tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Aug 24 09:57:48 2002
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Re: "The Cat in the Hat"
>jIja'pu':
>>..."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.
>
>ja' tulwI':
>>i don't understand. could you please explain this to me (beginning
>>from "The Cat in the Hat")?
>
>There's a rule in Klingon grammar which says that the first noun in a
>noun-noun pair never takes a Type 5 "syntactic marker" suffix.
>
>The ideas carried by those Klingon suffixes are generally expressed using
>prepositions in English: "to", "from", "for", etc. In English, nouns can
>be modified to create phrases such as "flowers for my mother" and "clock on
>the wall". These phrases can be used anywhere a noun fits, including the
>subject or object of a sentence. "I put <flowers for my mother> in a
>vase." "The <clock on the wall> has the face of a cow."
>
>Let's pick locatives as an example. We don't see locative nouns used as
>sentence subjects in Klingon. We can assume that there's no grammatical
>restriction for it, and that the reason for this is that they just don't
>make sense there. But if we make that assumption, we still have to deal
>with the explicit grammatical restriction against locatives as the first
>noun of a noun-noun construction. You cannot directly translate "clock on
>the wall" into Klingon without either adding a verb or losing the "on" idea.
>
>This issue is often called the "Cat in the Hat" problem, because the
>children's book of that name is occasionally mentioned as something that
>ought to be translated.
ghunchu'wI',
thank you!
one possible solution could be "the cat that is in the hat", isn't it?
tulwI',
sts.