tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jul 18 14:08:22 2007
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Re: Wool? In tlhIngan Hol?
mIq'ey (McArdle) wrote:
>--- 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"
>
>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}.
With {Hoch}, the important distinction is whether the noun it modifies is
singular or plural:
{Hoch SuvwI'} "every warrior, each warrior"
{Hoch SuvwI' quv} "every/each honored warrior"
{Hoch SuvwI'pu'} "all (of) the warriors"
{Hoch SuvwI'pu' quv} "all (of) the honored warriors"
>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.)
This example is confusing. Unfortunately it's our only example of the noun
{HochHom} "most, greater part":
... qItI'nga' Duj. tera' vatlh DIS poH cha'maH wej HochHom lo'lu'taH
[The] K'Tinga-class remained in use for most of the 23rd century. (S15)
This is an initial time-stamp consisting of a noun + noun "possessive" phrase:
[tera' vatlh DIS poH cha'maH wej] <HochHom> lo'lu'taH
[Terran century twenty-three]'s <greater part> one-used-it-continuously
Although it's quite long, it's just a variation of the simple example in TKD:
{nuH} "weapon" and {pegh} "secret" combine to form {nuH pegh}
"secret of the weapon". An alternate translation would be N1's N2,
in this case, "the weapon's secret". (TKD p.31)
--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons