tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Nov 23 20:06:18 1997
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Re: Question-Relative Clause
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Then again, the more I think about it, the less I am completely convinced
that QAO is bad, even given the argument that I said before I found
convincing.
The problem lieth in this. There's a difference between relative clauses
and what are called "indirect questions." It came up big in Lojban, which
had a great mechanism for relative clauses and for questions and then
someone realized that indirect questions didn't get handled properly. "I
know how the ship was made" or "I don't know who hit the captain" are
indirect questions. For all that the reference is to a single noun-phrase
or clause, it's not a modification of something known. It is, as you say,
the ANSWER to a question. Something like "the captain will decide who
stays" perhaps should not be "ratlhbogh ghot wuq HoD": how can you decide a
person? The captain is deciding the ANSWER to the question. It's *still*
a question, though, though perhaps not in the simplest of senses. Sure,
you can probably work out a method for this with "jang" or something, but
that sounds like a kludge. You can hate QAO all you want, but I don't
think you'll like "ratlhbogh ghot wuq HoD" any better. It wasn't as clear
before because we were using "Sov", which had other meanings and generally
was more fudgeable. My liking of QAO is starting to shake a little less.
Indirect questions are NOT relative clauses; they're not the same. Can
they be handled the same as them? Maybe they can, maybe they can't. Can
they be handled as sentence-as-object constructions? Maybe they can, maybe
they can't. But I don't think either choice is necessarily less arbitrary
than the other.
~mark
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