tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jan 09 12:22:33 1997

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Re: Krankor's article



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>Date: Wed, 8 Jan 1997 21:27:50 -0800
>From: Terrence Donnelly <[email protected]>
>
>I'm confused by one section of Captain Krankor's article in the latest
>HolQeD.  He writes {mulegh SuvwI'pu'vo' cha'}, meaning 'two of the warriors
>see me'.  I'll accept the odd word order, which I guess is justified because
>{SuvwI'pu'} is supposed to modify only {cha'}.  (Like if I said {HaDI'baH
>pe' ghojmeH taj} 'the boy's knife/practice knife cuts the meat', where
>{ghojmeH} is meant to modify only {taj}.)  
>
>But I don't follow the use of {-vo'}.  In TKD, p. 28, it says "This suffix
>is similar to {-Daq} but is used only when action is in a direction away
>from the noun suffixed with {-vo'}."  It seems to me that this list has
>always held to the idea that {-vo'} is used only to express motion.  Has
>this changed?  The Captain is clearly using {-vo'} as some kind of partitive
>suffix ('a subset out of a fuller set'), but I thought the absence of such a
>suffix was the whole reason for d'Armond's original article and Krankor's
>response.  So, what gives?  How do the pabpo'wI'pu' like this idea?

Well, you've heard from one pabpo', Krankor himself, who wrote the article.

As for *this* pabpo'... well, I need to write a letter to HolQeD as a
response.  I do *not* like this use, not a bit.  I don't see how it can
work.  As you correctly point out, it implies a meaning to -vo' that really
doesn't seem to belong there.  It only makes sense because in English
"from" has both those meanings.  The meaning of "-vo'" was never extended
this way, in text or canon, so far as I know.  Moreover, it's also very
unusual in that it uses one "prepositional phrase" (I mean, a noun with a
type-5 suffix) to modify not the whole sentence, but a *noun*.  Nouns with
type-5s on them aren't simply Klingon analogues to prepositional phrases
(which in English can modify nouns as well as sentences), from the way
they're described it seems they are used to add information to the
*sentence* as a whole (give its location, etc).  They add new "places" to
the predicate relationship.  I don't think we've ever seen an example of a
type-5-modified noun used as a modifier of another *noun* and not as a
sentence prepositional phrase.  (only -meH seems to be used to modify
nouns).  I should expand on this and write a response for HolQeD (or
someone else can).

Otherwise, I really liked his article; it made some fine points and made
good arguments against some things I wasn't too wild about in Holtej's
earlier article.  Butr the -vo' trick doesn't work for me.

~mark

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