tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jul 01 21:08:34 1996
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Re: Order of 'oH + -'e'
- From: Krenath <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Order of 'oH + -'e'
- Date: Tue, 02 Jul 1996 00:08:25 -0400
At 09:55 AM 7/1/96 -0700, you wrote:
>peHruS writes:
>>I may have to concede that the order of the equivalency sentence does not
>>make any difference...
>>1. nuqDaq 'oH Qe' QaQ'e'
>>2. nuqDaq 'oH puchpa''e'
>I don't think that {puchpa' 'oH nuqDaq'e'} makes much sense. I'd consider
>this to be a contradiction of your proposed concession, except that I also
>don't think this usage of pronouns to mean "to be at a place" can really be
>thought of as an "equivalency" statement.
>>3. veQDuj 'oH DujlIj'e'
>>4. puqpu' chaH qama'pu''e' (This is p68 Sec 6.3, which states: As for the
>>prisoners, they are children.)
>They do say somewhat the same thing when reversed, but with quite a different
>emphasis: "Your ship is a garbage scow" vs. "The garbage scow is your ship."
>The first one is a powerful insult; the second is merely bad news. :-)
>"The prisoners are children" says that each of the captured ones is a child.
>"The children are prisoners" says that each child has been captured. I don't
>think they are the same idea. In english, one can emphasize either word in
>either sentence to alter the meaning from one to the other without changing
>the word order, but in the Klingon sentence the subject of a "to be" sentence
>is permanently emphasized.
Well, I'm not sure how to express what I want to say, even in English, but
here goes:
It seems that the majority of "X is Y" equivalency statements actually do
not indicate complete equivalency, but that X is a part or subset of Y. for
example, the statement "A square is a rectangle" which is true, but not
necessarily true in reverse order.
if {puqpu' chaH qama'pu''e'} means "the children are prisoners", then
{qama'pu' chaH puqpu''e'} ought to mean "the prisoners are children".
tlhIngan Hol appears to follow the same general word order English does for
stating such sentences, something I wasn't really expecting, as tlhIngan
Hol's subject/object order is supposed to be opposite that of English and I
would have thought if the X and Y in either "X is Y" or "X 'oH Y'e'" as
subject and object. I, however, am not a linguist and get 'subject' and
'object' mized up about as often as I do 'left' and 'right' (though I can
blame that on my nonconformist idea of handedness)
,-------+-----. Eric Koske, Register Data Systems, Register Communications.
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