tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Dec 13 06:55:49 1995
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Re: Klingon on Internet Relay Chat
On Tue, 12 Dec 1995, Alan Anderson wrote:
> I wrote:
> >[regarding {SuvwI' Hoch}] ...I'm not
> >quite sure this "partive" construction follows the noun-noun rule
> >in TKD, but it's canon.
>
> Holtej writes:
> >If you take noun-noun (N1-N2) as "N2 _of the_ N1", then it works.
>
> This adds to my discomfort with extended interpretations of noun-noun.
> "All of the warriors" is not possessive, is it? Is it GENITIVE? From
> the examples I've seen, I don't think so. What *is* this construction
> called? I thought the term "partive" fit the english construction.
It's "partitive". The English phrase "X of the warriors", where X is
"some", "all", "many", a number, etc., is an example of the partitive.
It's also known as the "presuppositional", since it presupposes the
existence of a set of which the parts are members.
If we have canon support (I've heard that we have, I just can't recall
the specifics at the moment), of /X Hoch/ for "all of the X", then this
seems to be consistent with the partitive. But I'll say it again, since
you cut it out of my comment above, that we can't extend this to the
partitive in the general sense, since a) we have no canon, b) we have no
grammar, and c) it'd be ambiguous with /X #/, which is translated as "X
number #" (guard number three, and so on).
***thinking aloud***
Well, now, now that I think about it seriously, it sounds to me like the
original sentence *doesn't* want to be the partitive. He's not talking
about some subset of the warriors who are in maine; he's talking about
all the warriors who are in maine. The counterpart to the partitive is
called "existential." There's a fairly simple test for an existential
interpretation: put a pleonastic "there" in front of it:
Some warriors are in battle. [existential]
Some of the warriors are in battle. [partitive]
There are some warriors in battle. [existential]
* There are some of the warriors in battle. [ungrammatical]
***thinking mode off***
> me again:
> >One other thing about your sentence bothers me. You're using
> >{chaH} in its verb form in both senses of "to be" simultaneously.
> >{*Maine*Daq chaH SuvwI''e} and {SuvwI' bIr chaH SuvwI''e'} are
> >both valid sentences (though the second one is rather convoluted),
> >but I'm not sure the combination is reasonable.
>
> Holtej again:
> >I don't follow you here. His intended meaning was, if I'm reading it
> >right, "In Main, all warriors are cold warriors." I don't think he means
> >that all warriors are in Maine. Of the warriors who happen to be in
> >Maine, all of these warriors are cold. This works fine for me.
>
> I'm pretty
> sure that "In Maine, something happens" cannot be translated simply as
> {*Maine*Daq qaS vay'}.
Why not? Because it'd be ambiguous?
> That's not what I originally complained about, though. TKD 6.3 describes
> two different kinds of "to be", and I don't know if they can both be used
> at the same time with the same pronoun. {pa'wIjDaq jIH} and {loD jIH} are
> explained separately, and I think {pa'wIjDaq loD jIH} is too close to the
> English "I am" for comfort.
I don't think you should be intepreting it as two uses of "to be" with
one pronoun. So, they can't be used together? Then, by your reasoning,
this cannot be an ambiguous sentence. It must only mean what the author
intended, which is the only reading left. But, I must say that I don't
see any reason why they couldn't co-occur. Can you intepret it? Is it
grammatical?
> -- ghunchu'wI'
--Holtej