tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jun 27 23:00:54 2009
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Re: Klingon translation
On Jun 28, 2009, at 12:35 AM, ghunchu'wI' wrote:
> On Jun 27, 2009, at 9:54 PM, David Trimboli wrote:
>
>> The "who" in "I know who stole the money" is an interrogative
>> pronoun.
>> The "who stole the money" is an "interrogative content clause": a
>> clause
>> that *corresponds* with an interrogative sentence ("Who stole the
>> money?").
>
> Thank you! I couldn't find the official name of an interrogative
> content clause.
>
> Now that I know what words to use in my searches, I find something
> very interesting. In English, such clauses are used in pretty much
> the same way as are "declarative content clauses". The only relevant
> difference is the lack of the optional subordinating conjunction
> "that" for interrogative content clauses. The sentence-as-object
> construction in Klingon is exactly analogous, in both structure and
> meaning, to a declarative content clause used as an object in an
> English sentence.
Interrogative and declarative clauses are not functionally identical.
Consider the difference between "I know who stole the money," and "I
know that he stole the money." The interrogative content clause makes
the interrogative pronoun the direct object of the first verb. The
declarative content clause makes the action of the second verb the
direct object of the first verb.
{'e'} works great for the latter, but not the former. The closest
grammatical construction in Klingon to the former is a relative clause.
> --- ghunchu'wI'
Doq