tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Feb 18 06:36:23 2007

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Re: Dilbert Comic in Klingon for February 9, 2007

QeS 'utlh ([email protected])



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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