tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat May 05 08:28:35 2001

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RE: tuQaHlaH'a' ?



> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Trimboli [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Friday, May 04, 2001 2:22 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: tuQaHlaH'a' ?
>
>
> Replies to this question included the word /qel/ "consider," but
> I consider
> (!) the word to be somehow inappropriate.  Not wrong, mind you, just not
> quite right.

I see your point in a later post.

> Allow me to suggest a somewhat radical sentence:
>
> jajvetlh quv'e' jIHvaD bIjatlh.

At first glance, this looks like a direct quotation gone awry. It is
confusing. I see the grammatical experiment you are reaching for, but I'm
not sure this specific example quite works for me. I'll explain later just
how ambiguous this sentence really is.

> The main part of the sentence is, of course, /bIjatlh/ "You speak."  In
> Klingon, if it's a noun and not the subject or object, it usually goes at
> the beginning (and nouns indicating time tend to go ahead of everything
> else).  Krankor appropriately calls the function of these nouns "header."
> This sentence has a verb and three headers.

All of this follows technical rules. I'm just not sure it successfully
expresses an idea with any clarity.

> /jajvetlh/ is "that day."  As a time indicator, it goes in the front.

I think this particular word adds to the confusion because it looks more
like a straight-up noun candidate for direct object than would a more common
time stamp, like {wa'Hu'}. In a sentence that was not already a little
strange, this would likely not matter as much, but here, I think it makes
things less clear.

> /jIHvaD/ "for me" indicates that "I" am the beneficiary of the action
> ("speaking").

Fine.

> /quv'e'/ is the key point here, and the sneaky bit.  It's also the most
> objectionable part of the suggestion.  It indicates that "honor" is the
> topic of the sentence.  It's not the subject or object, so it goes in the
> "header" location with the others.  It's position is interchangeable with
> /jIHvaD/.

I agree on all points, while parsing the sentence and not settling on an
overall meaning yet.

> A fully-detailed way to say this whole sentence might be, "I'm about to
> focus on honor now: you spoke to me that day."  Note that it doesn't
> explicitly say that you spoke about honor, but if the topic of a sentence
> about speaking is honor, it should be pretty clear what the speaker was
> speaking about.

My problem is that you have chosen a pile of ambiguous words and grammatical
constructions which have most likely unintentionally crashed into each other
in this specific example. The ambiguities:

{jajvetlh} might be a time stamp or a regular noun, possibly a direct
object, or in this case, maybe a direct quotation.

{quv'e'} might be a noun with a Type 5 noun suffix, or it might be an
adjectival verb inheriting a Type 5 noun suffix from the noun it is
modifying, {jajvetlh}.

Add that this particular Type 5 noun suffix is known to have two
grammatically independent functions in the language. It can either indicate
the Topic, making it independant of the basic OVS sentence structure of a
typical sentence, or it can be a focus marker, allowing the noun to be the
object or subject or head noun, or such. In other words, it sometimes
participates in the OVS structure and other times it is independent of it.
At the beginning of the sentence, you can't always tell, so it is a point of
ambivalence built into the language.

Given these, the first two words are already remarkably ambiguous:

"On that day, [topic] honor..."
"On that day, honor [focus]..."
"On that honored day [focus]..."
"[Topic] That honored day..."

Now, add that you are working with {jatlh}, which can be used as a normal
verb, or it can be used in the special way that verbs of speech are used in
direct quotation, meaning that the verb of speech is grammatically
independent of that which is being quoted. In other words, maybe {jajvetlh
quv'e'} is a direct quotation, or maybe it is just a pair of header nouns
for {jatlh} being used intransitively. We can't tell. This gives us a pile
of candidates for what this sentence means:

You said to me, "THAT HONORED DAY". [{-'e'} could be either focus or topic,
since the quotation is a fragment.]

You said to me, "On that day, HONOR." [{-'e'} could be either focus or
topic, since the quotation is a fragment.]

On THAT HONORED DAY, you spoke to me. [{-'e'} is just focus and not topic]

On that day, you spoke to me of honor. [{'e'} is topic, not focus]

You spoke to me of that honored day. [{'e'} is topic, not focus]

So, basically, I like the idea that you are promoting, but the specific
example you came up with is so rife with ambiguity as to not carry any real
meaning without a lot more context.

Actually, looking at it, this sentence is a shining star of ambiguity. Four
words form a sentence with either five or seven radically different meanings
(depending on whether you think the Topic/Focus ambiguity in the first two
translations above to merit separate meanings). I'd be hard pressed to come
up with an example with that efficient of a combination of ambiguous factors
in the language. It's really beautiful, in a dark, twisted kind of way.

I want to be clear that I don't have a problem with the basic idea you are
putting forward and I do not wish to disrespect you or your idea. I just
think that your example distracts us from your point because of the extreme
combination of ambiguous features of grammar and vocabulary built into it.

> Again, this is not a denial of the possibility of using /qel/.  I
> just don't
> feel comfortable with "consider" being quite so universally applicable as
> the other suggestions assumed.  I can't help but imagine a bespectacled
> Klingon pursing his lips thoughtfully, folding his arms, and
> saying "Indeed.
> Interesting.  Hmm.  Let us consider, . . . " a very un-Klingon
> thing to do.

I accept that point and agree that {Del} seems to work better than {qel},
despite my own earlier preference for {qel}.

> SuStel
> Stardate 1340.9

charghwI' 'utlh



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