tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 22 08:08:08 2000
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Re: Question Words
- From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Question Words
- Date: 22 Feb 2000 16:04:15 -0000
>Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 10:47:59 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
>
>On 22 Feb 2000 13:55:38 -0000 "Mark E. Shoulson"
><[email protected]> wrote:
>> I don't mean to re-open this discussion, since there is NOTHING NEW to be
>> added to it, but I've seen a point made and even agreed to, which is not
>> the case.
>>
>> Okrand HAS NOT SAID that question words cannot be used for indirect
>> questions in Klingon. That they cannot is NOT an accepted fact in Klingon.
>
>The point is that you want to talk about "indirect
>questions", which Okrand has never addressed, so we have
>neither any basis for banning nor accepting such a beast.
>Meanwhile, the main argument here is whether or not you can
>use question words as relative pronouns, and for that there
>is clearly no justification. There simply are no relative
>pronouns in Klingon. Surely you accept that.
This is getting us back to the argument I was hoping to avoid. You say
"relative pronouns", I say "indirect questions"... what are either of us
talking about? Do question-words in Klingon act like relative pronouns do
in English? I will agree they do not. That's what -bogh is for, among
other things. Do they happen to participate in constructions (not simple
relative clauses) which in English are accomplished with relative pronouns,
and while they do not grammatically parallel the use of these relative
pronouns, do they effectively accomplish similar tasks in ways that appear
superficially similar? I would contend they could. The constructions to
which I refer I am calling "indirect questions" for lack of any better
term (it may even be the proper grammatical one for all I know). If you
mean "relative pronouns" as in "I chased the man who stole your purse",
yes, Klingon question words do not act as relative pronouns.
>> Indeed, several noted Klingonists (me and Krankor, at least) accept that
>> they CAN. I just spoke to Okrand a few weeks ago and mentioned that people
>> were again saying he'd forbidden it, and he said he definitely hadn't. He
>> said someone had asked him about it, and he gave his usual evasive
>> answer... and then saw it quoted as saying they were forbidden. I know
>> we've been through this before, and we talked about what Okrand said and
>> what he meant when it first came out (i.e. the news that he did not mean to
>> forbid them is NOT new). Don't propogate the error about what's known:
>> Okrand is still deep in weasel-territory on this, giving himself room to
>> back out. So don't beat yourself up, Nick.
>
>You and I each want damage control here. You don't want
>people to ban what you call "indirect questions" (even
>though Okrand has never mentioned such a beast, never
>explained such a beast and never actually accepted such a
>beast), while I want to avoid having beginners leap across
>this vague boundary between what you call an "indirect
>question" and what any grammarian would call the use of a
>question word as a relative pronoun.
Okrand has never mentioned such a beast, explicitly or implicitly, and has
said (by means of his waffling answers--which he admits are waffling) that
he basically wants more time to decide about them.
It's likely that I'm sticking with "indirect questions" as the term
precisely to avoid conflating the case with relative pronouns as in the
example above. Since I do agree that Klingon question words are NOT and
never were relative pronouns, and I think the examples of Nick's writing
did not use them as such either. Nick knows how to use -bogh as well as
the rest of us. So my fear of having them conflated with relative pronouns
is as great as yours; I just don't want that fear to forbid an unrelated
and possibly permissible use.
~mark