tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Aug 04 11:13:15 1999
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RE: KLBG: extra nouns, locative or what?
- From: "Andeen, Eric" <[email protected]>
- Subject: RE: KLBG: extra nouns, locative or what?
- Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 11:14:20 -0700
Welcome the list, John. My name is pagh, and I am the current Beginners'
Grammarian for the list. Whenever you have a post you want help with, mark
it for my attention with a KLBC in the subject line.
I'm sure you've already seen the standard BG greeting, but it's early and my
fingers are not yet tired.
jatlh John:
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Howdy. This is my first posting, and the start of my first attempts to read
Klingon. Thanks to the advice passed on by <<When I started, I got some
good advice ... which I'll pass along>> by Voragh from pagh, and thanks to
quljIb for posting a short message that looked interesting and simple.
My first question concerns the first word. So I'm off to a roaring start,
right? The independant clause in question is:
ramvam "The Blair Witch Project" vIleghta'
This is Noun-Noun-Verb, so the first noun (tonight) is the "extra" one, the
second one (movie title) is the object, and the subject (I) is implied by
the suffix of the verb (I saw).
So, why does the first noun just dangle there? Specifically, why doesn't it
require a syntactic marker (ramvamDaq ?) to tie it to the rest of the
clause? Is the above sentence proper Klingon or too-literal of a
translation from English, where we indeed treat "tonight" as vocative in "I
saw the movie tonight."?
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Most of the "extra" nouns that just dangle at the beginning of a sentence do
indeed have a type five suffix of some sort, but there are a few exceptions.
One is that <Dat>, <pa'>, and <naDev> are assumed to have a <-Daq> sort of
built in. The other big exception - the one you ran into - is for
timestamps. Klingon does not use a syntactic marker for timestamps; it just
plops them down at the beginning of the sentence. It is therefore perfectly
valid to say the following:
DaHjaj jIghung.
loS ben tlhIngan Hol vIghojchoH.
nem law' jIqan.
wa'Hu' ram jIQong.
pagh
Beginners' Grammarian
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