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

[Bellerophon, modeler]

Thanks for your patience. Dyslexia, presbyopia, and clumsy typing add up to
a perfect storm, especially in a language with which I am insufficiently
familiar. I finally increased the font size in my browser, which should cut
down on my typos, so hopefully I will only make instructive mistakes from
now on.

{vabDot} would be darned useful, as is {neH}. Where did you see it?

About relative clauses, I forgot about the "fool fights in a burning house"
example. Unfortunately, one could use {-bogh} with Type 5 suffixes other
than {-'e'} to get a sentence that is at best ambiguous, e.g. {*mangvaD
leghbogh yaS waq vInob} Is it even intelligible? "I give a shoe to the
soldier whom (or for whom?) the officer sees." Probably the only way the
Type 5 suffix other than {-'e'} can work reliably is if it is on the
subject noun of the relative clause and the relative clause is some sort of
object in the main clause, as in {meQtaHbogh qachDaq Suv qoH neH}. In other
words, if the relative clause were eliminated except for the head noun, the
sentence would still make grammatical sense: {qachDaq Suv qoH neH}. Having
a subject of a sentence be a relative clause with a head noun marked with
-vaD, -mo', -vo', or -Daq probably may not work reliably: {?mulegh mangvaD
waq nobbogh yaS}. Does that make sense? Maybe so. {?mulegh mangvaD waq
nobbogh yaS'e'} seems to make sense as /The officer who gives the shoe to
the soldier sees me/. I recall MO stated he couldn't make relative clauses
work except with head nouns as either subject or direct object.

My intuition decades ago (when I was considering Klingon grammar but not
really trying to use it) was that the fixed word order of obj-verb-subj
would create problems with complex sentences, and I supposed then that
Klingons might get out of the mess by devising a verb affix to reverse the
sense of the verb, sort of like passive voice but not just for indefinite
subject. The reversing affix would work like this: {qIrq HoH#reverser#
Qugh} /Kruge is killed by Kirk/ or simply /Kirk kills Kruge/. Or perhaps it
will turn out that the topic suffix was only assumed to be a Type 5 since
it had never been observed following a Type 5 suffix.

However, it seems to me that neither of these expedients is sufficient to
let relative clauses in Klingon do everything they can do in Earth
languages I'm familiar with. How for instance would one translate "I gave
the restaurant where we ate a good review"? "Restaurant" is a dative object
to the main clause, but a locative object to the relative clause. Even if
you could have {*Qe'vaDDaq} or {*Qe'DaqvaD}, the sentence would be
unintelligible. The resulting gibberish could as easily be interpreted as
"I gave a good review at the restaurant for which we ate."

My hope is that since MO is a linguist, he can surely devise the right
questions to ask Maltz to resolve the problems of relative clauses.

~'eD

On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 10:08 PM, Alan Anderson <qunchuy at alcaco.net> wrote:

>
> Try {...vabDot jInajtaHvIS} "even while I am dreaming". We're not
> completely sure how {vabDot} works yet, but I think it's a reasonable
> guess that it is an adverbial that means pretty much what you want.
> We've only seen it at the beginning of a sentence. (It might also be a
> noun, but how that would work is less clear.)
>
> > Is it just me (you'll probably say it
> > is, Qov) or is there a shortage of adverbials?
>
> There is certainly a limited number of them, but I wouldn't call it a
> shortage.
>
> -- ghunchu'wI'
>
-- 
My modeling blog:          http://bellerophon-modeler.blogspot.com/
My other modeling blog:  http://bellerophon.blog.com
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