tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Nov 25 20:23:29 2009

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Re: The topic marker -'e'

Christopher Doty ([email protected])



There is clearly some agreement that what I said earlier is wrong. What I'm really looking for is how this agreement has been reached from the list of canon stuff that Voragh sent earlier. I can't see anything there that says nouns marked with -vaD can only have a certain interpretation.
This is another thing that I think can be hard for someone new to the list. I fully acknowledge that this agreement exists, I'm just not sure it's based in canon. Which I don't mean as a putdown or anything. One would expect a sketch of a language to start having new rules when people want to use it for a wide variety of tasks and topics.

I guess what I really want to know when I ask these sorts of questions is "have I violated a rule given by Okrand, or does what I said just seem wrong to people who are more experienced in the language than I am?" Both of these things are valuable to know, but so is knowing the difference between the two.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre
David Trimboli wrote:

Christopher Doty wrote:



>> That says "The communications officer ignored, for Commander Kruge, an

>> urgent message." It's as if Kruge ordered the officer to ignore all

>> urgent messages, not as if the officer took it upon himself to ignore

>> any urgent messages specifically for Kruge.

> 

> But why does it say this?  I haven't seen anything anywhere which

> indicates that this interpretation is the only one possible.  That is,

> I don't understand why you're saying that this interpretation is

> correct, and the other isn't.

 >

> You might note that "The communications officer ignored an urgent

> message for Commander Kruge" is actually ambiguous in English: it

> could me that the messages was for Kruge and it was ignored, or that

> an urgent message was ignored at the behest of Kruge.  I don't know

> why you're saying that this ambiguity isn't present in Klingon.

> 

>> Qugh la'vaD QIn pav lI'lu'pu'bogh buSHa'pu' QumpIn

>> The communications officer ignored a message which was transmitted to

>> Commander Kruge.

>>

>> Here, {Qugh la'vaD} is tied to {lI'lu'pu'bogh}, not {QIn pav}, and not

>> {buSHa'pu'}. There are other verbs I could have used than {lI'}, but the

>> point is that it takes a bit of recasting to get the Klingon to mean

>> what we want it to mean.

> 

> But again, I haven't seen anything that says this.  Why is {Qugh

> la'vaD} tied to {lI'lu'pu'bogh} in this sentence, and why does that

> make it correct?



Frankly, I'm not sure how else to explain it. Maybe someone else can do 

so where I have failed.



chaq SoHvaD pabvam QIjlaH latlh ghot. jIQongchoH DaH 'e' vIHech.



-- 

SuStel

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