tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Sep 08 22:04:34 1994

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Re: KLBC: Blood of the vanquished

According to Mark E. Shoulson:
> 
> >'avwI' jeybogh qama''e' loDnI' "The brother of the prisoner,
> >who defeated the guard".  Note that in Klingon, it is clear
> >that it is the prisoner and not the brother who defeated.
> 
> There may be a problem with this.  See Section 3.4.  According to TKD,
> "When the noun-noun construction is used, only the second noun can take
> syntactic suffixes (Type 5)."  We used this idea here and there to make
> apposition more palatable by using type 5 suffixes on both nouns to show
> they were not in noun-noun constructions.  True, in this case it might be
> that the "-'e'" here doewsn't quite "count," since it's on for a different
> reason, and maybe Okrand just didn't think of "-'e'" in this case (he
> obviously wanted to keep out "-Daq" and such), but TKD's word is as
> presented.

Thanks for keeping me honest. I think this would be yet another
thing to bring up with Okrand. In reading it, I think he meant
that he was not considering the noun-noun construction in
combination with a relative clause. He did not, after all,
present the use of {-'e'} to indicate the head noun of a
relative clause at all in TKD, but he did agree later that this
was a good use of the suffix.

It seems only natural that if {-'e'} is acceptable to indicate
which noun is being described by the rest of a relative clause,
that it would also be acceptable to indicate the same in this
otherwise vague combination of a noun-noun construction and a
relative clause. Still, until Okrand explicitly approves it,
this is not the Empiror's Klingon.

Okay, I really am making a list now of stuff for Okrand:

-ghach
Generic "it" and Sentence As Subject
spelling on unwritten canon
comparative questions
adverbials - expanded or constructed
apposition
use of verb pong

More as I think of them...

> ~mark

charghwI'

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