tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Oct 31 20:58:44 2001
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Re: ghIj
- From: "Sean Healy" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: ghIj
- Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 17:51:11 -0900
>I suspect that's because you're thinking in English. In Klingon, we've
>been
>talking about /ghoSqa'ghach/, /ta'mey/, /Dochmey/, /bIH/, /ta'vam/, and
>even
>/'och/ and /'may'na'/, and we haven't seen "bIlbo" in a while. When
>Klingon
>subjects or objects are elided, you don't usually know whether they're
>"him," "her," "it," or "they" (of either sort). The subject of /Suv/ has
>become pretty muddy if you don't already know what the sentence is supposed
>to say.
Actually, I usually check how I would say it in Finnish, a language in which
subjects can be dropped as they can in Klingon (and word order is variable,
so I can put a sentence in OVS and then see where I would put everything
else). I think that if I were thinking English, I would have put a {ghaH}
there. None of the noun phrases (or antecedents to the pronouns) is likely
to be doing any fighting, which is why I think the subject of {Suv} is clear
enough.
>In Klingon, as is shown in the section of TKD about complex sentences, this
>kind of redundancy is normal, and doesn't necessarily indicate emphasis.
>In
>this case, there's no reason to assume any emphasis at all. But when you
>think about the passage IN KLINGON, it's not at all clear who's doing /Suv/
>unless you state it again, and there's no stigma attached to doing so.
I don't see what else in the sentence could be doing any fighting, so why is
there confusion about the subject of {Suv}? Of course, Finnish is not
Klingon, so maybe in Klingon there could be - but there doesn't seem to be
any semantic reason to think so. That is, grammatically those things could
be the subject of {Suv}, but it wouldn't make sense for them to do so. If I
were to say, "The dog was driving the car, and it wagged its tail",
grammatically either 'dog' or 'car' could be the antecedent of 'it', but
only one of those makes sense semantically, because cars don't generally wag
their tails.
>Because that's the order it appears in in the English, and you're thinking
>about the Klingon version in English.
Actually, if I this had been an original sentence, I would likely have put
"alone" first in the English. I've lived several times in situations where
English was not the language I spoke at home, and because of that, I
generally try to make sure I'm not allowing English to influence my
second-language speech patterns. Of course, it can still happen even though
I try to avoid it, and Finnish speech patterns can conflict with Klingon
patterns as easily as English patterns can. And you're certainly right that
I don't have a feel for Klingon patterns yet - I've only been studying four
or five weeks, and it took me months to get a feel for Finnish speech
patterns when I was actually living in Finland.
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