tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jul 18 05:41:06 2007

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Re: Wool? In tlhIngan Hol?

McArdle ([email protected])



--- Lieven Litaer <[email protected]> wrote:

> > P.S.  Can you indeed insert an adjective into a
> > noun-noun construction (i.e., can it be treated as
> a
> > noun-clause+noun clause construction)?  Could I
> have
> > (grammatically) written {... SuvwI' quv Hoch'e'
> ...}?
> 
> Yes, [noun+adjective] can be treated as [noun].
> 
> I don'T know what you try to write above, but it is
> correct to say
> {SuvwI' quv} "honored warrior"
> and then
> {SuvwI' quv Duj} "honored warrior's ship"
> 

Oops.  That sentence went through a couple of
revisions, and the {'e'} is left over from an earlier
version.  It doesn't belong there.

What I was trying to write is "all the honored
warriors".  I was under the impression that it {Hoch}
would be used in noun-noun constructions as the second
of the pair, as if "all of warriors", but I find
through further Googling that TKW (which, to my shame,
I don't have) says it comes first.  Also it slipped my
mind that the verb prefix {vI-} doesn't indicate
whether the object is singular or plural.  I should
have written {Hoch SuvwI'pu' quv}.

I was led astray, by the way, by the canon sentence
{tera' vatlh DIS poH cha'maH wej HochHom lo'lu'taH},
translated "it remained in use for most of the 23rd
century".  What is the grammatical relation between
{HochHom} and {vatlh DIS poH cha'maH wej} if not a
noun-noun construction "most of century #23"? 
Shouldn't {HochHom}, which is just the diminutive of
{Hoch}, work grammatically the same way as {Hoch}
does?  (Yes, I know, languages aren't always logical.)




       
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