tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun May 29 06:21:14 1994

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Re: Doch Sar





This is one of those month-old letters, so I have no idea if this point was 
ever made or not...


>>     I once figured out that the problem with the sentence-as-subject
>>construction is that since the pronoun {'e'} is the device used, it divides
>>the two sentences when it represents the object of the second sentence. For
>>it to represent the subject of the sentence, it would follow the second verb
>>and NOTHING would divide the two sentences, so there would be no way to
>>determine if a noun between the two verbs were the subject of the first verb
>>or the object of the second. It becomes very logistically confusing. While
>>sentence-as-subject would be a valuable tool, the lack of it has not stopped
>>me from saying many things in Klingon.
>
>Have you considered that the pronoun {'e'} or whatever it would be might
>*precede* the sentence to which it refers. In this way, the VS syntax would
>be retained and the sentences would be truly divided.


Except, of course, that then it would look almost exactly as a sentence-as 
object construction, if I am understanding you correctly.  Look:

SAO:

	<sentence> 'e' <sentence referring to 'e'>

SAS:

	<sentence referring to 'e'> 'e' <sentence>

Personally, I would find that VERY confusing to parse on paper, let alone in 
speech... especially if someone gets a few wrong prefixes in there.

Of course, considering how confusing a few other parts of the language are, 
this would not suprise me in the slightest... but I fail to see how it can be 
easily distinguished from SAO.



--HoD trI'Qal
  tlhwD lIy So'





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