[Tlhingan-hol] Religious terminology

[Will Martin]

There’s a fairly advanced grammatical point that you likely are not experienced enough to understand here. Allow me to help. It’s the last thing in this brief exchange. See my attempt at help below that.

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



> On Dec 4, 2015, at 11:40 AM, qunnoQ HoD <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ...
>> tlhIngan Hol Dalo'taHvIS, Dochmey'e' bopbogh mu'meylIj vuSbe'lu'.
> <while you are using tlhIngan Hol, someone is not limited,your
> words,things which are concerned>
> ...

The sentence you are struggling with has a “relative clause” in it. That’s fairly advanced, and that clause has both a subject and an object, making it a step more complex, and one of the nouns is marked with {-‘e’}, which is not explained in TKD because Okrand had not developed that technique yet for using {-‘e’} for that purpose at that stage of history of the language. So, your ignorance is quite forgivable.

In Klingon, a verb with {-bogh} creates a relative clause. That means it’s like a little sentence that tells you something about one of the nouns in that little sentence that is also shared with the larger sentence. In English, we use relative pronouns, instead.

So, when I say, “The guard, who is large, hit me,” the relative clause is “who is large”. The larger sentence is “The guard hit me.” In English, the relative pronoun “who” is standing in for “the guard”, which is part of the larger sentence.

In Klingon, there are no relative pronouns. Instead, that one noun participates in both the main clause and the relative clause:

muqIp tInbogh ‘avwI’.

So, {‘avwI’} is the subject of {tInbogh} and he is also the subject of {muqIp}. You could think of it as {muqIp (tInbogh ‘avwI’)}.

That’s strange enough to require some getting used to, but it gets weirder still if we say, “The guard, whom the officer had hit, hit me.”

{muqIp ‘avwI’ qIppu’bogh yaS}

For one thing, we can’t really tell if this means “The guard whom the officer had hit hit me,” or if it means “The officer who had hit the guard hit me.” Either interpretation is grammatically valid.

So, we mark the noun that participates in both the relative clause AND the main clause with {-‘e’} because it is, in essence, the topic of the relative clause — it’s the important noun that ties the two clauses together.

{muqIp ‘avwI’’e’ qIppu’bogh yaS}.

Now, we know the guard hit me, not the officer. Or if it had the other meaning, we’d say:

{muqIp ‘avwI’ qIppu’bogh yaS’e’}.

So, going back to the example you stumbled over:

tlhIngan Hol Dalo’taHvIS Dochmey’e’ bopbogh mu’meylIj vuSbe’lu’.

You got a lot of this right, but keep in mind that {Dochmey bopbogh mu’meylIj} is the original relative clause with the confusing {-‘e’} stripped out of it, because for the meaning of that clause alone, you don’t need {-‘e’}. The {-‘e’} is added so you can tell whether it is your words that are not limited or the things which your words are concerned about that are not limited.

Does it make more sense now?

> qun HoD
> 

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