tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jul 03 16:41:25 1997

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More on "jIjatlh" et al.

I finally managed to pull myself over to the mailing list and read some
of the interesting posts that have been piling up.

My congratulations to Will Martin on his recent vindication regarding
direct quotations and the like.

Of course, as soon as I saw something like:

     tlhIngan Hol jIjatlh    I said "Klingon language"
and
     tlhIngan Hol vIjatlh    I speak Klingon

certain ideas crept into my head.  What other verbs does this work
with?  Or to put it another way, what is it about direct quotations that
makes this work?

For example, could I say:

     ngevwI' Hegh jIleghbe'

to indicate that I have not yet seen the play "Death of a Salesman"?

Or what about:

     cha' vengmey lut jIlaD

to say that I have read "A Tale of Two Cities"?

Both of these seem plausible to me, but also disturbing.  If you follow
this kind of thinking you can argue that you can use almost any verb
this way.  After all if you can "read" the thing, you can also "dislike"
it or "finish" it or "misunderstand" it and so on.  

Let's go back to the first example.  If I say:

     tlhIngan Hol jIjatlh     I said "Klingon language"

How then do you use 'e'?  If the reply to the above is:

     'e' vIyajbe'     I didn't understand it

then what does the "it" refer to?  Is the 'e' the direct quote, or the
entire previous statement?  If the latter, could you express the former
by using a different prefix?

I don't know.  And I'm hoping I've missed something in my skimming of
the list and that wiser heads (aka, grammarians) will set me back on the
true path.

Meanwhile, it's less than two weeks to the qep'a' loSDIch, and I'm sure
we'll have a LOT to talk about there.

Lawrence

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