[Tlhingan-hol] Question words used not in questions

[John R. Harness]

Great question. The basic answer is no, you shouldn't phrase things that
way in Klingon.

English has a few question words that can also be used in other ways, but
this isn't the case in Klingon.

I would try to translate your first sentence this way, relying on {-meH}.
(I may be wrong in putting -vaD on vIghro'; I'm not quite sure how DIj
works in terms of being transitive.):

vIghro'vaD DIjmeH nabDaj QIjbe'.
"He did not explain his plan for the purpose of him painting the cat."

And maybe--
SoHvaD targhwI' qotlhmeH meqDaj ja'be'.
To me she did not report her reason for tickling my targ.

These seem really clunky, but it's what I can come up with. {-meH} seems to
cover a lot of the territory that we are covering when we use how, why,
when in the way you've described.

What does everyone else think? Got any better, less clunky ideas?

'arHa
Beginner's Grammarian



> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2015 11:24:28 +0200
> From: mayql qunenoS <mihkoun at gmail.com>
> To: tlhIngan Hol mailing list <tlhingan-hol at kli.org>
> Subject: [Tlhingan-hol] KLBC : Question words used not in questions
> Message-ID:
>         <
> CAP7F2cL-fbsKooPTRuhEUm9b8rGJFYxaKOs99_EcSvpfAXtYcQ at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> qavan 'arHa' !
>
> I want to ask you..
>
> In english we can say :
>
> He didn't tell me how he painted the cat.
> She didn't tell me why she tickled my dog.
>
> So, we use the words <how>, <why> not in order to ask a question, but
> to say something else.
>
> Can we use the words {chay'}, {qatlh} (or any other question word) in
> klingon in a similar manner ?
>
> qunnoq HoD
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol/attachments/20151230/18f79806/attachment.html>