[Tlhingan-hol] KLBC: "Which" and uses of question words

[John R. Harness]

Aloha, everybody. I myself am using the KLBC tag because I have a question
that may be interesting to beginners -- but apologies if it is a little
convoluted!

It came up as I was responding to qunnoQ's question about {-'e'} and I
wanted to start a new thread to keep the issues separate. The issue is
question words.

The Klingon Dictionary tells us about the placement of question words in
section 6.4: For {'Iv} and {nuq}, "the question word fits into the sentence
in the position that would be occupied by the answer." chay', ghorgh,
nuqDaq, and qatlh go at the beginning of the statement, and 'ar follows the
noun to which it refers.

qunnoQ asked: {lugh mu'tlhegh nuq ? nuq 'ej qatlh HIja'}

I (think) I understood the intended meaning, but a few things seem amiss
and I'm not sure how to solve the issue.

I suppose my question is: Can nuq stand in as it does here in {lugh
mu'tlhegh nuq}? It implies to me something like "Which sentence is right?"
but I don't think nuq really operates that way, because I don't think it is
the right placement. Instead, should it be something like this?: {lughbogh
mu'tlhegh 'oH nuq'e'?} "What is the sentence which is correct?"

There may be some potential confusion between the two English words that
sound alike: "which" (the question word, which doesn't seem to have a
direct Klingon analog) and "which" a word that marks relative clauses (in
Klingon marked with {-bogh}. Am I correctly disentangling these?

Additionally, can nuq and qatlh stand on their own as they do in {nuq 'ej
qatlh HIja'}? My guess is that they can, but I am unsure.

'arHa
Beginner's Grammarian
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol/attachments/20151206/53b7b5cf/attachment.html>