tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Mar 03 21:29:55 1994
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Appositives
>From: [email protected]
>Date: Thu, 03 Mar 94 23:25:56 EST
I'm not adding much in this post, the major reason for it is to repost
without the KBTP header, since it has gone beyond any discussion of that
and the topic is something that should be brought to everyone's attention
(especially charghwI' and Krankor, who I know don't read KBTP posts).
The discussion is about nouns in apposition, which are consecutive nouns
used to refer to the same thing. I used them in my translation, taking
some confidence from Krankor's Klingon Anthem, which contains the line "Dun
wo'maj, juHmaj; not Dej", using "wo'maj" and "DuHmaj" in apposition.
Guido#1 isn't so sure he trusts appositions, and I can see why (though
personally I like them but can't support them). I had some regular ones as
subjects or objects of verbs, but also in locative ("Nineveh"Daq veng
tInDaq yIghoS, for "go to Nineveh, the big city"). Here's what I said in
response to Guido#1's comment on that line:
>>Actually, even if you don't trust appositives, they make more sense if they
>>have "-Daq" on them; they're closer to seeming acceptable. If you think
>>about it as though words with "-Daq" on them fill the "locative place" of
>>the sentence (Yes, Nick, some Lojbanic thought here), then flagging *two*
>>nouns with "-Daq" somehow crams both of them into that place. It doesn't
>>necessarily imply that they're the same, but it does imply that they both
>>fill that place: go to Nineveh, go to the big city. Appositives in subject
>>or object places don't have that to fall back on, since they could be in
>>noun-noun constructions or unmarked other places (like nouns of time), but
>>case-marked nouns can get away with it more. That make any sense?
>Yes, and perhaps if you have occasion to need an appositive for subject or
>object position, you could tack {-'e'} onto both the nouns. This way, it
>couldn't be interpreted as a noun-noun construction for this reason, from
>TKD, section 3.4, pg.31, "When the noun-noun contruction is used, only the
>second noun can take syntactic suffixes (Type 5)."
Ooooh!!! Clever! I like it. It dosn't feel to me like it's doing the job
in the same way as other type 5's might do it; "-'e'" doesn't feel like a
case-ending to me like "-Daq" or "-vaD" or "-mo'" do. Those still seem to
have the strongest case to me. But you're right that "-'e'" prevents
confusion with genitive noun-noun constructions, leaving this with really
the only option. I think it's a great usage, and I think I'll start trying
it myself.
>This seems to me like such a delightfully useful appositive construction,
>that I'm tempted to employ from now on, when I come across the need for
>equivocating two nouns without an ugly {'oHbogh}/{ghaHbogh}/etc. to muddy up
>the translation.
majQa'!
>Guido#1, Leader of All Guidos
~mark