[Tlhingan-hol] 2 nouns in apposition

[Rohan Fenwick]

ghItlhpu' Voragh, jatlh:
> qeylIS loDnI' 'opleS chovan (PB)

jang Anthony, jatlh:
> Or,  "One day, brother of Kahless, you will bow before me."? Again,
> how to distinguish between two adjacent nouns X Y meaning "X's Y"
> and "X which is Y"?

Quite simply: context. There's no other way. There is no grammatical marking that distinguishes such constructions from one another, no external syntactic clue. Punctuation may be present to help, but can't always be relied upon. In this instance, it's knowing what the story is, and knowing who's talking, that allows you to work out that this is probably an appositional compound rather than a genitive one.

taH:
> Context cannot be always relied on to resolve ambiguities.

Some ambiguities are superficially unresolvable, but this is no more true of Klingon than it is of any other language. This is the reason why some English prescriptivists keep bleating about dangling modifiers despite the fact that they're perfectly grammatical. If I say to you "as a sci-fi fan, I recommend you read this book", who's the sci-fi fan here? Me, or you? From the text alone we not only do not have, but outright cannot have, a clue with any degree of certainty. But context resolves the issue perfectly well (in this instance, two people being familiar with each other's reading preferences). It's unfair to pick on Klingon for this.

taH:
> Which classes of nouns can be used as Y in the X Y construction as
> "X which is Y"?

I know of no prescriptive rule in this regard.

taH:
> Readers and listeners should not have to go through steps of logic
> based on context and the general situation to distinguish meaning
> :: the meaning should be apparent at first reading/listening.

That's simply wrong. Going through steps of logic based upon context and situation is what readers and listeners ALWAYS have to do, whether you realise it or not. Context informs everything. Let me draw another example in English. If you and I were sitting in a bar, and I say to you "look at this bloodwine", where your eyes go is going to be entirely informed by your knowledge of where the bloodwine is. If it's in a cup in my hand, you're going to look at that. If I spilled it down my shirt, regardless of the cup you're going to be likely to look at the stain on my shirt, not the cup in my hand. If there's a cup in my hand and another one in front of me, you may feel a momentary sense of confusion while you try to work out which one I mean by "this". But if you first look at the one on the table, then notice out of your peripheral vision that I'm holding up a glass for you to look at, then your confusion is resolved. All of those possibilities, though, are based on ambiguity around what the word "this" could mean and the role played by context in disambiguating those meanings in your mind - whether or not you consciously realise such a process is going on.

I'm sorry to be so blunt about it, but neither in Klingon nor in any other natural or naturalistic language will you get such a universal unambiguity of meaning. If you want that, you should learn Lojban. But Klingon doesn't, and wasn't ever intended to, work like that.

QeS 'utlh
 		 	   		  
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