[Tlhingan-hol] KLBC : Sentences as objects

[Will Martin]

Perhaps this is the unanswered KLBC message. I’ll take it on.

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



> On Nov 13, 2015, at 8:50 AM, qunnoQ HoD <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 'arHa qavan. Hoch Savan.
> 
> TKD p. 65 : "{'e',net} [..] they are used primarily but not exclusively with verbs of thinking or observation (e.g.know,see)"
> 
> HIjang !
> 
> 1. how far does the "primarily though not exclusively" extend ? Do verbs as (read,feel,observe,hear,find,discover,remember,acknowledge) fall under the same category as (know,see) as far as the {'e',net} are concerned ?

I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule about this. If it would make sense, one will tend to use it. The “primarily though not exclusively” was intended to give you a sense of how these pronouns are commonly used, not to create a boundary beyond which you cannot go. I do caution you not to become such a zealous aficionado of Sentence As Object (SAO) to overuse it. It is a tool, but it’s not used with enormous frequency, and if you use it too much, your speech will be considered marked.

Keep It Simple.

Especially as a new speaker, you want to focus your attention on speaking well in simple Klingon sentences. SAO is one of the more complex constructions, and you should know up front that there’s a troublesome canon example in terms of adverbial placement for the second sentence, and an absence of canon for placement that a reasonable speaker would expect, that many of us ignore because, hey, a reasonable speaker would expect the adverbial of the second sentence to precede the pronoun. I forget the details. I merely remember the bad taste in my mouth.

> 2. if i want to say <<I am/was told that..>>, would the following be correct ?
> 
>    {... e' vIja'lu’}

One problem here is that verbs of speech are radically different than all other verbs. A second problem is that Klingon tends to prefer direct speech over indirect speech. We got direct speech first, and my memory is fuzzy over whether or not we ever got indirect speech.

Another problem is that you are using the prefix shortcut with {‘e’} as the direct object and “me” as the indirect object, and I’ve never seen that done before, and I’m not sure I like it. It’s just another layer of complexity in a language that values directness and simplicity.

You should study verbs of speech.

The basic construction is that for me to say, “Krankor said, ‘Go home.’”, in Klingon, that’s two sentences, and they have no grammatical connection whatsoever. {jatlh Qanqor. <<juH yIghoS.>>} The punctuation is not Okrand’s convention. It’s ours. Otherwise, it’s not all that remarkably easy to recognize the boundaries of the quotation.

This could also have been said as {<<juH yIghoS.>> jatlh Qanqor.}

The quotation is not the direct object of the statement of speech. It has no grammatical link. The two separate sentences are merely near each other. They are not combined into one sentence construction.

If I wanted to say “Someone told me, 'Go home,’” I’d translate it as {muja’ vay’. jatlh. <<juH yIghoS.>>} Literally it means “Someone told me. He/she said. Go home.” That’s the clearest way that I can express that some unidentified person said, “Go home,” to me. You could scramble this around several ways. You could say, {vIja’lu’. jatlh. <<juH yIghoS.>> or {vIja’lu’. <<juH yIghoS.>> jatlh.}

I tend to differentiate between {ja’} (to tell, as in to speak TO SOMEONE) and {jatlh} (to say, as in to say SOMETHING). The object of {ja’} tends to be the person(s) spoken to, while the object of {jatlh} tends to be the thing spoken (the words, the language, the speech, whatever).

When you do use {‘e’}, it is the direct object of the second verb. You can’t have ANOTHER direct object of that verb, and the subject needs to be specific. If you want to use {-lu’} on the second verb referring back to an earlier sentence, you should instead use {net} and don’t use {-lu’}. Here you’ll often see people say {net Sov}, for instance, meaning “One knows that…”

And don’t forget that the verb {neH} does not take any pronoun in an SAO construction. {chab vISop vIneH.}

I hope this helps.

> cpt qunnoQ
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