tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jan 19 09:17:25 1995
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Re: law'/puS
>Subject: Re: law'/puS
>Date: 95-01-19 00:24:21 EST
>From: [email protected] (William H. Martin)
>> If I take the liberty to consider Q to be an infinitive,
>> I see the comparative expression as two noun-'noun'-constructions:
>> "the much bigness" of men, "the less bigness" of women.
>> How do you think about this?
>No. Guido's suggestion was that verbs with {-meH} are
>infinitive in the sense that they do not need to have a subject
>or object assigned to them (though they can). That is not the
>same thing as saying that such an infinitive can behave
>grammatically as a noun. I think that is too much of a liberty.
>I see no justification for interpreting tIn as "bigness" and
>similarly interpreting anything in the Q position as a noun in
>a law'/puS construction. Nothing near this.
On retrospect, I probably didn't express myself properly about prefixless
{-meH} verbs. What I think I should have said was that the English infinitive
is used most frequently in the same semantic way that the Klingon {-meH}
verbs are used, viz., communicating a purpose. I didn't mean that {-meH} was
equivalent to infinitive. But it's not too important now. The only quirk I
see is that oftentimes Okrand uses a prefixless {-meH} verb, and it looks odd
to me because it's what happens in English just because of the grammatical
nature of an infinitive, a nominal acting as the complement to an object,
whereas is a verbal *clause* in Klingon. But prefixless {-meH} verbs are
canonical and so, we have to deal with it the same way we deal with Okrand's
{Hub'eghrupHa'} and so forth.
>Subject: Re: "HolQeD" 3:4
>Date: 95-01-19 00:30:54 EST
>From: [email protected] (Mark E. Shoulson)
>Just to lay this one to rest again. We *did* ask Okrand about this one.
>And we presented him with "*jIpo' law' bIpo' puS" *and* "jIH po' law' SoH
>po' puS" *and* "*po'wIj law' po'lIj puS". Yes, I thought of that as well.
>The answer is that "jIH po' law' SoH po' puS" is correct. All hail Okrand.
Ahowajiminibaba. That argument is now unofficially nullified. I hope
someone's planning to present this in "HolQeD" so we won't have to hear about
it anymore.
>~mark
Guido#1, Leader of All Guidos