tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Nov 05 05:31:31 2009

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Re: Sentences as objects

qe'San be'rawn ([email protected])



Alternatively it could possibly just be a typo and should have been
qIrq'e', especially as the translation below starts with Kirk rather
than just, "I want Kirk alive".


yIntaH qIrq'e' vIneH.

Kirk I want alive.

"I want that Kirk keeps living." (STConst)

qe'San

--- On Thu, 5/11/09, David Trimboli <[email protected]> wrote:

From: David Trimboli <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Sentences as objects
To: [email protected]
Date: Thursday, 5 November, 2009, 12:47 PM

Tracy Canfield wrote:
> I am still sorting through these to see what patterns they suggest, but
> here's something that jumped out:
> yIntaH qIrq 'e' vIneH.
> Kirk I want alive.
> "I want that Kirk keeps living." (STConst)
> 
>  'e' neHbe' vavwI'
> That wasn't what my father wanted. ST6
> 
> TKD 6.2.5 says "When the verb of the second sentence is neH 'want', neither
> 'e' nor net is used."  With two occurrences of neH with 'e' in the corpus,
> can we safely say that 'e' is optional with neH?

No, we can't. TKD gives us the "best practice rules" of Klingon. 
Anything from Okrand that seems to violate those rules are exceptional, 
unless they appear with extreme regularity, or he explains the new rule. 
We can speculate as to why we see apparent violations, but we can't 
generalize new rules from them.

I believe (without evidence) that your second example occurs because 
Azetbur, who spoke the line, was using someone else's sentence as the 
object of her sentence. There may be a rule, not given in TKD, that says 
it's all right to use {'e'} with {neH} when you haven't actually 
supplied the previous sentence yourself.
Other explanations are possible. Maybe Azetbur misspoke. Maybe {'e'} is 
allowed for emphasis. We can only speculate; we cannot make new rules. 
TKD gives us only the most basic rules; the more subtle ones and the 
exceptions usually do not appear. The saving grace of this is that we 
are told most Klingons won't even notice that we're using baby talk.

-- 
SuStel
tlhIngan Hol MUSH
http://trimboli.name/mush








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