tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Nov 07 20:59:38 1997

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indirect questions and relative clauses



> William H. Martin wrote:
>
> I see the point you are trying to make, but you are failing.
> Your second clause after {'ach} is attempting to say:
>
> Huch nge'bogh nuv'e' ngu'laHbe' chom.
>
> What you say instead is something like:
>
> "The bartender does not know that who took away the money?"
>
> Notice that this does not quite make sense. You want to remove
> the "that" and remove the question mark and get a relative
> clause, but in truth the question "Who took away the money?" and
> the relative clause "who took the money" are not at all similar
> in meaning even if the English wording is nearly identical, and
> it is not valid to require the removal of the word "that" in
> order to get meaning out of the translation. All Sentence As
> Object translations CAN use the word "that". This one cannot,
> which is good evidence that something strange is going on here.
>> charghwI'
This paragraph
Actually that is how an indirect question (and a relative clause) is
made in English with some minor changes (see the end of the e-mail for
the differences)

> Question: What does the bartender not know?
Answer: Who took the money. (note the period, it is not a question, but
the answer to a question)
Question: Whom does the bartender know?
Answer: The one who took the money

> what is being said, in Klingon-sentence order is:
Huch nge' 'Iv 'e' Sovbe' chom.
Who took the money? The bartender doesn't know.
It seems to be that you are having a computer program translate the
sentences.

> > Huch nge'bogh ghot Sov chom, 'ach Huch nge' 'Iv 'e' Sovbe' chom.> Quark knows the one who took the money, but he doesn't know who took the
> money.
QAO or indirect questions and relative closes are not the same. But they
are very close in proper English.
There is a noun-phrase before a relative clause (in my case, {the one})
ghot Sov chom -- the bartender knows a person
'Iv ghaH ghotvam'e' -- who is this person?
Huch nge'bogh ghot -- he is the one who took the money.

> Difference in English between a question and not-a-qestion (a relative
clause and indirect questions)

> It has the same form a question, with one slight difference, the verb
doesn't need to be the second element of the phrase followed by the
subject if the question word is not part of the subject).
Question: What (question-word) did (verb) he (subject) take?
Not-a-question: What (question-word) he (subject) took (verb).
Question: Who (subject) took (verb) the money?
Not-a-question: Who (subject,question-word) took (verb).



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