tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Mar 01 00:27:28 1994
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Deanna
'o'mu'tlheghvam maja'chuqtaH:
DaH bItuQHa'moHegh Deanna 'ej bIQot...
*Deanna, take off your clothes now, and lie down...
None of the proposed fixes of this one work, because -'egh is a
Type 1 suffix and cannot follow the Type 4 suffix -moH. We have a
definite problem here. Maybe we could use
SoH yItuQHa'moH
More generally on this, we've all been assuming that the meaning
of the suffixes applies IN ORDER: that is, that the meaning of
each suffix applies to the entire sequence of
(prefix) stem (suffix) (suffix) (...)
piled up before it, except where -qu' picks out one part for
attention (p.49). That means that a word like
yItuQHa''eghmoH
which obeys the suffix ordering and has -moH "outside of" -'egh,
can only be interpreted as something like
'make yourself take off clothes'
Now, I think this "boxes within boxes" semantics is generally true
in human languages, but the only ones I'm familiar with have much
more freedom of affixation and compounding than Klingon does.
Okrand is familiar with human languages (especially Amerindian)
that have the strict affix ordering of Klingon. Does anyone here
know whether the semantics of affixes in such languages is also
strictly ordered? In other words, could
yItuQHa''eghmoH
mean
'undress yourself'
with the -moH "inside of" the -'egh?
ALTERNATIVELY -- and much more simply -- maybe
tuQHa'moH undress (v)
means that "tuQHa'moH" is translated by the English TRANSITIVE
verb "undress [someone else]", as in (an invented example)
puq tuQHa'moH QorghwI'
the nurse (nanny, caretaker) undresses the child
This would make analytic sense: tuQ is 'put on [clothes]',
tuQHa' is 'take off [clothes]', and tuQHa'moH is 'cause [someone]
to take off [clothes]', or loosely 'take [clothes] off [someone
else]', i.e., 'undress [someone]'. In that case, "tuQHa'"
(without -moH) would be translated by the INTRANSITIVE "undress,
take off one's own clothes". And in THAT case, we can get a
perfectly good Klingon translation of the sentence with
DaH yItuQHa' Deanna 'ej yIQot...
- marqem
Mark A. Mandel
Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA : [email protected]