tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Aug 08 00:30:29 1994
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joke
- From: [email protected] (Mark E. Shoulson)
- Subject: joke
- Date: Mon, 8 Aug 1994 11:23:18 -0400
- In-Reply-To: "William H. Martin"'s message of Fri, 5 Aug 94 16:03:57 EDT <[email protected]>
>From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
>Date: Fri, 5 Aug 94 16:03:57 EDT
>According to Mark E. Shoulson:
>...
>> Um... Okrand told us that Klingon doesn't have indirect quotes, especially
>> if (as you are) you're treating "Har" like a verb of saying (which I do not
>> contest; it makes sense). So these sentences should be recast in
>> first-person.
>Thanks. I was confused on this. I thought Klingon didn't have
>DIRECT quotes, and since most of the examples I've seen could
>be interpreted either way, I had no way of knowing. The example
>in TKD 6.2.5 has the speaker in the first person directed to a
>listener in the second person, which results in a sentence that
>would be the same as either a direct or indirect quote. The
>person of the subject of the second verb doesn't change:
>I told you, "Don't you interrupt me."
>I told you that you are not to interrupt me.
>Had the object been other than second person, then I could have
>better known this. The person of the subject of the second verb
>changes:
>I told him, "Don't you interrupt me."
>I told him that he should not interrupt me.
>I'm curious as to where you learned that Klingon doesn't have
>indirect quotes. I don't remember seeing this anywhere and if I
>create a grammar section for AKD, I'd prefer to offer explicit
>citations for this sort of thing.
Hmm! I derived that from the same place you quoted; it never occurred to
me that it could be read to imply that Klingon had no direct quotes. We've
generally taken it to mean that indirect quotation did not exist in Klingon
(I know that's how I always used it, and Nick, and I seem to recall Krankor
also on this side.) I suppose one could find support from Okrand's
translation of his examples by using direct quotes rather than reported
speech, to imply that it should be treated as such. Also, it makes more
sense to consider things as quotes and not objects (i.e. "I told you:
'don't interrupt me'" with a sort of colon between the sentences) because
they can come in either order and are not restricted to quote-first. This
raises the question of how you say "I said, 'hello'" with no addressee. If
you don't consider the quote an object, it should be {jIja' "nuqneH"} or
{"nuqneH" jIja'}, otherwise it should be {vIja' "nuqneH"}/{"nuqneH" vIja'}
(tho {vIja' "nuqneH"} really looks icky to me). Maybe the second can only
mean "I said 'hello' to him". This may be another Okrand-question.
>charghwI'
~mark