tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jul 04 11:04:19 2000
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Re: Deixis and direction
jatlh Albert Arendsen:
> I speak German, which has, in total, 16 cases, and at school I've had
> Greek, which has 24, and Greek, which has 30.
>
> 1st case is Subjective, 2nd is Genitive, 3rd is Adjective, 4th is
> Objective, 5th is Locative. All these exist in all three genders
> (Masculin, Feminin, Neutral) and in both numbers (Single, Plural). Greek
> doesn't have Locative, and uses Adjective for that instead.
>
> In Klingon Subjectives and Objectives are formed by location in the
> sentence.
Agreed.
> Genitive is formed by type 4 suffixes,
Genitive is also formed with the Klingon noun-noun construction (TKD section
3.4).
> Adjective is formed by
> type 5 suffixes - and here you can see that Klingon grammar is similar
> to Greek, because -Daq, an obvious Locative, is a type 5 suffix.
Perhaps "case" is the wrong concept to be discussing here. After all, I'm
trying to show something that doesn't fit into any Terran case known.
"Case" is "a category in the inflection of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives,
denoting the syntactic relation of these words to other words in the
sentence, indicated by the form or position of the words." (American College
Dictionary, 1966) Okrand calls TKD section 3.3.5 "Syntactic Markers." I'm
not utterly convinced that what section 3.3.5 demonstrates really DOES have
anything to do with syntax, but I can certainly see the argument stating
that nouns with /-Daq/ are inflected for a Locative case, and nouns with
/-vaD/ are inflected for a Dative case.
However, my point is that these inflections aren't relevant to the grammar
of the non-subject, non-object nouns. Call them "header" nouns, or /DIpmey
le'/, or whatever. In reality, they all have exactly the same syntactic
relation to the sentence. In /vaS'a'Daq puqvaD vInob/, there is no
syntactic difference between /vaS'a'Daq/ and /puqvaD/. There is no special
locative function or indirect object function in the sentence. There is
only a "header" noun function, and the suffixes show what symantic meaning
these nouns have.
> > /loD/ = NOMINATIVE.
> > /betleH/ = ACCUSATIVE. Since there is no inflection, I don't know if
these
> > are worth two cases or not.
>
> I would say /loD/ is Subjective and /betleH/ is Objective - a rose by a
> different name ...
>
> > /tlhIngan/ = GENITIVE
> > /puqvaD/ = OTHER
> > /romuluS/ = GENITIVE
> > /vaS'a'Daq/ = OTHER
> > /DaHjaj/ = OTHER.
>
> I'm inclined to disagree with the usage of Genitive here. The Genitive
> is the second case in German, Latin, Greek - even in Suomi which is
> totally unrelated to Germanic and Romanic languages. The Genitive is
> used to indicate possession. /betleHwIj/ is a Genitive.
The Genitive is also used in "expressions of measure, origin,
characteristic." It is "the case of nouns generally used to modify other
nouns." (ACD) Possession is only one aspect of the Genitive case. See
especially "Klingon and the Construct State" by d'Armond Speers, HolQeD 3:3
and 3:4.
But like I said, I am discovering that Terran language cases aren't really
terribly applicable to Klingon.
Essentially, I am refuting the idea of this basic sentence syntax:
[timestamp] [adverbial] <[locative] [from] [indirect object] [because noun]
[topic]> [object] verb [subject]
in favor of this one:
<[adverbial] [non-subject non-object noun (phrase)] [NSNON(P)] [NSNON(P)] .
. .> [object] verb [subject].
Square brackets indicate optional items; angled brackets indicate items that
can be placed in any order. In the case of my own sentence interpretation,
the order of the adverbial and the non-subject, non-object noun or noun
phrases have some accepted standards, but aren't immutable. Of course, this
represents only the basic sentence structure; it doesn't go into specifics
or exceptions.
This follows the rules as they are written and demonstrated, not as we have
built them up to be. More importantly, it follows the rules as Klingon
linguists make them out to be. Everything else is Terran linguist
influenced.
SuStel
Stardate 508.6