tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Feb 18 06:36:23 2007
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Re: Dilbert Comic in Klingon for February 9, 2007
- From: "QeS 'utlh" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Dilbert Comic in Klingon for February 9, 2007
- Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:34:43 +1000
- Bcc:
ghItlhpu' Doq, ja':
>That would be {qaSDI' DIS veb}.
Now it's my turn to say {HIvqa' veqlargh}. How to dispel trust in one easy
step. {{:S
>Subject follows verb. I don't see this as less ambiguous. Just more
>verbose.
{qaSpu'DI'} is what I had intended here: "the goals which I will have needed
to accomplish when next year has finished".
ghItlhqa' Doq, ja':
>DaH wa'nem ngoQ vIta'bogh vIgherta'. (wa'nem is the time stamp for
>the relative clause; DaH is the time stamp for the main clause)
jIja'taH:
>Aside from the point about {wa'nem} that Voragh already made, this could
>also get confusing. And there's nothing to stop the listener from
>interpreting
>the phrase {wa' nem ngoQ vIta'bogh} as simply being an ordinary noun-noun
>phrase object ({wa' nem ngoQ} "one-year-from-now's goal") plus a verb,
>rather than a time stamp plus object plus verb.
mujangtaH Doq, ja':
>"Now I have intentionally completed gathering next year's goals, which I
>have accomplished,"
No, I meant "...which I will accomplish". Remember that tense is unmarked in
Klingon, so the verb {vIta'bogh} could just as easily mean "which I
accomplish" or "which I will accomplish": "Now I have intentionally
completed gathering next year's goals which I will accomplish".
>vs. "Now, I have gathered the goals which I will have accomplished next
>year."
>I think most people could figure out which is the more probable intent.
See above.
ghItlhtaH, ja':
>wa'nem'e' DaH ngoQwIj vIgherta'. (wa'nem is the topic of the sentence
>without an obvious grammatical role in the sentence as required by
>English)
jIjangtaH, jIja':
>Of course it has an obvious grammatical role. It's the topic, as per TKD.
>That counts as a grammatical role, doesn't it. (And by the bye, colloquial
>English does use isolated noun phrases as topics too: "My uncle John, he
>drank me under the table." "Tuesday I went to the shops.")
jangqa' Doq, ja':
>The first is just a redundant reference (unlike the Klingon)
I don't see why it shouldn't be interpreted as "topic" in the same way as in
Klingon {cheng'e' muqIppu'} "As for Chang, he hit me". The only difference
seems to be that English lacks a morphological topicalisation marker (and
since English doesn't have case for nouns anyway, that's an extremely flimsy
argument to postulate against the analysis of this form as a topic
argument). The simplest explanation semantically is that "my uncle John" is
behaving as a topic argument, because that argument carries similar
connotations to a {-'e'}-marked header. Calling it a redundant reference is
oversimplification, because the whole unit is not a grammatical sentence;
two nouns (or pronouns) cannot co-occur as subjects of the same English verb
without some sort of conjunction or other link.
>and the second is a time stamp.
It's a marked usage; the default way of doing that in English is "I went to
the shops on Tuesday". In the example I cited, I understand "Tuesday" as
being specially emphasised (say, as opposed to "Monday"); whether that
qualifies as "Topic" or not, I'm not qualified to judge. (I admit that this
second example was rather weak, and may not actually be a true topic
argument.)
>I genuinely think that English generally lacks the equivalent of Topic
>in the sense that Klingon uses it.
I'll agree that English lacks a *simple* equivalent of Topic. There are
several syntactic and morphological methods for topicalising an argument,
though.
Anyway, I only intended to make that point in passing, so I'm not going to
argue it any more.
jIja'taH:
>Although we can't say for certain that it's bad grammar per se, it's
>certainly bad style. The noun-noun construction is the normal device for
>doing things of this sort. This sentence is functionally equivalent to {DaH
>wa' nem ghoQ vIgherta'}, so why not just write it that way?
mujangtaH Doq, ja':
>An earlier description of this sentence spoke of linking {wa'nem} and
>{ghoQ} by speaking continuously between them and pausing somewhere else.
See, I disagree with that idea. The information we have on prosody in
Klingon is close to nil, so I don't think we can comfortably talk about
using intonation and phrasing as a conveyor of meaning; stress is the only
part of Klingon suprasegmental phonology that we know anything about. As
such, I think we should try and resort to lexical and syntactic means
wherever possible to convey what we mean, especially since Klingon as it's
used is primarily a written language, and prosody is difficult to symbolise
well in writing.
>That's really the same thing as making it a compound noun, since written
>Klingon is really just a phonetic representation of spoken Klingon as
>we've come to form our own standards. If you need to verbally link the two
>nouns in this way, you might as well write it as a compound noun. If you
>don't like it as a compound noun, you probably should not consider verbal
>rhythm as a means of disambiguating the sentence.
I don't, although as you point out, others seem to.
QeS 'utlh
tlhIngan Hol yejHaD pabpo' / Grammarian of the Klingon Language Institute
not nItoj Hemey ngo' juppu' ngo' je
(Old roads and old friends will never deceive you)
- Ubykh Hol vIttlhegh
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