tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jul 02 21:03:18 2000
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RE: obtuse question
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alan Anderson [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Saturday, July 01, 2000 4:23 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: obtuse question
>
>
> [ben loDnal]
Since I read messages in reverse order, I guess I'll have to read later to
find out what context brought the topic "obtuse question" to the bracketed
phrase [ben loDnal]
> Sustel:
> >Unless there's context to the contrary, I think the natural implication
> >would be that the husband is no longer a husband.
>
> jIH:
> >jIQoch. <cha'vatlh ben HIq> yIqel.
>
> Sustel:
> >UNLESS THERE'S CONTEXT TO THE CONTRARY!!
Speaking of context, these two words seem to lack any. Time stamps usually
refer to verbs in sentences. We have one example of a fossilized phrase
about wine with no real implication that the phrase is more generically
functional. Even if it is functional, how would it be used?
We know that {cha'vatlh ben HIq} is two hundred year old wine. If I say
{cha'maHben loDnal} would that mean that he has been married twenty years,
or would it mean that he's been married six months and he's twenty years
old? And if he is the object of the verb, how would I know whether the age
phrase referred to him and not the verb?
cha'maH ben jupwI' loDnal vIqIH.
So, what happened twenty years ago? Did I meet the husband 20 years ago, or
did I meet the man who married 20 years ago, or did I meet the 20 year old
husband, or did I meet the husband of my twenty year old friend? A lot of
you guys think ambiguity is a healthy, natural part of language, but this
one is getting ridiculous. You have to already know what this sentence means
before you can tell what it means. It is a useless sentence.
So, why are we fighting about this? Is there anything of value to be won
here?
It would be SO EASY to avoid this mess and just say what you mean:
cha'maH ben jupwI' loDnal vIqIH. "Twenty years ago I met my friend's
husband."
loDnal vIqIH. cha'maH ben jupwI' Saw. "I met my friend's husband of 20
years."
jupwI' loDnal vIqIH. cha'maH ben boghpu' loDnalvam. "I met my friend's 20
year old husband."
> jIQochtaH. As I tried to make clear before, I don't see an implication of
> "former" in {ben Doch}. *I* think that, absent context, it just says
> something about how long the thing has been what it is.
>
> I'm not contradicting, just disagreeing.
I'm not all that drawn to either one of your positions. One argues that a
thing is black. The other insists that it is white. I look at it and it
looks red. I really think time stamps work for wine by convention and that
otherwise, they refer to the action of verbs. When Okrand told us how to
talk about a person's age, he didn't use the same phrasing that he used for
wine. Why should we believe that it works that way for other stuff?
> >I'm not saying that when one puts some age on a noun, that noun
> is no longer
> >that noun. I'm not making some general rule. <-----KEY SENTENCE.
> >
> >I'm saying that in the single case, mind you, the SINGLE CASE of
> speaking of
> >a husband or wife, and modifying the noun for husband or wife by another
> >noun phrase which means "X many years ago," I (me, personally,
> and, I think,
> >and this is just me thinking, most people) would tend to
> interpret that as a
> >spouse who is no longer a spouse, since otherwise you'd use a
> noun phrase as
> >a "timestamp" for the sentence, not as a modifier to the spouse.
I tend to agree with this, though in this case, I'm not given a sentence to
evaluate. Instead, I'm just given a pair of words.
> I see it in exactly the opposite way. I would tend to interpret a
> time-stamped sentence as referring to the event, and a "time-referenced"
> noun as referring to the state of the noun (in whatever time context is
> implied).
If the noun is the direct object, how do you propose that we tell the
difference? The word order would be the same.
Basically, I think Okrand did a rather poor job of telling us about
{cha'vatlh ben HIq}. He didn't explain if this noun phrase indicating a
wine's age was functional for other nouns as well. He didn't tell us how to
say, "Two years ago, I drank two hundred year old wine."
If I wanted to say, "Two years ago, I had a 44 year old girlfriend," it
would never cross my mind to use your method of description. I'd just say:
cha'ben bangwI' vIngagh. loSmaH loSben boghpu' bangvam.
> So -- again, based heavily on the {cha'vatlh ben HIq}
> example --
> a "three years ago husband" implies to me that the person in question *is*
> a husband, and has been one for three years.
I wish I'd seen Okrand use this phrase somewhere besides just a description
of wine. I really got a sense that it simply became a convention to describe
wine with its age. Wine and its age are so closely linked in terms of the
value of the wine that particularly valuable, particularly old wine gets
this sort of designation. Does that mean that if you talk about a husband,
you'd use the same grammatical convention.
So, do you consider your wife to be vintage 1983? In English, we don't talk
about spouses and age with the same phrases we talk about wine and age. Why
do you assume that Klingon would be more consistent about this than we are
in English?
> >In any case, this argument is pretty silly anyway, since /cha'
> ben loDnal/
> >would probably be generally interpreted as "two year old
> husband"! Klingons
> >age quickly, but this is ridiculous!
>
> Here I *am* going to contradict you. {ben} doesn't mean "years old".
> {cha' ben loD} might mean "two year old male" because people
> normally don't
> change from something else to {loD} after they're born, but the general
> impression I get from {cha' ben loDnal} is that the {ben} reference
> specifically refers to {loDnal}.
How do you know that it would not mean "two years since he completed his
Rite of Ascension?" After all, at two years old, you would not call him
{loD}. You'd call him {puq}.
Meanwhile, I really am hesitant to use this for anything but wine. I never
got the sense that Okrand was giving us a generalized way to describe age. I
really got the sense that this was a convention for expressing the age and
therefore the value of wine. Other age related discusion (other than wine)
would just use normal time stamps on verbs.
Unless we get evidence otherwise.
> >Sorry for the tantrum, but I'm getting tired of people twisting
> what I say
> >into something I don't, or by missing my point entirely and
> arguing against
> >me for something I wasn't talking about anyway.
>
> Until you interpreted {cha' ben loDnal} as "two year old
> husband", I wasn't
> arguing with anything. I was just disagreeing about inferring "former"
> from the use of {ben} before a noun. (It looks like perhaps
> you're not all
> that sure of the "former" meaning yourself, given the "two year old"
> reading you proposed.)
And this is where I think you are both arguing for something ugly. This
really is unnecessary. We have far less controversial, ambiguous ways to
express all these ideas. Why not use these better methods of speech?
> -- ghunchu'wI' 'utlh
charghwI' 'utlh