tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 24 04:45:29 1997
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: Question-Relative Clause
ja' ~mark:
>...There's a difference between relative clauses
>and what are called "indirect questions."
I don't see any evidence that Klingon *has* indirect questions. *Quotes*
are direct, not indirect (the translation of "you told me you were hungry"
is {choja' jIghung}, not ?{bIghung 'e' Daja'}, for example). Klingons are
supposed to be direct, right? Straightforwardness!
>..."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.
Right -- but it *is* a modification of something *unknown*. The more I
think about this, the more suspicious I am of the term "indirect question".
It still looks like a relative clause to me.
>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.
I think {wuq} works okay with a person as its object; it's "decide upon" in
the addendum.
>It's *still*
>a question, though, though perhaps not in the simplest of senses.
I can see it as a question only when I deal with it in English. I never
heard of "indirect questions" in grammar school; they don't seem to be an
important part of the way I think. They don't occur to me at all when I'm
"thinking in Klingon".
>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.
I *do* like {ratlhbogh ghot wuq HoD}. It's direct and obviously correct.
"The captain decides upon the person who will stay." Where's the problem?
>It wasn't as clear
>before because we were using "Sov", which had other meanings and generally
>was more fudgeable.
Try {legh}. "I see who is standing" -> {Qambogh ghot vIlegh}. Okay?
This looks more like a relative clause to me than any sort of a question.
> My liking of QAO is starting to shake a little less.
>Indirect questions are NOT relative clauses; they're not the same.
They feel the same to me. They're doing the same thing -- referring to some
noun and specifying an identifying feature of that noun. The only difference
that I see is that the examples given of indirect questions use the relative
pronoun itself as the head noun of the relative phrase. Because Klingon has
no relative pronouns, we need to use a more concrete noun, like {ghot}, when
the phrase is translated.
>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.
Or maybe indirect questions just plain *can't* be handled in Klingon without
removing all traces of "question"-ness from them.
-- ghunchu'wI'