tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jul 07 08:27:55 1997

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing



[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: More on "jIjatlh" et al.



>Date: Thu, 3 Jul 1997 17:10:12 -0700 (PDT)
>From: "Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen" <[email protected]>
>
>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"?

I don't think so.  I think you're getting dazzled by the "quotation" aspect
of what we've learned, which is really more an incidental feature than the
basis for it.  The point of what we've learned is that with verbs of
saying, the thing said, when a quotation, is not considered the object.
That is, objects of verbs of saying are not quotes.  For starters, we only
know that this applies to verbs of saying, which we already are told are
anomolous in grammar (from TKD).  Moreover, even if we accept that it
applies to other things, the extension would be quite otherwise.  {*ngevwI'
Hegh jIleghbe'} would mean "I didn't see the words {ngevwI' Hegh} [written
someplace, presumably]," not the play.  Quotes, remember?

~mark


Back to archive top level