tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jul 30 20:06:00 1997

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Re: chay'



ghItlh ~mark:


>It's not that Qo'noS-shattering.  ......
>
>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.  .....
>..... 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. :)

Yes, but that is very clear once one gets the hang of it. We just need more 
vocabulary to use it!

But still, all the question words can be answered with the same sentence using 
the answer in the same or similar position as the question word, except the 
non-adverbial way of answering chay'. I illustrated that in the first post of 
this thread. There is no verb or noun suffix that so easily puts the answer to 
chay' into the sentence as say -mo' for qatlh.

qatlh Sop? QIt Sop. BUT - qatlh Sop? SopmeH, nujDaq Soj lan 'ej yIv 'ej ghup. 
(Another sounds-like verb!)

See? The modifying suffix goes on the QUESTION, not the answer! Isn't that 
something?

ghobe', ~mark. Qo'noS ghorta'be'. 'ach Dajbej.

Qermaq








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