tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Apr 21 22:37:24 1999
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Re: KLBC: HIboQ
ja' loD Doq:
>In the sentence, "I didn't think that a walk in the woods would fatigue a
>young man such as yourself." I belive that <loD Qup DuDoy'moH ngem lengHom
>'e' vIpIHbe'> is the best choice. I do not think that it is necessary to
>form two sentences. Because of the verb prefix, the object of the sentence
>(in this case "you") is implied, and the <loD Qup> serves only as further
>clarification. I do this all the time: it is not gramatically incorrect...
>is it?
I'm of the opinion that this sort of usage is incorrect. {loD Qup} is a
third-person noun, and the verb prefix {Du-} does not match that. When
there is a prefix mismatch, the usual interpretation is that the prefix
points to the beneficiary of the verb. *{loD Qup DuDoy'moH} sounds very
much to me like it's trying to say "it makes a young man tired for you."
Klingon already has a lot of built-in terseness. Trying to jam a third-
person noun into a first- or second-person slot probably overloads the
grammar to the breaking point. I know it's tempting to claim something
like apposition and say it's got an obvious meaning, but we have nothing
resembling it in any examples I can think of, and the meaning is *not*
obvious unless you already know what it means. It's slightly less of a
problem if the noun in question is the subject instead of the object,
since we don't have the "prefix trick" interpretation in that case, but
it's still something novel that we've not seen used by Okrand.
*I* would use two sentences for an idea like this.
{bIQup. DuDoy'moH lengHom 'e' vIpIHbe'.}
-- ghunchu'wI'