tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun May 29 06:21:14 1994
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Re: Doch Sar
- From: HoD trI'Qal <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Doch Sar
- Date: Sun, 29 May 1994 18:14:49 -0400 (EDT)
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'