tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 23 20:57:08 1999
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Re: SIv (Re: Hello)
ja' charghwI':
>...Meanwhile, the sentence he kept repeating
>that he could not figure out how to express was, "I wonder who's
>kissing her now". I did not choose to punctuate it right then
>because I'm not even sure how it works in ENGLISH. Is it a
>question? Well, sort of. But not really. It is strange and
>beautiful.
It's one of those indirect questions that people rarely seem to address
explicitly when they come up with a language. Esperanto apparently had
to bend a little to make them work; I'm not sure whether Loglan dealt
with them explicitly at first either. This is the kind of thing for
which a Question as Object construction-qoq comes exasperatingly close
to being reasonable.
>In the earlier example, he used {SIv} as the second verb of a
>sentence as object construction to mean "I wonder if...". That
>is a question one would answer with "yes" or "no", but in
>English, "wonder" can deal with questions of other types, like,
>"Who is kissing her now?"
>
>Okrand was simply enjoying the mysterious fullness of this
>particular verb and I think he wants it to do something
>particularly interesting. It is like a one verb project of his.
>He may never finish it. We may always "wonder" how to use {SIv}.
>Or he may come up with something later that is outright
>fascinating. I'm willing to let him cook on {SIv} for a while.
I suspect that there is no answer already out there waiting to be
discovered; it will probably have to be crafted, not teased out of
hiding. Or there might be an existing construction that could be
used to take on the additional role of expressing the ideas without
too much tendency to break under the stress. The concept is just
not yet dealt with in any of the known grammar.
-- ghunchu'wI'