tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 24 18:59:23 1997
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Re: plans
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>Date: Sun, 9 Nov 1997 12:50:40 -0800 (PST)
>From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
>
>> He might know because he saw the child being hit, however it is not
>> known whether he knows the person who hit the child or not (he can be
>> someone whom he never saw before). Perhaps he might know because he was
>> the one who did the hitting.
>> Or the child told him *who did it*.
>
>All you need to have to make the difference you seek is to
>change {Sov} to {ngu'laH}. You are trying to say that as a
>relative clause, {puq qIppu'bogh nuv'e' Sov,} fails because he
>may know the person who hit the child but not know that this
>person hit the child. He may also be able to identify who hit
>the child even though he is not familiar with that person and
>therefore not know him. So, the problem is really with the
>choice of verb, not with the choice of grammar.
Aha, yes. You can get a lot of mileage out of "ngu'" or "ngu'laH" this
way. But you see, you've had to change the change the verb to get across
the meaning of the indirect question. Needless to say, changing the verb
is no big deal, it's part of any translation, but the point is that a
simple relative clause with the verb you'd have expected didn't do the
trick: you had to add something more to it. An indirect question is not a
relative clause, or not the one you might have expected. You could
probably answer all the examples I gave using some form of "ngu'", but note
that in the process you flatten out all the verbs into forms of "identify",
when in fact other claims were being made. "I heard who killed the
emperor", "I discovered what fuels the ship," "I learned what you taught
the captain,"... all these, as indirect questions, would have to become
"ngu'" or "ngu'laH", and you'd lose all reference to hearing, discovering,
or learning. You could also say "ta' chotbogh ghot De' vIQoypu'"/I have
heard information of the person who murdered the emperor, which might work,
but then again might also lead someone to say "You're sharing information
with the Emperor's murderer? You must be in cahoots with him. Come along,
the Imperial Guard will want to have a word with you..."
Perhaps "ngu'" *is* the answer to handling indirect questions in Klingon.
Perhaps not (something in me suspects it's not general enough. What about
"The lieutenant suggests who remains"? If you use ngu', where do you say
that it's a suggestion to the captain and not a decision or determination
on the part of the lieutenant?). Perhaps an idiom with "De'" or "pong" is
Right. Perhaps QAO is it. But you can see that it's not just using a
relative clause built on the straight verb (i.e. without taking the
indirect question nature, if any, of the statement into consideration) is
not enough. You've demonstrated that you believe that here.
~mark
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