tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jul 29 11:33:38 1997
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Re: chay'
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>Date: Mon, 28 Jul 1997 21:48:41 -0700 (PDT)
>From: "Neal Schermerhorn" <[email protected]>
>
>This is the only question word that seems to translate in more than one way
>even without considering the example with ra'. It asks for possibly two
>different types of responses (depending on context, most likely). It is
>interesting - it is the only ambiguous question word....
It's not that Qo'noS-shattering. The word has the same two
somewhat-unrelated meanings in English (and many other languages besides,
which leads one to think that maybe they're not so unrelated after all). I
can ask you "How do you walk?" and you can answer "well, first you plant
your right foot on the ground, and lift the left foot up, balancing on the
right. Place the left foor down in front of the right, and shift weight
onto it. Then..." or you can answer, "pretty quickly." Like the old joke
about asking a magician, "How do you do that trick?" and he answers "Damn
well!".
Thing is, chay' and qatlh really are adverbial questions. They're asking
questions which involve the functioning of the sentence as a whole, not
just a part of it. That's really what adverbs (in the Klingon sense) do:
they modify how a whole clause-relationship happens. "vIHoH"/I kill him,
*as a whole* gets modified by "batlh" to mean "I kill him honorably". The
adverbial affects the way the predicate relationship happens. Same with
causes and methods, though it may not be obvious. Causes, methods,
purposes, even locations and times all add additional information into the
predicate relationship that affects the relationship as a whole. With a
"nuq" question you're asking for information that fills in a particular
noun-phrase of the sentence. With chay' and qatlh and ghorgh and nuqDaq
you're asking for information to fill in some of the "everything else"
data, not subject or object, which goes in the beginning of a Klingon
sentence. Not all of these are necessarily answerable by noun-phrases, but
that's okay.
The weird question is 'ar. :)
~mark
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