tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Oct 16 06:24:25 1995
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Re: TLHINGAN-HOL digest 262
According to Matt Treyvaud:
>
...
> jIyaj. But then what if you have been there before but were not there at
> the time in question? - e.g. a murder in your kitchen (which you didn't
> commit). A better way to express all the meanings, I think, would be
> {poHvetlh qaStaHvIS, pa' jIHbe'}... this seems much less ambiguous. {pa'
> jIHpu'be'} and {pa' jIHbe'pu'} both seem flawed to me.
First, your word order is wrong. Your {poHvetlh} is supposed to
be the subject of {qaStaHvIS}, right? Next, you are mixing time
and space when you take a space-oriented locative {-vetlh} and
apply it to a time-oriented noun {poH}. While it is okay to do
this in English, I don't know of any rule or example in canon
that lets us do this in Klingon.
Meanwhile, if you replace the time stamp with a better phrase
serving the same function, I agree with the second half of your
proposed sentence. Something like:
loD HoHlu'DI', pa' jIHbe'.
or
loD HoHlu'DI', pa' jIHlI'be'.
This is because what you want to express is the simple past or
progressive past. "When the man was killed, I was not there,"
or, "When the man was killed, I was not being there." To use
the perfective there would imply that you had not been there in
your life until some time after the murder. "When the man was
killed, I had not been there."
> Incidentally, do we know now how to handle {je}-ing more than two nouns?
> If so... how is it done? (my money's still on listing them and putting
> {je} at the end).
Your suspicion is confirmed in the newest issue of HolQeD.
Okrand lists a usual disruptor pistol, a power source conveyor
and a long stick and uses just one {je} at the end. This does
not establish that it is wrong to place an additional {je}
after the first pair of nouns, though to do so is to tread on
that thin ice of using grammatical constructions which conform
to one's personal logic, but not to any rule or example in
canon. Meanwhile, it DOES establish that it is correct to use
only one {je} at the end of a list of nouns.
charghwI'
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