tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Nov 18 11:23:51 1994
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Re: Interesting construction
>Date: Fri, 18 Nov 1994 04:28:46 -0500
>Originator: [email protected]
>From: [email protected]
>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.
>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,
I find it actually pretty natural, once it came to me, though it is
admittedly a little loose in terms of ambiguity et al. But let me see your
logic.
>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.
Yes, that's how I'd split the sentence. True, the "De'" seems pretty far
removed from where it go4es in the second sentence, but the "-'e'" and
context (don't sell context short; in this case at any rate it and the
meanings of the words make almost any other reading impossible) should help
point the reader to the true reading.
>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.
Hmm. Yes, this is close, and yes, it's not the same. Also consider what
would happen if the information were the subject instead of the object of
the sentence (teH De''e' vIlaD 'e' vIqawbogh). Hrm, granted that's pretty
icky too. Also, evenif your argument doesn't work in that case (and it
might), that doesn't mean it's an invalid argument. Yes, it needs
considering.
>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.
Which, aside from the "-'e'" suffix, is precisely the casting you had of
the noun phrase we started with.
>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?
Erg, no, I don't really expect to see *any* suffixes on "'e'". I have no
evidence that this should be so, aside from the fact that we've never seen
any. But absent other information, I myself won't accept that 'e' takes
any suffixes. In that case, if there's nothing else to attch the
topic-flag to, the sentence will remain ambiguous, and we;ll live with
that. Ambiguity is a feature of nearly all languages, noyt not a bugbear
that plagues imperfect ones. In fact, we have canon examples of ambiguous
sentences: pegh ghajbe'bogh jaj rur Hov ghajbe'bogh ram. See _Power
Klingon_.
>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.
That's what I thought...
>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}.
Hmm. At first glance, I see no problem with any of these, and personally
prefer the 'e' versions for both, though by a smaller margin in the first
case. Then again, I'm on record opposing too much use of "-meH" for
meanings other than "in order to". I've slipped a little from this... but
not much.
>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
Hmm. It seems trange, though I can see what you're doing. I tend to
expect noun-modifying -meH clauses to precede the noun they modify
(cf. Okrand's "ja'chuqmeH rojHom" translated as "A truce in order to
confer"--i.e. as a noun modified by the -meH phrase); purpose caluses
precede the noun they're modifying. But I see the clause is modifying
jInIDbogh... erg... I don't know why this doesn't work well for me. I
need to think on this one some more. Maybe if you flag the tongDuj with
-'e' it would help? You shouldn't have to though.
~mark