tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun May 21 10:40:45 2000

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Re: Klingon Academy



ja' HomDoq:
>(I don't see a difference in english between "a teller of myths"
>and "one who (tells myths)")

There's not really a difference in English between these two concepts.  I
learned in grammar school something called "Transformational Grammar", and
among its rules was the "T-Actor" transformation which turns phrases like
"eat meat" into "meat eater", or "tell myth" into "myth teller".

Years ago, I and charghwI' went a few rounds on whether or not there's a
difference in Klingon.  I proposed that Klingons type 9 verb suffix {-wI'}
worked in the same way as "T-Actor", and like other type 9 verb suffixes
could be used on an entire phrase instead of a bare nouns.  He managed to
defend his "they are not the same" position long enough for me to explore
the implications of my "they are the same" position to the limits, and I
decided that his more conservative interpretation was more correct.  Trying
to treat {N V-wI'} as a sentence with a type 9 suffix on the verb leads to
some uncomfortable conclusions, and it's much easier to go with the simple
interpretation of it as a noun-noun phrase.

One of the problems is that a "one who (tells myths)" translation treats
{wIch} as the object of {ja'}, but we've consistently seen that {ja'} has
as its object the person being spoken to, not the thing spoken.  For the
phrase "tell a myth", the appropriate verb would be {jatlh}, not {ja'}.

-- ghunchu'wI' 'utlh




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