tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Dec 05 10:04:00 1997

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Re: Question as object

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>Date: Sun, 30 Nov 1997 20:51:42 -0800 (PST)
>From: Alan Anderson <[email protected]>
>
>ja' ~mark:
>>..."The lieutenant learned what fueled the ship."  It's not "the
>>captain learned the substance that fueled the ship".  If the substance is
>>stale kevas, how do you learn kevas?  You learn the identity of the
>>substance, which is not the same thing.
>>
>>Is there an answer to this that doesn't require QAO?  Maybe.  But it is NOT
>>as simple as you are making it out to be: an ordinary relative clause
>>doesn't cut it.
>
>I'd never heard of indirect questions before this discussion, and until I
>saw this example I wasn't convinced that they were inherent in an idea as
>opposed to its expression in a particular language.  Now I find I have to
>agree that "He learned what fueled the ship" doesn't work with a relative
>clause if it's translated anything close to directly.

Thank you.  I *had* heard of them, but had forgotten them and never fully
appreciated the distinction until I thought about them during this
discussion.  I am glad I was able to communicate their importance, and that
I managed to convince some of you not to sweep them under the rug.

>This example is unlike the ones that I've complained about.  The object of
>the second sentence is *not* a simple noun identified by what looks like a
>question word.  In this case, the object indeed is a complete sentence.
>The whole construction still isn't a real question, but there is an implied
>answer.  Its sort of "He learned [the answer to] 'what fueled the ship?'"

Right.  That was Krankor's contention all along, that QAO meant "I know
[the answer to] that."  He just never really couched it in terms of
indirect questions or drew the distinction between them and relative
clauses.

The distinction is subtle and common, and because it's not drawn in English
it's easy to miss.  That's part of why this discussion was so protracted.
In a sentence like "I saw who was standing there," the difference between
the relative clause meaning and the indirect question is very small and
subtle, so it's easy to dismiss it.  But it is there, and is much more
pronounced in other sentences.  So I'd say you should still use the
relative clause only when that's the meaning you want, and the indirect
question method (whatever it is) when the meaning you need is "I saw who it
was who was standing there."  Because so many of the examples are subtle
like this, it isn't always easy to see the difference.

There are a few notable examples to poke at.  "I know how to fix the
computer": what is the difference between the two meanings?  Use the
Klingon recasting of "I know the method [to use] in order to repair the
computer" for the relative clause meaning.  The difference is so small
here it may not exist at all.  I suppose I could say that I could know the
method in broad strokes, and thus know what the method is without knowing
the method, but that's not completely true: I still DO know the method,
just not very well.  This one, perhaps, really should be translated only as
one or the other (probably relative clause), or perhaps as either
interchangeably.

Then there's my other favorite of "I know whether the captain died."
Someone suggested that "Heghpu'chugh HoD ['e'/ngoDvetlh] vISov" wasn't too
bad: if the captain has died, I know it.  I maintain it isn't enough.
Because the claim is that not only do I know that the captain died if he
died, but I also know that he *didn't* die if he didn't.  The above Klingon
sentence is silent about what I know in the case that the captain didn't
die, but the indirect question meaning isn't.  I'd be pretty happy with
"Heghpu''a' HoD? 'e' vISov" for that.

>I'm still going to try to avoid using questions as objects.  They might
>have their place, but it's a "fence-around-the-law" kind of thing.  If I
>start sprinkling {ghItlh qonta' 'Iv 'e' lughoj} and the like through my
>writings, it might give people the erroneous impression that I accept the
>superficially similar {ghItlh qonta' 'Iv 'e' lughov} -- which I do not. :-P

Which is why I make sure to punctuate it as a "rhetorical" question, to
drive the point home that I'm not using a relative clause.  It's better
than nothing.  If QAO is the way to go, we must be very careful to make
sure that people recognize the difference between it and relative clauses.

It is certainly the case that we don't know for sure how indirect questions
are handled in Klingon.  We have no canon, and there are many possibilities
out there.  I would be extremely surprised if they were treated as relative
clauses, and I think you would be too.  The more I think about it, the more
I like QAO constructions, to the extent that I would be mildly surprised if
they were *not* the right answer.  But only mildly; there certainly is room
for all sorts of other answers.  QAO seems to solve the problem neatly and
elegantly, within the grammar, and flexibly enough for just about any
situation.  Other answers I could think of tend to be more restrictive.  Of
course, Okrand can invent a whole new class of words or constructions I
can't even guess at.  Occam's razor, to my mind, supports QAO, but that's
no proof; languages don't behave that rationally.

~mark

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