tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Aug 18 05:22:07 2002
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Re: tlhIngan Hol lujatlhbogh puq'e'
lab gunchu'wI':
> >>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.)
i'd call the first noun in a noun-noun construction a genitive noun.
(but we can keep on calling it "the first noun in a noun-noun
construction".) and then i'd say that it's quite clear that it cannot
get a type-5 suffix (a *"case tag"), because it's already put into a
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.
i don't understand. could you please explain this to me (beginning
from "The Cat in the Hat")?
> >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."
hm. why not? x-ghach is the doing of someone who does x. so
ji-x-ghach could be the doing of me, who does x. :)
tulwI',
sts.