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

[Alan Anderson]

On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 2:21 AM, Bellerophon, modeler
<bellerophon.modeler at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Strange. All four descriptions of "relative clause" I looked at
earlier defined it as including the subject, basically being a
complete sentence plus the relativizer word -- thus justifying the
term "clause". Now all I see are descriptions that say the clause
*follows* the noun being modified and begins with the relative
pronoun. I'm learning so much about my native language that I find I
know less and less as I go on.

> 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."

We do have examples of type 5 noun suffixes on the head noun of a
relative clause. For example, {meQtaHbogh qachDaq Suv qoH neH} "Only a
fool fights in a burning house." (The Klingon Way, page 111)

What we lack is a clear way of using something other than the subject
or object of the relative clause as its head noun. We have the
tantalizing English example of "the restaurant where we ate" in TKD,
and the Useful Klingon Expression {jIHtaHbogh naDev vISovbe'} hints
that there might once have been productive grammar along those lines,
but nothing gives us more than that.

-- ghunchu'wI'