[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: naj

[Bellerophon, modeler]

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.

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."

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.

~'eD


On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 12:53 AM, ghunchu'wI' <qunchuy at alcaco.net> wrote:

> On Sep 1, 2013, at 12:21 AM, "Bellerophon, modeler" <
> bellerophon.modeler at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Regardless of how the sentences feel, they are interrupted by the
> relative clauses {QIppu'bogh} and "who has been stupid."
>
> 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}.
>
> 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.
>
> Maybe it's a fluency thing.
>
> -- ghunchu'wI'
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