tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Aug 16 12:49:41 2002
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Re: tlhIngan Hol lujatlhbogh puq'e'
>>A rose by any other name. Personally, I see "subject," "object," and
>>"header" as the cases of Klingon nouns.
ja' Holtej:
>I don't see these as cases, so much as grammatical roles. Unless you
>subscribe to the theory that (a) all nouns are marked for case, even if it's
>not overt; and (b) Klingon is like human languages in this regard, there's
>no evidence that Klingon uses case.
There's one extra bit of evidence that I think argues for considering the
existence of cases in Klingon. The first noun in a noun-noun construction
has a special feature which prohibits its taking a type 5 suffix. One
might label "subject", "object", various type-5-marked usages, and "first
noun" as separate cases, with the occasional exceptional presence or
absence of {-Daq} and {-'e'} treated separately. (Direct address would
probably be another unmarked case.)
That "no type 5 on the first noun" rule is the hardest one to deal with in
my mind when trying to simplify the description of where nouns appear in a
sentence. "The Cat in the Hat" and "a man from Peru" are such useful ideas
that I'd expect them to be legal if the placement of type-5'd nouns were
based primarily on semantics.
>Or, you're just saying that the rules don't explicitly prohibit it, and it's
>a logical possibility that one day we may see this, just like we eventually
>saw locatives as the object of verbs of motion like {ghoS}. Not that you're
>advocating its use with what we know today. Is that the point?
The way I see it, such usage would be akin to putting a previx and a
{-ghach} on the same verb. "It follows the rules, but it follows them
someplace they don't normally go."
-- ghunchu'wI'