tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Feb 17 21:26:27 1999
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RE: jatlh
ja' Voragh:
>This trips up many beginners, for whom TKD is usually the only resource they
>have. Okrand deliberately made this feature counter-intuitive, or at least
>different, from the way quoted speech works in many Terran languages. You
>expect the quotation to be the direct object of {jatlh}, so he decided that
>it wouldn't be, by Kahless! It's one of the "alien" non-Human features that
>he built into Klingon.
Say what? Quotations aren't direct objects in English...are they?
"I need a hammer," the doctor told his assistant.
Our cook asked the shopkeeper, "Is the fruit fresh?"
It sure looks like Klingon works a lot like English does, at least
with the verbs "tell" and "ask".
>...it wasn't glaringly obvious at first reading that he used the verb prefix
>{qa-} "I [do something to] you" and not {Da-} "you [do something to] it" - at
>least not to me (I noticed it only on my third or fourth rereading).
Don't blame the author for its being overlooked. He *did* use clear and
unambiguous examples throughout the description. It's not his fault that
most people misunderstood -- unless of course you count his putting the
discussion of quotations in the "sentences as object" section in the first
place. :-)
>Thus the need for later clarification, first on the Star Trek: Continuum
>newsgroup startrek.klingon (June 1997) and later in a source unavailable to
>most beginners, the Klingon Language Institute's quarterly journal *HolQeD*
>("linguistics").
Actually, once even a few of us were convinced of the way TKD actually
explained it, the correct explanation was quite quickly understood by
all on this list. The "later clarification" didn't really "clarify"
anything, it just confirmed what TKD had said all along.
>Contact Lawrence to see which back issues are still available for purchase.
The available issues of HolQeD are listed on the KLI's Merchant page, at
/kli/Merchant.html (you can buy them from there).
-- ghunchu'wI'