tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Aug 23 19:56:52 1995
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Re: }} Dancing. was Re: Klin to Bermuda
- From: [email protected]
- Subject: Re: }} Dancing. was Re: Klin to Bermuda
- Date: Wed, 23 Aug 1995 19:56:52 -0400
~markvo':
>I tend to view the difference between a compound word and a
>noun-noun construction to be very small, if present at all.
I disagree strongly. I think there's a sharp difference. There appears to
be some overlap, I admit, but there are some canon uses of compound nouns
which could not be meaningful as N1-N2 constructions (construct states).
compare:
mu'tlhegh *mu' tlhegh
'Iwghargh *'Iw ghargh
Some people may have found my article to be a trivial exercise, since it had
little practical value. I wasn't proposing some wild twist of the grammar,
or completely new construction, to try to make the language more
English-like, or to admit a broader range of constructions, for example. I
didn't give people new tools to use the language. But there's strong
evidence that N1-N2s are not trivially like compounds, and I find this of
much more use than finding unique ways to say "good day to die." It is, at
the very least, linguistically interesting.
If you have some evidence I didn't consider, which suggests they're
qualitatively the same, I'd like to see it. You rarely make statements like
this without having something in mind to back it up. ;)
--Holtej