tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Oct 27 13:55:38 1999
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RE: KLBC: Undoubtedly continue to..
- From: "Andeen, Eric" <[email protected]>
- Subject: RE: KLBC: Undoubtedly continue to..
- Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 13:56:37 -0700
jatlh ngghoy:
>>>1. How does one say "You (!) undoubtedly continue to
>>>cause to be difficult to her on this situation" ?
> *The exclamation marks the item to be emphasised.
jIjatlh:
>>I'm not sure I understand the English . . .
> mu'meywIjmo' qamISmoHpu'bogh jIQoS
> chaq mu'tlheghvam QaQ law' 'e' QaQ puS..
> "You certainly are being difficult (to her) about this!"
qay'be'. DaH jIyaj.
jatlh ~mark:
: I think what you're asking for here is how to get
: something which uses the meanings in the suffixes
: in the "wrong" order.
> majQa'
> This was exactly my point Mark! I was pondering
> about expressions with a line of suffixes that
> follow in a different order to the way that I
> mean. I thought that if the positioning of
> rovers is significant, what about the rest of
> the suffixes and the possible ordering of other
> surrounding elements like adverbs and/or a
> 'conjunction clause as a relative clause' all
> in the one sentence?
> Mark's guideline of:
: 1) suffix-meanings *usually* apply in (roughly)
: the order given.. and you should try other
: sensible orderings that make more sense, if the
: default one doesn't work.
A large part of the reason this is true is that the suffix types are ordered
in such a way that the required order is usually the one that would make
sense anyway. We can speculate that during the evolution of the language,
the different suffix types settled into their places because that is where
they make sense.
> This makes sense but then I can seen the
> possibility of ambiguity like one of the earlier
> examples that I gave:
> {qarchu'be'} or {qarbe'chu'}?
> The actual written sentence was: qarchu'be'
> However, I felt the context indicated the meaning
> of "(this is) clearly not true" - possible,
> especially if one grants that the writer could
> have made a common slip up and left the be' in
> the "default" position on the end of the string.
> But then again, maybe it really DID mean "It is
> not clearly/completely accurate" (pagh) or
> colloqially "That's not quite right." (Alan) and
> it was I who misinterpreted it.
> If context in tlhIngan Hol still leaves ambiguity,
> what have we left?
A natural language. Klingon was created intentionally with all sorts of
little ambiguities, quirks, and exceptions. They make Klingon feel more like
a language spoken by a bunch of folks (though in this case folks with bumpy
forheads) than one cooked up in a lab. If you want a language without
ambiguity, try Lojban.
pagh
Beginners' Grammarian
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