tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Sep 07 21:43:08 2001

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QAO's (was Re: Klingon WOTD: ghorgh (ques)

batlh ghItlhta' ghunchu'wI' quv:
>My basic point is that {'e'} is a pronoun with a very narrow purpose.  That
>purpose is not defined to let it "answer" a rhetorical question.  I'm
>uncomfortable with the idea of letting real-world usage so strongly
>override the published rules of the language.

This is a good point regarding 'e'. I would like to add only one other
thing, and it is somewhat reminiscent of the corresponding debate among the
lojbanists. It concerns sentences of the following genre:

(a) ghorgh Haw' yaS 'e' Sov HoD

Since ghorgh (and chay', qatlh, etc.) are naturally reserved for questions,
this makes the default interpretation of this sentence that of a question,
i.e. "When does the captain know the officer fled?" Awkward? Yes, but what
did you expect? A more feasible example:

(b) nuqDaq yuch pol ghaH 'e' Dalegh

Again, a question by default, thus lit. "You see that she keeps the
chocolate where?", or "Where does she keep the chocolate? You saw that."
More naturalistically, "Where did you see that she keeps the chocolate?"
Pragmatically, it seems (to me) to work out kind of like, "Where does she
keep the chocolate? You saw that. [So tell me already.]"

This interpretation should take precendence over the non-interrogative
interpretation, even if the post-'e' verb is an "answering" one, as in (a).
Never mind that such things can be said *even* more succinctly in Klingon,
cf. ghunchu'wI's own examples. If we had understood that to begin with, we
would never have had this debate.

ghunchu'wI', if you do an article on this, I urge you to include some
information on sentence-level recursion in Klingon. (That could easily span
several pages. {{;-) Klingon does have sentence-level recursion, but how it
works with 'e' and net is a good, interesting question (likely to cause
riots). Frankly, it's nice to have this mechanism in Klingon. In some
languages, it's hard to say things like, "What do you want me to say?", viz.

(c) nuq vIjatlh DaneH
 lit. You want that I say what?

That's what I usually say to people when they just want to hear what Klingon
sounds like, and I don't feel like summoning to mind "taH pagh taHbe', etc."

Andrew H. Strader
  http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~strader

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