tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Feb 09 11:29:50 2000

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Re: KLBC cheng Sa' may'bom bom mu' cha'DIch



jatlh charghwI':
>I don't really know that {ghel} can take an object. The 
>definition is "ask (a question)". Meanwhile, there is no 
>Klingon noun meaning "question" and Okrand has specifically 
>stated that {ghel} doesn't really work as a word of speech. 
>Even if it did, verbs of speech don't use the quotation as 
>an object. They are just adjacent sentences that are 
>grammatically independent of each other (the sentence 
>stating the speech and the sentence which is the quotation) 
>with no punctuation between them.
>
>This leaves me thinking that {ghel} is actually a stative or
>intransitive verb and the meaning includes the concept of 
>"ask a question" as we would express it in English. I see 
>it as similar to "have a headache" or "experience an 
>earthquake". These are all intransitive verbs in Klingon. 
>What English takes to be a direct object is handled in 
>Klingon as an implied noun that never exists, all contained 
>in the stative verb.

Parentheses in Okrand's translations tend to confuse me. AFAIK, he never 
explicitly explained them. qar'a'? So do the parentheses mean that the 
contents of the parentheses is optional, or that they must be used as the 
subject, or that there must not be any subject? For example:

bIv   break (rules)

Does this mean that "rules" or an equivalent noun must be the object (e.g., {c
hut vIbIv})? Or does it mean that there should never be any object (e.g., {jIb
Iv})? Or does it mean that you can decide whether to have an object?


- DujHoD


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