tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jan 18 09:13:35 1995
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Re: KLBC: lutwIj wa'DIch
Good stuff here for beginners.
According to Craig Altenburg:
>
> 1| puqloD ghajpu' loD
You probably don't need {-pu'} here. The perfective is not the
same thing as the past tense. You probably wanted "A man had a
son." Instead, depending upon context which might tell us if
this is present, past or future, this means one of the
following:
The man has had a son.
The man had had a son.
The man will have had a son.
Similarly, {puqloD ghaj loD} means one of the following:
The man has a son.
The man had a son.
The man will have a son.
As an English speaker, since tense is a part of your normal
speech, you want to resolve which of these three you are
saying, so you try to nail it down with the perfective to
represent the past tense. That's not how Klingon works.
In Klingon (as in a number of other languages), there is no
tense in the grammar. If setting tense is important, then you
use some sort of time reference (DaH, wa'Hu', wa'leS, Hu' law',
etc.) to set the time context and then move on. If setting such
a time is unimportant (as I think is the case in your story),
then just don't worry about it. It is highly weird to tell a
story in Klingon where every sentence has {-pu'} tagged on to
the verb. If you find yourself doing this, then you are missing
a significant point in your understanding of Klingon grammar.
> 2| yoHchoH puqloD 'e' ghojmoHta' loD
As you remark below, this is not quite satisfactory. It could
easily mean that the man had accomplished teaching other
children that a child became brave. In other words, the fact
that his son became brave has become information that he has
passed on to other children.
Much better would be {yoHmeH puqloD ghaH ghojmoHta' vav}. "In
order that the son is brave, the father teaches him." I have
not heard much concern about using an explicit noun as subject
for a purpose clause. Cannon certainly has prefixes on verbs
with {-meH} to be specific about the person and number of the
subject and object of verbs with {-meH}, so it quite logically
follows that an explicit noun can be used here.
It is a little messy in that the subject position for the
{-meH} verb is potentially the same as the object position of
the main verb, but this can usually be sorted out, especially
if there are zero or two nouns in that position. Zero means no
explicit purpose subject or main object, and two usually means
one purpose subject and one main object. Of course they might
be instead a noun-noun construction acting as only purpose
subject or main object, but hey, sometimes language gets messy.
In this case, I think the structure of the Klingon language is
overall quite straightforward and we can deal with this without
a great hassle.
Also, note that using {-choH} here comes dangerously close to
positing that the kid started out as a coward and needed to
change in order to become brave. You might even want a {-taH}
here to show that important thing is that the kid continues (in
all settings) to be brave.
As for the {-ta'}, I think it works fine here, since the point
here is not the act of teaching the son as part of the story
line, but the accomplishment of the act of teaching the son.
The successful completion (accomplishment) of the act is part
of the story line, not the act itself.
> 3| Suv puqloD 'e' jhohmoHta' loD je
The first part of this is grammatically identical to the
previous sentence with the same problem and suggested solution.
Additionally, the {je} should be shifted one word earlier. As
it is, the man is expected to be joined with another noun,
whereas if {je} followed the word that was supposed to be
spelled ghojmoHta', then it would mean "also", adverbially
modifying the verb instead of acting as a noun conjunction.
> 4| puqloDvaD SuvtaHvIS Qapla' potlh law' Hoch potlh puS ja'pu' loD
Realize that Klingon does not have indirect quotation. This
means:
The man had reported, "For the son, success while fighting is
most important."
On second look, it could also mean:
The man had told his son, "Success while fighting is more
important than anything."
That is probably exactly what you wanted. That's one place
where there is not an extremely neat way to disambiguate. (So
much for bragging about Klingon's straightforward structure...)
As for the perfective, it is probably unnecessary, but not
altogether wrong. If you mean for the instruction from the
father to be part of the story line, then {-pu'} here is wrong.
If you mean for it to be background material -- a setup for the
story line -- then it is okay. I suspect that this is not the
case, and you should not have included the perfective.
In other words, I think that if this were a movie, the telling
would be one of the scenes in the movie, rather than a
flashback or a reference made, like, "My Daddy always told me
that success while fighting is more important than anything
else!"
> 5| DuSaQ tayDaq ghol qipmeH nuH Hat lo'pu' puqloD
This is another place where the {-pu'} seems inappropriate. In
the tense context of the story, this is happening NOW, it is
not something that had happened as a setup for part of the
story line. It IS part of the story line.
Do the first two words mean, "At civilized school" or "At the
school's ritual" or something else? I just want to understand
the story better.
> 6| naDHa'pu' ghaH
Here the {-pu'} is DEFINITELY wrong. It suggests that the
discommendation is a setup for part of the story. "He had been
discommended." You want "He was discommended," fitting in to a
general past tense pervading the entire story.
Now, grammar aside, I think discommendation is a rather heavy
punishment for a kid who uses an illegal weapon at school. He
may be severely repremanded, and pay SEVERE penalties for this
act in order to set him straight, but discommendation is
worse than a death penalty. I can't imagine a Klingon reading
this story without getting VERY upset at this point. I'd advise
you not to read this aloud in the company of REAL Klingons. You
could get hurt.
> 7| potlhbej Qapla' 'ach batlh potlh law' Hoch potlh puS jatlh loD
> lughpu'chugh
What's with this last word? Is it a part of the sentence? If
so, I don't know how it fits. If it was supposed to be an
adjectival describing loD, then I don't think the suffixes work
here.
Were you trying to say, "If the father had been correct, he
would have said, 'Success is definitely important, but honor is
more important than anything else.'"? This falls under the
category of "irrealis", which Nick has pointed out to us does
not exist in Klingon. This means we need to approach this
carefully to figure a creative way around the void.
Before directly approaching this, I'd like to point out that if
the father had REALLY taught his son to be BRAVE, then the son
would not have used an illegal weapon. To do so is not merely
dishonorable. It is also cowardly. But back to the grammar...
Qapla' potlh law' Hoch potlh puS ja'DI' vav Qochqu' ghaH. batlh
potlh law' Qapla' potlh puS.
> - - - - -
>
> Here are some thoughts I had about my story:
>
> - - -
>
> In line 2 I wanted to express "The man taught his son to be brave." I used:
>
> yoHchoH puqloD 'e' ghojmoHta' loD
> "The son becomes brave, the man taught that."
>
> I'm not 100% satisfied with this. I had originally written:
>
> yoHmeH puqloD ghaH ghojmoHta' loD
> "In order that the son be brave, the man taught him."
You were better off before changing your approach.
> One problem with this is that I could not find an example of a purpose
> clause that had an explicit subject.
I don't think this is a problem.
> I guess I could of used:
>
> yoHmeH puqloD ghojmoHta' loD
> "In order that he be brave, the man taught the son."
Just a note. I think it becomes better to use the word vav
instead of loD, since it establishes the relationship at both
ends instead of the man being a man unto himself, while the
son is defined by his relationship to the man.
> thought it's not necessarily clear who is being brave.
If you want to be REALLY clear, you could use loD twice. TKD
explicitly says it's okay to do this when the same noun fits in
more than one place, or you can state it once and replace it
with the appropriate pronoun later in the sentence, or omit it
after the first statement of it, allowing the verb prefix to
imply the pronoun. Let's see... TKD 6.2.1. While this is
addressing multiple sentences joined by conjunctions, I think
it is a very small stretch to apply the same rule to sentences
where dependent clauses have subjects or objects that are the
same nouns as the subjects or objects of other clauses in the
same sentence.
> - - -
>
> In line 4 I used the construction:
>
> <puqloDvaD> blah-blah-blah <ja'pu' loD>"
> "The man told the son, "blah-blah-blah".
>
> The use of <puqloDvaD> would seem to be supported by TDK 6.8 since "the
> son" in the English version is an indirect object.
Fine. The confusion here is that puqloDvaD can easily be
mistaken as part of the blah-blah-blah. There's no really neat
solution to this that comes immediately to mind, except to use
the rule given in 6.2.5, page 67, which states that quotations
can be stated with the verb of speaking following OR PRECEEDING
the quotation. We could then say:
puqloDvaD ja' vav bISuvDI' Qapla' potlh law' Hoch potlh puS.
I'm not personally wild about putting the "He said" part BEFORE
the direct quote. It just doesn't feel very Klingon, but then,
there it is in TKD and it solves this kind of word placement
problem.
> - - -
>
> A couple of other question I encoundered along the way:
>
> 1) With the A Q <law'> B Q <puS>, TKD says you can use <Hoch> in the "B"
> position -- meaning "A" is most "Q". Can you also use <Hoch> in the "A"
> position -- meaning "B" is least "Q"?
I don't see why not.
> 2) In the dictionary there are some words defined that seem to already have
> a suffix. (e.g. <ghojmoH> -- to teach). Are such words deemed to be one
> word or
> are they, in fact, a root with a suffix?
It is generally agreed that grammatically it still must be
treated like a root with a suffix. Its listing in TKD has more
to do with English having a different root verb for these
suffixed Klingon verbs. In other words, if TKD did not list
ghojmoH under "teach" and you needed to look up "teach", would
YOU think to look up "learn" and create your own ghojmoH?
"Teach" is a common English word, so it got its own listing,
and the only way that Klingon expresses "teach" is with
ghoj+moH.
> That is would "be willing to
> teach" be *<ghojmoHqang> or *<ghojqangmoH>? The latter -- which I feel is
> most likley to be correct -- seems to present a problem. I would read <puq
> ghojqangmoh> as
> "He makes the child willing to learn" not (necessarily) as "He is willing
> to teach the child". Perhaps in Klingon we must use context in cases like
> this.
Well, this is one of those points that we'd like to get Okrand
to address. Guido#1 suggests that {-moH} may transfer the
meaning of Type 2 suffixes to the object rather than the
subject because the object of such a verb is still the agent to
the root verb. He and I had a loooooong argument about this and
we didn't really resolve it for sure either way, though his
case is a strong one and could well be right.
In the example {HeghqangmoHlu'pu'} "it made him/her willing to
die", the volition ...
EURIKA!
ALL THIS TIME, WE'VE BEEN LOOKING AT THIS EXAMPLE PRESUMING
THAT {-lu'} REFERRED TO "IT", BUT IT MAY VERY WELL REFER TO
"HIM/HER". In other words, if {-lu'} is replaced by "one" in
the generic sense, then rather than seeing it as "One caused
him/her to be willing to die," this may instead mean, "It
caused one to be willing to die."
Naaaaa. That doesn't work. Never mind. If the example had
instead been vIHeghqangmoHlu'pu', then breaking it down, left
to right with each suffix modifying the meaning of the previous
suffix, I say:
I die it.
I am willing to die it.
I am willing to cause it to die.
And now, if we keep the association between the subject and the
Type 2 suffix and allow the {-lu'} to do its normal thing, we
get, "It causes me to be willing to die," with "it" being the
indefinite subject.
Guido#1 argues that the sequence should instead be:
I die it.
I am willing to die it.
I cause it to be willing to die.
It causes me to be willing to die.
Note that in the third step, {-moH} is supposed to somehow
transfer the volition from the subject to the object. Why?
Well. I don't know. Unfortunately, we have no other canonical
examples of {-qangmoH} or {-qanglu'} to help us figure out
which suffix is causing the change in assignment of volition.
Anyway, the interaction of Type 2 verb suffixes, {-moH} and
{-lu'} is a royal mess confused by examples in TKD without
sufficient explanation from Okrand as to how this is supposed
to work. We are working on it.
>
> choQaHchugh qatlho'
>
> Qeygh
charghwI'
--
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