tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jan 04 21:32:22 2010
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Re: qoSwIj
Yeah, I was just looking over the adverbials section, and it seems
that Okrand is using "adverbial" specifically to refer to manner
adverbials, and not temporal adverbials.
I also found this in a search of the canon emails at klingonska.org:
"As the subject of a sentence, on the other hand, jajvam is more typically
found:
nI' jajvam "this day is long"
(nI' "[it] is long [in duration], jajvam "this day")
though DaHjaj is not impossible:
nI' DaHjaj "today is long"
(nI' "[it] is long [in duration], DaHjaj "today")"
So, it looks like <DaHjaj> can be either a fronted time word (a
"temporal adverbial" in linguistic terms, but I'll not use that here
for clarity) as well as a true noun as a subject (see also
constructions like <DaHjaj po>, where DaHjaj is clearly functioning as
a noun). Thus, it would appear that the two possibilities I proposed:
<DaHjaj qoSwIj 'oH>
and
<qoSwIj 'oH DaHjaj'e'>
Are possible translations of this phrase. Any sense of the difference
here? Perhaps the second, with the topic marker, would carry some of
its topic sense here, meaning "TODAY is my birthday," as opposed to a
simple statement?
Any of the "elders" have thoughts on the difference here?
Chris
On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 21:06, David Trimboli <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 1/4/2010 10:51 PM, Christopher Doty wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 19:40, David Trimboli<[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> TKD defines "adverbial" to be a specific list of words, and {DaHjaj}
>>> isn't one of them.
>>
>> Well, actually, TKD defines an adverbial a word that "usually come[s]
>> at the beginning of a sentence and describe[s] the manner of the
>> activity." A list then follows, but nowhere does it say that this
>> list is complete or exhaustive.
>
> See my other message for my explanation about looking at the word lists.
>
>>> (Yes, it behaves as an
>>> "adverbial" in the general linguistic sense, but that's not what we're
>>> talking about here.)
>>
>> What are we talking about, then? The example you give from TKW
>> clearly has<DaHjaj> acting as an adverbial:
>>
>>> DaHjaj SuvwI''e' jIH.
>>> Today I am a warrior. (TKW 203)
>>
>> This is ungrammatical with everything we know about
>> predicate-nominals, unless<DaHjaj> is an adverbial...
>
> No. Nouns can also come before the OVS part of the sentence. Usually
> they have Type 5 suffixes to indicate their meaning, but this is not
> required. We also know that nouns indicating times can come at the
> beginning with no inflections. Specifically, they "precede the adverb"
> (TKD p. 179). TKD 6.7 is all about the placement of adverbials, and it
> says that a noun or phrase indicating a time element comes before the
> adverbial.
>
> We have many examples of nouns used as time stamps, and they all come at
> the beginning. I'm not going to try to find them all, but they include
> {DaHjaj}, {wa'Hu'}, {wa'leS}, and {vagh rep}.
>
> --
> SuStel
> http://www.trimboli.name/
>
>
>
>