tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jul 02 22:03:28 2000
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RE: KLBC: -law'
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Sunday, July 02, 2000 8:53 PM
> To: tlhIngan-Hol
> Subject: Re: KLBC: -law'
>
>
> ghunchu'wI' 'utlh:
> >TKD says that Type 6 verb suffixes "...show how sure the speaker is about
> >what is being said." It specifically mentions {-law'}: "This suffix
> >expresses any uncertainty on the speaker's part..."
>
> But the description for /-be'/ also says it negates the concept it
> follows, and yet we've seen it extend a bit further than that.
>
> What do you think of a statement like /DaSovbej/? Does this
> mean "You certainly know it" (which is how most people seem to read
> it)? Or, strictly going by the rules, is it "I am certain that you
> know it"? Perhaps there is not much difference.
I have to agree with ghunchu'wI' on this one. One of the concepts that
Okrand likes is deixis. That is the grammatical element of a sentence that
relates to the person speaking it, like "I am here," or "My bus is near."
Pronouns have a deictic element because the speaker is the one defining who
is first person, second person or third person.
If Okrand says that Type 6 suffixes express the degree of certainty on the
speaker's part, that is a fairly clear deictic reference. The certainty or
lack of it relates to the speaker, unless something about the sentence
shifts the deictic reference to some other person, place, time or whatever.
> Also, what do you think of pagh's example from canon:
>
> pagh:
> >One canon example of <-law'> from a Skybox card is: <puvlaHbogh Duj
> >ngabmoHlaw' So'wI'>. In this case, the speaker (i.e. Klingon
> Science Guy who
> >writes captions for trading cards) is obviously not specifically
> qualifying
> >the statement from his perspective.
While that is how we are tempted to interpret it, I can easily interpret it
according to Okrand's direction and say "The cloaking device appears to me
to cause a ship able to fly to disappear." This is a different meaning than
we are attracted toward, but then when we refer to {tlhIngan Hol}, we
gravitate toward interpreting it as "Klingon language" with "Klingon" acting
as an adjective describing the language, rather than the actual Klingon
meaning which is "the language of a Klingon" or "the language of klingons".
These meanings are close enough that we can fudge it without causing
problems, until someone starts to argue that in this case {tlhIngan} is a
noun functioning as an adjective, just like it does in English.
The speaker is saying that the truth of the statement that the cloaking
device causes the ship to disappear is, from the perspective of the speaker,
apparently true. It's not definitely true. It is apparently true. There is a
little uncertainty on the part of the speaker.
> In this case, the Klingon Science Guy is obviously not saying
> that *he* is uncertain that the cloaking device would make ships
> disappear. He *is* certain - certain that the cloaking device would
> make the ship *apparently* disappear to whomever was watching it.
> At least, that's how I would read the sentence.
I disagree. Your argument resembles the argument that {tlhIngan} is an
adjective that preceeds the nouns it modifies. The meaning is so close to
what you want it to mean because of your linguistic development using
English, that you want to argue that the meaning you want from this sentence
has to match what it actually means. Meanwhile, you are ignoring the deictic
context of the Type 6 suffix clearly described in TKD.
> Let's come up with an artificially contrived example. Suppose
> a Klingon adult is showing a child the wonders of science.
> He shows her a /ghewHom/ through a microscope. Is it proper for
> him to say, /tInlaw'/ "It appears to be big"? Or is it
> wrong in this instance, since he knows for a fact that the
> /ghewHom/ is actually very small?
"It appears TO ME to be big." The deictic reference is still attached to the
speaker.
> --
> De'vID
charghwI'