[Tlhingan-hol] 2 nouns in apposition

chransberry@gmail.com chransberry at gmail.com
Thu Dec 3 13:26:31 PST 2015


Bother, wrong button again. Someday I'll get my act together with this mailing list thing... maybe.

Message quoted below.



----- Reply message -----
From: "chransberry at gmail.com" <chransberry at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Dec 3, 2015 10:26
Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] 2 nouns in apposition
To: "Rohan Fenwick" <qeslagh at hotmail.com>

>'utbe'! qay'be'qu' 

I recognized qay' and be', but had to look up the rest... which I hear is what we're supposed to do, to improve our proficiency.

-QISta', ghojchoHwI' 

PS Speaking of nouns in apposition, I'm trying to say "Krista who is one-who-begins-to-learn", would that be as above, or without the comma, or with the words switched, or what?


----- Reply message -----
From: "Rohan Fenwick" <qeslagh at hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, Dec 3, 2015 07:05
Subject: [Tlhingan-hol] 2 nouns in apposition
To: "tlhingan-hol at kli.org" <tlhingan-hol at kli.org>

jIjatlhpu' jIH:
> 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.

jangpu' QISta', jatlh:
> Exerting my greatest effort to resist launching into a lengthy rant on why
> the sci-fi fan is "I".

Perhaps not the greatest example. I was trying to construct a deliberate example of ambiguity on the fly. How about Groucho Marx's famous "I once shot an elephant in my pajamas"?

jIjatlhqa'pu' jIH:
> 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.

jangqa' je QISta', jatlh:
> Exerting similar effort to resist going off on an even more off-topic rant
> on the difference between syntactic unambiguity and semantic unambiguity.

In this case I wasn't intending to draw a specific distinction. The point remains that ambiguity of both kinds is inherent in every natural language that I'm familiar with and it's unreasonable to expect Klingon to be any different.

taH:
> Pardon me,

'utbe'! qay'be'qu'. :)

QeS 'utlh
 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol/attachments/20151203/9b94c351/attachment.html>


More information about the Tlhingan-hol mailing list