tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Nov 18 01:10:57 1994
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: Interesting construction
- From: [email protected]
- Subject: Re: Interesting construction
- Date: Fri, 18 Nov 1994 04:09:34 -0500
WARNING: Very long post coming up. Beginner's may want to ignore it, unless
they like grammatical discussions. I really don't mean to scare away or
intimidate anyone.
qaSpu'mo' poH nI', chaq Do' jIjeSqa'. charghwI'mo' jIQuch. Hu'vam jabbI'ID
QonoS [mailing list] SIghqu'. tlhIngan Hol wIlo'qa'law'. Seqrammo' jIQuch je,
pab De' chu' nuQoymoHpu'mo'.
Subject: Interesting construction
Date: 94-11-17 12:10:21 EST
From: [email protected] (Mark E. Shoulson)
>Hmm... Just had something interesting... I needed to find a way to say "The
>information which I remember reading". Came up with what's probably a
>pretty obvious casting, but I can't offhand recall seeing its like before.
>Nick, you might like this...
>De''e' vIlaD 'e' vIqawbogh...
>See how it works?
I never remember anything like this before, and perhaps there's a good
stylistic reason for that. It may be that Klingon expresses this sort of
concept differently, or at least whenever such a concept arises, this sort of
construction very simply never occurs to us. But looking at this
grammatically,
De''e' vIlaD 'e' vIqawbogh ghItlh tej
just to fit it into a whole sentence, so I can work with it better. As with
all relative clauses, it is best for analysis to break it up. Any sentence
using a relative clause is simply two sentence which have one noun, the head
noun, in common. Thus:
De''e' vIlaD 'e' vIqaw & De''e' ghItlh tej.
The stylistic point that I mentioned earlier may sway with where we opt to
put the {-bogh}.
De''e' ghItlhbogh tej vIlaD 'e' vIqaw.
No, this has different connotations. Changing the position of {-bogh} puts
emphasis or predominance on the other verb. This is used in English so much
because its syntactic structure of relative clauses is so much different. I'd
have to think about this a bit more.
Subject: Re: Interesting construction
Date: 94-11-17 21:24:51 EST
From: [email protected] (Nick Legend Nicholas)
>Twilight zone stuff! Just yesterday, I was reading up on the syntax of
Modern
>Greek relative clauses, and in Greek, you can actually say:
>i pliroforia pou thimame oti [ti] diabasa
>the information which I remember that [optional: it] I read.
I may be misunderstanding this, but I think this would come out in Klingon
thus:
De' vIlaD 'e' vIqawbogh ghItlh tej.
where {'e'} is the head of the {-bogh} clause. This is impossible to
translate into standard English, but it would be something like, "That I read
the info, which I remember, was written by the scientist." The English
doesn't quite convey the Klingon correctly, and I am highly doubtful that
this construction would arise much in normal Klingon usage. Plus the fact
that, unless you can use *{'e''e'}, that is, {'e'} with a topic marker to
distinguish it as the head of the {-bogh} clause, the construction would
always risk being ambiguous when the subject is third person. Cf., {'e'
qawbogh yaS}, which is head noun?
I am perhaps rambling, since I see no special significance of this in
Klingon, except that it is very interesting to speculate on the grammatical
aspects of it.
I have myself run into this sort of problem in my own experience, and dealt
with it only as I thought I should. But it wasn't with {'e'}, rather {-meH}.
First off, I should explain some things on {-meH}.
In many cases in Klingon, there is a question of whether to use {'e'} or
{-meH}. This is specifically in the cases of certain verbs, e.g., {Hech} and
{nID} I'm thinking of in particular. In other words, where there is the
option between {'e'} and {-meH}, there is the question of which would be
standard in Klingon, or do I want to say, which *should* be standard in
Klingon. Regardez:
{tongDuj vIHIvmeH jIHech} or {tongDuj vIHIv 'e' vIHech}.
{tongDuj vIHIvmeH jInID} or {tongDuj vIHIv 'e' vInID}.
Putting aside for now the fact that Nick's sometimes overuse of {-meH} have
driven some to extreme conservatism of its use, I would be willing to support
these two examples as using {-meH} quite appropriately and efficiently
according to Okrand's description as well as to the normal use of purpose
clauses in natural languages. I opt for the {-meH} over the {'e'} in these
sorts of cases, because I think that the relationship being expressed between
two such clauses is closer semantically to {-meH} than {'e'}, but that's just
my opinion.
Now, getting back to relative clauses, I have often run into the problem of
how to make this sort of construction into a {-bogh} clause. It has turned
out not so difficult:
Haw' tongDuj vIHIvmeH jInIDbogh
The freighter which I tried to attack escaped
There will be those who criticize {jInIDbogh}, but I would ask you to
consider the construction as a whole first.
At this point I think I should break off from a long post, to give everyone a
day to think about this, if they should so choose.
Guido