tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jun 01 23:04:04 2001
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RE: law', puS, and time stamps...
ja' charghwI':
>SuStel is completely right in his critique of my law'/puS construction...
I think he's just *mostly* right. ;-P
The construction in question is:
DaH be'vam 'IH law' wa'maH vaghben be'vam 'IH puS.
SuStel quite rightly points out that
>> ...one MUST interpret
>> /wa'maH vaghben be'vam/ as a SINGLE noun phrase. We have
>> precedent for what
>> this would mean: Power Klingon has /cha'vatlhben HIq vItlhutlh/
>> "I'll drink
>> two century old ale."
But the "two century old" phrasing is not a direct translation. The direct
translation is more like "ale of two hundred years ago". Similarly, the
contentious phrase in what charghwI' wrote comes out literally as "this
woman of fifteen years ago". It does not automatically imply that she was
*born* fifteen years ago; it just says that she was a female at that time.
I'm quite comfortable with using {wa'maH vaghben be'} to refer to a woman
as of fifteen years ago. Even if that's not exactly what it says in
excrutiatingly correct grammatical detail, it can't reasonably mean
anything else, and the context in which charghwI' presented it is clear
enough.
***
By the way, we *do* have slight justification for putting adverbial-like
stuff along with the nouns of a {law'/puS}, in the proverb {QamvIS yIn qaq
law' torvIS yIn qaq puS} (TKW page 95). The "aberrant" grammar is
mentioned in TKW, but the correction given is merely to add the missing
{-taH}. Nothing is said about the oddness of having a subordinate clause
there in the first place, so it's quite possible that there *is* no oddness.
-- ghunchu'wI' 'utlh