tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Nov 22 16:58:02 2001

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Re: QAO (was: I had an idea, I don't know how...)

>From: "Sean Healy" <[email protected]>
>>One of the objections to QAO is that the two sentences don't quite match
>>each other.  An English speaker would not accept "I cannot explain 'why 
>>has
>>he stopped?'"  I cannot explain the REASON he has stopped, not why has he
>>stopped?  (Notice how that last sentence makes no sense?)  As far as makes
>>sense to me, the object sentence cannot be a question.
>
>Apples and oranges.  Klingon is not English, and there are natural 
>languages
>where such a construction is perfectly valid.

I was illustrating, not proving.

>I'm not saying that question-as-object is valid.  I'm also not saying that
>it's not.  Only Okrand can answer that question.  What I'm saying is that
>this particular reason doesn't seem linguistically valid.  A question is
>simply a sentence, and we know that {'e'} connects two sentences, so 
>there's
>no reason to consider it ungrammatical ... although you don't have to use
>it, or even like it, if it doesn't feel right to you.

I don't mean to say that it's necessarily grammatically invalid.  But if you 
can use them, where are they?  Why haven't we seen any?  We can come up with 
some that seem to make perfect sense, but others that don't -- can we 
arbitrarily say which ones work based on how we can figure it out?

Okrand has provided some further evidence against QAO.  In a situation where 
he was describing verbs like /SIv/ and /Sov/ (I don't have the HolQeD issue 
on hand to reference for you), he failed to say something like */jegh'a' 'e' 
vISIv/ for "I wonder if he surrendered," and instead gave us something of 
the form /jegh 'e' vISIv/ "I wonder if he surrendered."  Grammatically, as 
you see it, there's no reason why the first version would be wrong, yet 
Okrand gave us the second as the correct form.

And quite simply, not using QAO is the safe, conservative approach.  You 
can't go wrong if you recast the sentence, but you CAN be wrong if you 
insist on using it when you don't know if it's right.

>Now, I could see the problem if the English sentences had different tenses,
>but that's because you can't do that with sentence-as-object, either.  "At
>first, I thought he was wrong, but now I think he was right."  How would 
>you
>say that in Klingon?

Klingon doesn't have anything equivalent to "at first" that I'm aware of, so 
I'm going to add one extra bit of necessary (and made-up for this example) 
context.

muj ghaH 'e' vIQub, ghu' vIqelpa'; 'a qar ghaH DaH 'e' vIQub.

The "wrong" and "right" are not given tense, but they really don't need it, 
as whatever other context you have would tell you what was wrong or right.  
If I preceded that sentence with /wa'Hu' jatlh 'avwI' jej 'etlhlIj/, the 
time context has become clear.

SuStel
Stardate 1894.4

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