tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Apr 30 18:11:27 2006

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Re: I wonder who's kissing her now?

Tad Stauffer ([email protected]) [KLI Member] [Hol po'wI']

>ghItlhpu' Shane MiQogh, ja':
> >DaH nagh 'Iv, 'e' vISIv.
> >That's how i'd do it.

I instinctively would have used this same phrasing, although I would 
probably have used {chop} "bite" instead of {ngagh} "mate with" (I'm 
assuming {nagh} here is a typo).

Okrand:
>"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).

QeS 'utlh:
>Okrand's further clarification seems to indicate that {SIv} "to wonder"
>would probably be better glossed as "to wonder (about), to be curious about,
>to ponder". If this is the case, we could answer Okrand's own question about
>"I wonder who's kissing her now" with something like {DaH ghaH chopbogh
>vay''e' vISIv} "I wonder about the (some)one who is biting her now" works -
>which I see no reason to reject.

Based on the Okrand quote, we could say:
{DaH ghaH chop vay' 'e' vISIv} "I wonder (that/if/whether) someone is 
biting her now"
But since Okrand mentions the pronoun {'e'}, and you're using only the noun 
suffix {-'e'}, I'm not sure if {DaH ghaH chopbogh vay''e' vISIv} is 
grammatical.

Okrand uses {vISIv} as "I wonder it", where "it" is the previous sentence, 
represented by {'e'}.
But we don't know if we can say {ghaH vISIv} "I wonder him/her". Maybe 
Klingons say {qech vISIv} or {ghaH vISIv}, but based on what Okrand says 
here about {SIv}, so far, we can only {SIv} an entire sentence.

So for "I wonder who's kissing her now", I would rephrase that somehow. 
Fortunately, your original sentence "I wonder if he realises how lucky he 
is" matches the construction [S 'e' V], so you just need to figure out how 
to translate sentence S "He realizes how lucky he is". I probably would 
just recast it as "He realizes that he is very lucky".

- taD

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