tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jun 10 19:58:45 1997
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Re: jajlo'
ja' QetlhIS:
>Consider the sentences:
>
>He told them, "Didn't I already tell you that?"
>I already told you about many things.
>I already told you many things.
>I already told you that you should do this.
>I already told you you should do this.
>
>The first sentence shows the English counterpart to David'ssentence, two
>sentences after each other (with a comma which doesn't exist
>intlhIngan).
>"Them" and "you" are the indirect objects of "told". In the first case
>we really can't say that the sentence has a direct object as we cannot
>look upon the quotation as an object, but we can say that omitting the
>object
>calls for a quotation, which we indicate with quotation marks.
The objects, direct or indirect, of the English verb "tell" aren't
all that relevant to the discussion of Klingon grammar. The Klingon
verb {ja'} appears to have as its object the person being spoken to,
not the phrase being spoken.
>I think the problem arises from the lack of the following possible
>workarounds:
>
>* we cannot express "from" or "of" other than, which Okrand indicates,
>with "Daq",
> which we would interpret to speak in the same position as the object.
nuqjatlh? "From" is indicated with the noun suffix {-vo'}, and "of"
usually is indicated with a noun-noun "possessive" construction.
>* there is no word for "about" either (only occurance i really know is
>SaH and there it's inherent to the verb)
Which "about" are you talking about? :-) There are many ways to say
the things that are expressed by the word "about" in English (see the
article about prepositional concepts by Elias Israel in HolQeD 1:4
for discussion of similar topics).
>* there is no equivalent for the english "that", as in "i told you that I
>don't
> do that" which would be the perfect solution to indicate a subordinate
>clause
> for indirection, which Okrand solved like English (in difference to German)
> can do: simply omitting the "that". But then, without quotation marks, the
> "that" sentence and the directly quoted sentence simply look alike.
The Klingon equivalent for "that" is {'e'} and {net}.
See TKD section 6.2.5, Sentences as objects.
>Now we could argue, that we can omit the "about" in a similar way as we can
>do the "that".
The only case of an omitted "that" is when the second verb is {neH}
in a sentence-as-object construction. The rest of your argument
assumes that verbs of saying can have a sentence as an object, and
there's not really enough evidence to support that assumption.
>...The occurance of "report" in the meaning list of
>"ja'" still is an indicator for me that "ja'" can be used in the
>meaning of "to tell about". IMHO, that is the difference which
>Okrand wanted to give "ja'" to "jatlh". The words tell and report
>themselves both carry the slight hint to "indirection" in themselves.
Or, as SuStel suggested, the reason "report" is given as a meaning
for {ja'} is to handle the case where there is no object specified.
Otherwise we'd have translations like "I told, 'You are ugly.'"
It's much more reasonable as "I reported, 'You are ugly.'"
-- ghunchu'wI'