[Tlhingan-hol] Fwd: Question about question words
André Müller
esperantist at gmail.com
Thu Sep 29 06:22:37 PDT 2011
Often in languages with an interrogative word (like Chinese "ma", Thai
"mai", Esperanto "ĉu"), questions can also be formulated without it. Its
interpretation as a question then depends on the intonation, and these
questions are often in a surprising tone.
Note that "Then you have seen it?" is also marked as a question only by its
intonation, it doesn't have the seemingly obligatory question word order of
English. In Esperanto I would express this sentence as "Do vi vidis ĝin?!"
and the sentence doesn't need the question particle.
I suspect that this can happen in Klingon as well.
The second one, from PK, might be an error. If forced to read it as a
question, I'd translate it as something like "You've seen my phaser
pistol?!" (I thought I hid it well!).
Greetings,
- André
P.S.: Thanks, I didn't notice I had sent the message to you only.
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