tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 24 11:50:54 1997

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Re: squadron officers

peHruS writes:

>>>1) Two squadrons of officers entered the restaurant.
>>>2) Two squadron officers entered the restaurant.
>>>3) The officers of two squadrons entered the restaurant. >>
>
> The challenger says: 
>
> Qe' lu'el cha' nawlogh yaSpu'
> Qe' lu'el cha' nawlogh yaSpu'
> Qe' lu'el cha' nawlogh yaSpu'

Possible translations of {cha' nawlogh yaSpu'} are:

two squadrons' officers
officers of two squadrons
(we don't know if those squadrons consist solely of officers) 
two squadron's officers
two officers of a squadron
two officers of the squadron

What do you want us to say, peHrus? Hurrah hurrah, peHruS has 
discovered a vague sentence?  Officers from a squadron or 
squadrons entered a restaurant. Either one or two squadrons are 
involved, and at least two officers. Presumably if it were important 
that the reader knew exactly how many many squadrons and officers 
were involved, it would be specified.

cha' nawlogh wa'maH yaSpu' - ten officers of two squadrons
wa' nawlogh cha' yaSpu' - two officers of one squadron

> Now, how are we going to distinguish these?

Your problem has nothing to do with numbers, but to do with using the 
word {nawlogh} to mean three different things.  In sentence one you 
want it to be a unit of measurement like dozen or pair.  In sentence 
two you want it to be a type of officer like {cha' tlhIngan yaSpu'}.  
In sentence three you want it to be a unit of identity like a ship or 
an empire.  

I'm sure I could come up with a sentence as ambiguous in English as 
this one is in Klingon.  The ambiguity would say nothing about the 
adequacy of either language, but would merely indicate that to 
express the idea clearly you need additional information.

> Sentence two places the number before a noun-noun construction
> resulting in a compound noun. I brought up the question after 
> Voragh pointed out three canon examples showing me that the number 
> goes in front of the noun-noun construction.
>
> Sentence three gives Noun 1 possessing Noun 2.

A noun-noun construction *does* show possession.  

peHruS, this is going to sound hostile, but it isn't intended as 
such:

You write here almost exclusively in English, usually picking 
nits and trying to find loopholes.  Your occasional writing in 
Klingon here has been either wildly ambitious experiments in 
peHruSian grammar, or meticulous, repetitive, simple OVS 
sentences.  I think one or both of two things is true: 1) you are 
so concerned with the possible existence of loopholes and ambiguity 
in the language that you don't believe it is possible to just write, 
or 2) you are so concerned about looking foolish by making ordinary, 
indefensible, oops-I-didn't-know-that-rule mistakes, that you avoid 
writing anything in Klingon unless you can defend it as some Klingon
extrapolation of your own devising.

Please, relax, write intermediate Klingon sentences that might 
well have ambiguities in them, submit to corrections when you have 
overlooked something.  Your ability will increase, and with it 
people's willingness to listen to your speculations about the 
language.  Of course the answers to any speculations are always going 
to be one of "yes, that's perfectly legal,"  "no, that's ridiculous" 
or "hmm, that's possible, but we have no way of knowing."  But if all 
you ever do is speculate, the answer is likely to be "who cares, it's 
just peHruS."

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