tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jun 25 14:52:30 1997
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Re: MUSH
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>Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 01:06:37 -0700 (PDT)
>From: [email protected]
>
>In a message dated 97-06-20 22:16:15 EDT, SuStel writes:
>
><< > De'wI' po'wI' jIHbe'
> > chay' MUSH vIlo' 'e' vISovbe'
>
> I'll pretend I didn't see this as a question as object, and I'll imagine I
> just saw {chay' MUSH vIlo'}.
> >>
>
>You appear to be saying that tlhIngan Hol question words may be used ONLY to
>ASK a question. If you are correct, this is the first of 28 languages
>(admittedly the other 27 are Terran) I have studied (I'm nowhere near fluent
>in most of them) in which question words may not be used subordinately.
Read up on Sanskrit. Sanskrit is a nice, well-behaved Indo-European
language, which neatly keeps interrogative and relative pronouns distinct.
When it comes down to it, there's really no reason they should be conflated
(sometimes people criticize Esperanto for conflating them). You can say in
Sanskrit something that translates quite neatly and literally to "I
understand what you say", even close to word-for-word... but it's not the
same "what" as in "what are you saying?"
What are you saying?: ki.m bhaa.sase
I understand what you're saying: yad bhaa.sase tad avagacchaami
Note that "kim"/what the question word occurs only in the first senetnce,
not the second. The second translates to "what you say, that I
understand." i.e. "that which you say, THAT I understand." Yes, in
Sanskrit you use both relative and correlative pronouns. There are *three*
series in Sanskrit: relative, correlative, and interrogative. English uses
some interrogatives also as relatives and omits the correlatives mostly.
yasmin snihyasi tad hanti: [the one] (in) whom you love, him I kill
(in Sanskrit, verbs of affection often have their objects in locative).
But "who" is "kah", not "yah" or "sah".
>tlhIngan Hol is not Terran. It is not like anything Terran. Still, how can
>we presuppose that we cannot use question words this way? I await your
>debate.
Dunno. But it looks like it's certainly reasonable to use either way, so
how are we to know what Klingon uses?
Personally, I happen to like using question-words as you do, though I make
a point of not thinking of them or trying to represent them as relative
clauses. I'd write "chay' vIlo'? 'e' vISovbe'" punctuating it to really
look like "How do I use it? I don't know that," which I feel means what I
want and works for me. But perhaps it doesn't in all cases, and so I
mustn't be fooled into thinking that question-words are direct substitutes
for relatives.
~mark
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