tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Aug 27 12:43:23 1997

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Re: mu'tlheghmeywIj

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>Date: Wed, 27 Aug 1997 09:12:48 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Qov <[email protected]>
>
>At 05:35 AM 8/27/97 -0700, Dawut wrote:
>
>>Would these qualify as valid sentences from among the "complex and 
>>convoluted" sentences written of on TKD p.59, or are these sentences 
>>simply invalid?  Has there been any issues of HolQeD which have 
>>addressed this?  (I only have the first volume of HolQeD, and am 
>>interested in getting important back-issues.)
>
>Other than that, these sentences are fine.  You're not really doing anything
>radical, you're just plugging a more complex sentence into the slot after
>the vaj.  {bIjeghbe'chugh vaj ...} "If you don't surrender then ..."
>Absolutely any valid Klingon sentence may follow. {choja'Qo'chugh vaj lojpa'
>noSvaghwIj Hoch yIHmeyvaD romuluSngan Hol vIghojmoH pu'beHlIj vISoptaHvIS
>'e' Har SoSlI'.} Again, the limits are what your reader's brain can parse
>before the meaning breaks down.

Yes; this is all a matter of limits of complexity.  We see it in English a
lot too: This is the stick that hit the dog that bit the cat that chased
the mouse that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built: that
whole song is wordplay based on overloading the stack (there's a similar
song in Aramaic sung at the Passover Seder, and I'm told it resembles a
Cypriot song quite closely).  Or progressions like:

The toy broke.
The boy the boy liked broke.
The toy the boy the man hit liked broke
The toy the boy the man the woman loved hit liked broke.
etc.

It's hard to say where exactly the sentence breaks down, where it's too
complex to follow anymore, where it stops making sense and becomes
"ungrammatical" due to being too complicated.  (There was a fun toy
language invented by someone on the constructed language list which was
based on center-embedding: each element in a sentence was embedded inside
the others.  And during one interview with the race of squid that spoke it,
it turned out that they had a very sharp limit: ten or twelve deep
(depending on the sex: female squid had a stack of twelve, males of ten)
and then it stops making sense: that stack gets blown.)

~mark

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