tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Dec 15 09:00:30 2000

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RE: Grammar Highlight Each Day (Noun series indicating possession)

> > Well, "must" is a bit strong.  {SuvwI' taj nISwI' je} is "the
> > warrior's knife and disruptor pistol" which is a series showing
> > possession but ending with {je}.  (It's ambiguous whether just
> > the knife or both the knife and pistol belong to the warrior,
> > just like in the English.)

> When speaking we tend to insert slight pauses in our sentences which help 
to
> properly group the nouns to avoid this ambiguity.  Likewise many times 
when
> I write I add an extra space or two to symbolize these pauses and group 
the
> nouns.

That's an interesting system, though most of us use commas for that. 
Punctuation was a really controversial thing in Klingon in the early days, 
but eventually we realized that what we write is "Romanized" Klingon 
anyway. We are not writing what a Klingon would write, so it doesn't really 
matter whether Klingons use punctuation or not. We can. Okrand does, though 
it took a few years for us to see him write anything long enough to require 
it.

> mej vavwI' toy'wI' puq je
> "My father, a servant, and a child leave."

Notice that this can mean that three people are leaving, or maybe two 
people are leaving. "My father, who is a servant, and a child leave." 
Apposition exists in both English and Klingon and they are handled the same 
way in both languages such that the ambiguity exists in both languages. 
Additionally, setting aside the unlikely implied context of age, in both 
languages this could refer to only one person: "My father, who is a servant 
and a child, leaves."

> or is it, "My father's servant, and a child leave."
> or, "My father, and the servant's child leave."

Face it: In Klingon, when you pile a bunch of nouns together, things get 
polybiguous. That's why you don't see a lot of examples from Okrand of lots 
of nouns strung together. The language doesn't handle this gracefully. It 
quickly becomes the kind of mess that Klingons don't tend to tollerate. 
It's no wonder that we so often omit all nouns altogether in a sentence. 
Things are so much clearer when you just deal with verbs. Every verb has a 
defined place in the sentence with suffixes letting you know exactly what 
that verb is supposed to do. Sometimes nouns enjoy this treatment, but all 
of these positionally-defined-grammar nouns get messy when piled next to 
one another.

I mean, nouns are just so inferior to verbs. They have no prefixes 
whatsoever, no rovers and barely over half as many types of suffixes. puj 
DIp. HoS wot. wotmey vImaSbej.

> With spacing:
> mej  vavwI' toy'wI'  puq je
> "My father's servant and a child leave."

That makes sense to you, but it doesn't address the issue of apposition. We 
could use commas with exactly the same justification you use for extra 
spaces. Deal with it: If you want to reduce ambiguity, you need to 
rephrase. Spaces and/or punctuation are less likely to be successful when 
addressing a population of widely divergent contexts.

mej vavwI' toy'wI'. mej puq je.

It is still ambiguous, but less so.

mej cha' nuv: mej vavwI' toy'wI'. mej puq je.

Hmm. But does that mean the following?

mej cha' nuv: mej toy'wI' ghaHbogh vavwI''e'. mej puq je.

Not good enough yet?

mej cha' nuv: mej vavwI' toy'bogh nuv'e' 'ej mej puq je.

Or perhaps your original statement actually means:

mej cha' nuv: mej vavwI' toy'bogh nuv'e' 'ej mej vavwI' puq je.

In other words, maybe the child was one of my siblings. Or even:

mej cha' nuv: mej vavwI' toy'bogh nuv'e' 'ej jImej vavwI' puq.

"Two people left: My father's servant left and I, my father's child, left."

I hate ambiguity. Other people here think it is seriously cool, but to me, 
it indicates a place in the grammar when somebody should have said, "Oops". 
I wish we could fix it. We can't.

> DloraH

SarrIS

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