tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Mar 05 05:29:19 1996

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

At 10:27 AM 3/2/96 -0800, you wrote:
>Alex "Lord Havelock" writes:
>>meghlIjDaq yIH Datu' nuq qab law' 'e' qab puS?
>>meghlIjDaq yIH bID Datu' 'e' qab law' Dochvetlh qab puS.
>
>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.  

Well, the beginning just doesn't work. Really look at that first sentence.
Keep in mind that the Sentence As Object construction is really two
sentences in Klingon and we could punctuate it that way if we wanted to. 

{bIQaghpu' 'e' vIHar.} = {bIQaghpu'. 'e' vIHar.}

If we do that to this example:

meghlIjDaq yIH Datu'. nuq qab law' 'e' qab puS?

Remember that {'e'} can only be used as an OBJECT of a verb while it
represents the previous sentence. While the location of {'e'} suggests that
it is the object of the verb {qab}, that really doesn't apply here. That
analysis uses the word order in a normal sentence, but this is a {law'/puS}
construction, which has no similarity to the grammar of a normal Klingon
sentence. We know that {qab} does not have the ability to TAKE an object.
This word order {*noun* qab} in a NORMAL sentence would indicate that {qab}
is being used adjectivally and is not grammatically treated as a verb at
all, so the noun is not its object. Since the noun cannot be its object,
that noun cannot be {'e'}.

In short, you can only decide that this is acceptable if you take several
different, conflicting, partial views of the grammar. These pieces do not
fit together and the construction fails. You cannot meaningfully combine a
{law'/puS} sentence with {'e'} to form a sentence as object construction. It
just doesn't work. The {law'/puS} construction can act as the sentence {'e'}
represents as object of some other verb:

{SoSlI' Quch Hab law' SoSwI' Quch Hab puS 'e' vIHar.}

But that does not mean you can place {'e'} as one of the two nouns in a
{law'/puS} construction representing a previous sentence. It just doesn't work.

>However, this sort of thing is sufficiently
>unusual that I won't start using it myself, at least not until I've
>seen more support for it (in canon, perhaps).

It would have to be one whale of an example.

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

charghwI'

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