tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Aug 31 23:21:58 2013
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: naj
<div dir="ltr">I think too much is being made of my choice of the word "interrupt." The interruption is pretty unobtrusive, as I said, unless it goes on too long. The relative clause could be even longer without affecting intelligibility, e.g. {mulegh mang buD qIppu'bogh yaS'e'}. Hopefully I am not a lazy soldier, too.<div>
<br></div><div>Perhaps based on English, German, Russian, etc., I see the sentence {mulegh QIppu'bogh yaS} as a longer form of {mulegh yaS} modified to specify which officer. This interpretation makes logical as well as grammatical sense to me, since it is the officer who sees me, regardless of his past stupidity; {QIppu'bogh} simply serves to identify which officer. In English, the relative clause in "officer who was stupid" is "who was stupid." The mechanics of relative clauses are a little different in Klingon, so the head word is also considered part of the clause. Fine by me, since the word order is fixed and the topic suffix allows either the subject or object of the relative clause to be marked as either the subject or object of the main clause. Unfortunately, the head word can't be used with any other syntactic markers, so two sentences are necessary to translate "I live in the house that Jack built."<div>
<div><br></div><div>But I digress. My whole point in bringing this up was to speculate on how I arrived at the erroneous paradigm of placing reported speech where the object of {jatlh} would go.</div><div><br></div><div>~'eD</div>
</div></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 12:53 AM, ghunchu'wI' <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:[email protected]"; target="_blank">[email protected]</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">On Sep 1, 2013, at 12:21 AM, "Bellerophon, modeler" <<a href="mailto:[email protected]";>[email protected]</a>> wrote:<br>
<br>
> Regardless of how the sentences feel, they are interrupted by the relative clauses {QIppu'bogh} and "who has been stupid."<br>
<br>
I think you have misunderstood what a "relative clause" is. Your examples are incomplete, consisting only of the verb and the relative suffix/pronoun. To be a complete clause, there must also be a noun that the verb describes. The full Klingon relative clause is {QIppu'bogh yaS}.<br>
<br>
I too have never thought of the verb part of a relative clause as "interrupting" the main clause. It's just part of the noun phrase. Similarly, I get no sense of interruption from {jej ghojmeH taj} or {'ugh baS 'In}. They are more complex than {jej taj} and {'ugh 'In}, certainly, but they still flow without any need to put the sentence on hold when dealing with an intrusive element.<br>
<br>
Maybe it's a fluency thing.<br>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
-- ghunchu'wI'<br>
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</font></span></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br>My modeling blog: <a href="http://bellerophon-modeler.blogspot.com/"; target="_blank">http://bellerophon-modeler.blogspot.com/</a><br>My other modeling blog: <a href="http://bellerophon.blog.com/"; target="_blank">http://bellerophon.blog.com/</a><br>
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