tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Mar 04 17:08:48 1996

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Re: lut tlhaQ: nuq qab law' Dochvam qab puS?



Alex "Lord Havelock" wrote:
>meghlIjDaq yIH Datu' nuq qab law' 'e' qab puS? [etc.]

I wrote:
>This is a *very* interesting twist on the {law'/puS} construction.
>I don't see anything drastically wrong with it; it certainly makes
>syntactic sense to me.

~mark writes:
>Syntactic sense?  Not to me... You have "'e'" being used as the "subject"
>of one of the limbs of law'/puS.  "'e'" can only be an *object*.  I don't
>know exactly what function the nouns serve in law'/puS, but it ain't
>object.  What's the object of "qab" anyway?

With the perspective gained from the passage of time, I now see that
my first reaction was entirely too positive. :-)  I intentionally did
not claim it made any sort of *grammatical* sense, but perhaps the word
I should have used was "semantic" instead of "syntactic."  I, too, don't
know what to call the part of the "sentence" the nouns take, but I was
misled by their appearing *before* the verb, and the {'e'} didn't look
out of place at first glance.

So I must retract my earlier enthusiasm.  {'e'}, being restricted to
object only, does not fit as a noun in a {law'/puS} construction.

-- ghunchu'wI'               batlh Suvchugh vaj batlh SovchoH vaj




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