tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jun 20 19:19:16 1995
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Re: "It was raining hard"
On Tue, 20 Jun 1995, Jim Boniface wrote:
> >> I needed one more fare to make my night.
> >> mevpa' jIH Qav jIH DIl nuv vISuqnIs
>
> If the above way was the best way to say "I needed one more fare to make my
> night" would the sentence structure be ok? My thinking on it was that since
> there is no 'fare' in tlhIngan Hol, the "Qav jIH DIl" should be all together
> and act like the verb, with "I needed" as the subject and "before I could
> stop" as the object. Is that the right way to think about it?
No. {Qav jIH DIl} says "It is final; I; It pays for it". The words have
no grammatical relation to each other or to the rest of the sentence.
The absence of any verb prefix indicate that {jIH} is neither the subject
or object of either {Qav} or {DIl} and that both verbs have third-person
subjects (i.e. the subject of both verbs is he/she/it or they).
{jImevpa'} would not be considered an object. Technically, it is a
subordinate clause. (See Sec. 6.2.2.) {vISuqnIS} (I need to get it) is
not a subject it is a complete sentence unto itself. The verb prefix {vI-}
indicates the subject is "I", the object is "he/she/it or they"; and the
verb is {Suq}.
> >DaHjaj ram jImevpa' leng DIl raQpo' latlh 'e' vIpoQ.
> >(Before I stop tonight, I require that another passenger pays for a trip.)
In this sentence {DaHjaj ram jImevpa'} (Before I stop tonight) is also a
subordinate clause.
{leng DIl raQpo' lalth 'e' vIpoQ} (I require that another passenger pays
for a trip) is two sentences. The first sentence, {leng DIl raQpo'
lalth} is the object of the second sentence, {'e' vIpoQ}. This is called a
sentence-as-object construction. {'e'} is a pronoun representing the
first sentence as a whole and indicate that that sentence is the object of
{vIpoQ}. (See Sec. 6.2.5.)
> Jim
yoDtargh