tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jul 14 11:20:50 1996
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Re: usage of Hoch and latlh
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>Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 13:54:21 -0700
>From: "Kenneth Traft" <[email protected]>
>Glen's response to Mark Shoulson and d'Ammond Speers:
>Although Okrand refers to only three parts of speech: <<DIpmey>>,
><<wotmey<<, and <<chuvmey>>, you cannot simply look something up in the word
>lists to see which of the three categories the word in question falls under
>and then automatically know how to use it. You must study the text of the
>grammatical explanations and the examples given.
True to an extent, but not entirely. What you're saying sounds a lot like
"look at what their translations are in English and treat them the same."
There are a lot of languages in which some things that seem to be numbers
are not treated like other numbers (consider English, in which "zero" is
certainly a number in counting, but not normally used partitively. Or
Hebrew, where similar situations obtain, and in which, like in Basque, the
number "one" follows instead of precedes like all the other numbers). I
realize Klingon is Klingon and not Hebrew or English or Basque... but
there's only so much you can be sure of based on limited information.
>The first MISCONCEPTION is that numbers ARE NOT nouns, because they are listed
>in the chuvmey section. Although numbers in every language fall into a
>special category, Klingon numbers are either NOUNS or ADVERBS (TKD 5.2, pp
>54-55).
Adverbs? How so? Klingon adverbs come at the beginnings of sentences and
describe an feature of the sentence. "jIQong" can be "*QIt jIQong" in
which the act of sleeping is modified by being told it's done slowly (the *
is in case some wiseacre notes that sleeping slowly doesn't make sense).
How can I add "jav" in front of a sentence to modify the meaning of the
sentence as a whole? Can you give me an example of this?
Ah... Do you mean numbers when modified with "-logh"? OK, yes, agreed:
those are adverbs. And numbers modified with "-DIch" are something close
to stative verbs that only occur adjectivally (that we know of).
Unmodified numbers certainly do appear to be more noun than anything
else... except for their way of modifying the noun that follows them when
used as quantifiers. On the one hand, it's tempting to say as you do:
> A number plus a noun is a de facto N-N construction and must be
>treated as such.
because after all, they act like nouns in other ways. On the other hand,
there *is* room to say that they are simply unusual. After all, pronouns
behave as nouns in all respects... except that they can also be verbs.
I will say, though, that treating them as nouns as you do does seem to me
more defensible.
> We know that the expression <<pagh tlhIngan means zero
>Klingons, no Klingons OR non of the Klingons, i.e., partitive. Since pagh
>tlhIngan>> means "NONE of the Klingons", it stands to reason that its opposite
>"ALL of the Klingons" must follow the same pattern, <<Hoch tlhIngan>>.
Dunno... In Welsh "dim dynion" is "no men", but "dynion i gyd" is "all the
men." To be sure, that's a rather unusual construction.
I think I'm generally having some trouble with the concept of partitives.
Sure looks that way. In a way, I can see a difference. If you consider
"pagh" as a number, like "zero", then "pagh tlhInganpu'" is just applying
that number to how many Klingons there are. I suppose that's like what
you're saying. I'm not sure it has to follow that "all" must go the same
way as "six" (pagh and jav are both listed as numbers, so "zero" and "six"
are given as agreeing.) You yourself noted that "HochHom" is used as a
simple N-N construction meaning "the near-entirety of..."; as I said, my
logic in "*tlhIngan Hoch" was considering it as "the entirety of things
Klingon." Viewing "Hoch" as a number is neater, and it turns out
correct---but I didn't see it as inescapable.
>Similarly, even though <<bID>> is listed as a noun and not a number, COMMON
>SENSE should tell you that if numbers are used as nouns, then nouns expressing
>quantity, even though they are not listed as chuvmey, must follow the rules of
>other numbers. I would expect that the correct way to indicate "I am half
>Klingon" would be <<wa' bID tlhIngan jIH.>> Can there be any doubt whatsoever
>that this is the correct word order? Would you prefer <<tlhIngan wa' bID
>jIH?>>
I was (and remain) reluctant to re-classify words when there was any
possibility that it was not a typo that labeled them wrong (as is the case
with some mislabeled nouns and verbs). Blowing noun for verb is one thing,
but chuvmey are a closed class, and comparatively rare; I would have
thought Okrand would label them properly.
> <<latlh>> falls under the same category: <<latlh tlhIngan>>means
>"another Klingon" or "another of the Klingons," again partitive.
I would probably agree with you on {bID} (mostly because the other
word-orderings are really lousy), but I'm still unconvinced regarding
{latlh}. It may be the same confusion, but how is latlh a partitive?
Again, it still makes sense as a GENITIVE N-N construction. We know that
N-N is restricted purely to ownership (peQ doesn't "own" chem in peQ chem),
and I agree with you that extending it to *all* cases where "of the" occurs
in English is also wrong. But looking at "tlhIngan latlh" as "the
Klingon's fellow"... that is, a fellow Klingon of the Klingon in question
("possessed" no more than a friend, but we certainly say "tlhIngan jup"),
that means "another Klingon" quite handily: a fellow-Klingon to the one
he's "other" from. It's this logic that leads me to my position, not
blindly replacing N-N's for "of the."
>Second, <<mangghom>> means "a soldier's group", i.e., an army. This is a
>standard N-N compound for army. If you wanted to say "a group of soldiers"
>and use it partitively, then the correct translation would be <<ghom negh>>,
>since <<mang>> is singular. There is, however, no canonical evidence for
><<ghom>> being used partitively.
I am dubious that this sort of construction applies to nouns generally.
Numbers *are* given as chuvmey, and *do* behave unusually (can you add
- -logh or -DIch to other nouns? Or combine them like compound numbers?);
can we generalize to all nouns? Or only to nouns of groups, like "ghom"?
Or only to some of those? We don't know. At least I don't.
>One really needs to study Okrand's use of parts of speech more carefully in
>order to understand his fluidity of grammatical concepts:
> 1. Numbers are treated as either nouns or adverbs
Nouns or adverbs with -logh or adjectives (adjectival verbs) with -DIch.
> 3. Interrogative pronouns (question words) are also treated as nouns or
>verbs or pronouns
We've wished for the ability to do "?'arlogh"; I suppose that your logic
would permit that. I remain conservative on many of these points myself.
Generally, though, I agree with most of your observations, and indeed have
observed them myself.
~mark
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