tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jan 04 15:02:25 2002
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Re: QAO
charghwI':
>The point of note here was that he explicitly said it would NOT be of the
>form:
> *pawpu''a' HoD 'e' vISIv.*
> *"Has the captain arrived? I wonder about that."*
>This struck me as a clear message that while Okrand reserves the right to come
>up with some QAO example in the future, for the time being, a prime example of
>an expected possibility of QAO was dismissed as invalid. This is, in my
>opinion, a counter-example. It is more than a mere omission of an example.
ter'eS:
: As DloraH remarked and from charghwI's example, I've
: come to understand {SIv} to mean "to wonder" in the
: sense of "to speculate". In this way, the *QAO
: sentence really _is_ a positive statement in Klingon,
: though we may translate it as a question:
: > pawpu' HoD 'e' vISIv.
: "I speculate that the captain has arrived."
: (so either agree with me or prove me wrong), or
: > "I wonder if the captain has arrived."
FYI, here's Okrand's quote in full from startrek.klingon (7/97):
"All four words asked about ({tul} 'hope', {Qub} 'think', {Sov} 'know', and
{SIv} 'wonder') can be used in the construction {S 'e' V}, where S is a
sentence, {'e'} is the pronoun (that) which refers to a previous topic (in this
case S), and V is one of the verbs listed above (as well as some others). If
the sentence (S) is {tlhIngan Hol Dajatlh} 'you speak Klingon', it's OK to say:
tlhIngan Hol Dajatlh 'e' vItul
I hope that you speak Klingon,
tlhIngan Hol Dajatlh 'e' vIQub
I think that you speak Klingon
tlhIngan Hol Dajatlh 'e' vISov
I know that you speak Klingon
tlhIngan Hol Dajatlh 'e' vISIv
I wonder if you speak Klingon
"(The fourth example is weird from an English translation point of view, but it
falls right in line in Klingon. If the English translation matched the pattern
of the other three sentences, it would be 'I wonder that you speak Klingon'. In
English, this means something like 'I'm surprised that you speak Klingon' or 'I
don't understand how it can be that you speak Klingon', but this is not what
the Klingon sentence means. The Klingon sentence means something more like 'I
am curious about whether you speak Klingon'. The clumsiness here is the
English, not the Klingon.) One other verb that can be used in the V slot in
such sentences is {Hon} 'doubt':
tlhIngan Hol Dajatlh 'e' vIHon
I doubt that you speak Klingon.
"I'll return on another occasion to the question of whether the sentence
preceding the {'e'} in such sentences can be a question. This is a more general
issue than whether you can do it with {SIv} 'wonder' and I need some clear
guidance from Maltz."
--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons