tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 17 07:11:07 1994

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Re: Word used by Marnen

On Feb 16,  6:20pm, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
...
> Actually, what I meant was "A definite warrior knows when he has  finished
> speaking", ...If you consider the sentence as "When has he finished
> speaking? That, a great warrior knows", you can see that pragmatically it
> *does* make sense to permit the question works as relative pronouns...

> Now, there *is* some ambiguity between "a great warrior knows when he has
> finished speaking" and "When does a great warrior know he has finished
> speaking?", namely, whether the "ghorgh" applies to the main clause or the
> initial subordinate one.  Bummer, huh.  

     So we can't even tell whether this is a question or a statement. Bummer,
indeed. Perhaps adding {-bej} or {-chu'} to {Sov} would push the sentence
toward a statement? Nope. "When does a definite warrior clearly know he has
finished speaking?" Perhaps inflection would make the difference. We have
determined that Klingon inflection in canon does immitate English inflection.
So ... Hmmm. The function of the noun suffix {'e'} would be great if it
worked for verbs, since we could apply it to {Sov} or {jatlh}, but alas, it
is a NOUN suffix.

     Since ghorgh behaves much like an adverbial, wouldn't we tend to place
it after the {'e'} if we wanted this to be a question, and at the very
beginning if we wanted it to be a statement? You placed it at the beginning,
so I would tend to consider this to be a statement.

charghwI'

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