tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Nov 07 05:13:42 1997
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Re: Question-Relative Clause
Scott Murphy writes:
>...The sentence "They don't know how this happened," does not
>contain a relative clause. In fact, it doesn't even contain a noun which
>would serve as the head noun.
This sentence *does* contain a relative clause. The word "how" in this
example is a relative pronoun, and the specific noun which it is standing
for would serve as the head noun.
> The subject is "they". The object is "how
>this hapopened". The verb is "don't know". Until we either see an
>example in canon of a sentence like this, or get an explanation from
>Okrand. The question IS still open for debate.
After expanding the pronoun into a more complete noun, the object is
"the way in which this happened". There is nothing here to suggest an
interrogative word is appropriate. The debate might still be going on,
but only because the people defending "question as object" are missing
the two fatal flaws in their argument:
1 - Trying to express "They know who ate the chocolate" using the
Sentence As Object construction in Klingon misuses the pronoun
{'e'} to refer to only one word of the first sentence.
2 - The phrase "who ate the chocolate" isn't a question in English.
It is a relative clause. This "who" is not the same as {'Iv}.
>...The insertion of "that" is not always implied by the use of 'e'...
The *deletion* of "that" is often permitted in English when smoothing
out a translation, but in every valid Sentence As Object I have seen,
the word "that" can be left in the English without changing the meaning.
-- ghunchu'wI'