw the original, I thought this was what the original intent of
>the message, but the speaker just dropped the {'e'} pronoun. Noting the
>exceptional cases {neH, jatlh, ja'} without mentioning the sentence-as-object
>construction may prove to be confusing, since it doesn't give a new student a
>place to look to understand why it would have made any difference to have
>used those verbs (TKD 6.2.5).
Yes and no. The point was to get students to re-read that section, and say
"Ah! Even if there are two verbs in my English sentence, there will always be
a noun or prounoun before the verb in the Klingon, unless it is one of these
few verbs." They don't even have to understand sentence-as-object to grasp
that. In any case, if you want to debate this further, it goes off the KLBc.
--HoD trI'Qal